Acts 17:28
For ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said,
‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Some Christians have the notion that anything taken from paganism or secular culture and used in the service of the gospel is inherently corrupting and sinful. A constant complaint against the Catholic Church is that it has allegedly sullied the purity of the gospel of Christ with pagan ideas and practices. St. Paul would find this charge funny, since he himself made use of pagan poets in his preaching, as today’s verse makes clear. So would St. John, who borrowed the term “Logos” from Greco-Roman philosophy to describe Jesus Christ (John 1:1). They knew the same truth that Augustine pointed out four centuries later: when Israel left Egypt, they took the gold of the Egyptians with them, with God’s blessing (Exodus 12:35-36). All truth is God’s truth, even if pagan or secular culture is teaching it. Today, find a way to engage our culture with the truth of God in ways people can understand. If it’s good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for us.
