ACC ~ Acts 17 v28

BOUND BY THE LAW OF CHRIST. ORIGEN: “Being as one outside the law to those outside the law.” He came to Athens, he found philosophers, and he did not use the words of the prophets or from the law, but as one perhaps recalling this pagan teaching from a school of rhetoric he spoke to the men of Athens. For [Paul] said, “Just as some of your poets have said, ‘For we are his offspring too.’” In this place, he was as one outside the law to those outside the law, in order to gain the lawless. It is as if he were to say “I was doing nothing contrary to the law in making this concession to them, but I was keeping myself bound by the law of Christ, in order to gain the lawless.” COMMENTARY ON 1 CORINTHIANS 43.

SIGHT TO THE BLIND. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: It is clear that by using poetic examples from the Phaenomena of Aratus [Paul] approves the best statements of the Greeks. Besides, he refers to the fact that in the person of the unknown god the Greeks are indirectly honoring God the Creator and need to receive him and learn about him with full knowledge through the Son. “I sent you to the gentiles for this purpose,” says Scripture, “to open their eyes, for them to turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, for them to receive release from sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”So these are the “opened eyes of the blind,” which means the clear knowledge of the Father through the Son, the direct grasp of the thing to which the Greeks indirectly allude. STROMATEIS 1.19.

ALL CREATION IS IN GOD. BEDE: Since this verse is difficult to understand, it should be explained in the words of the blessed Augustine, who says, “The apostle shows that God is ceaselessly at work in the things which he has created. It is not with respect to his substance that we are in him. For instance, it has been said that he has life in himself, but since we are certainly different from him, we are not ‘in him’ in any other way except that he brings it [our existence] about; and this is his work, whereby he contains all things. And it has been said that his wisdom reaches ‘mightily from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things well.’ It is through this ‘ordering’ that ‘in him we live and move and are.’ Hence we infer that if he withdrew this work of his from things, we would neither live nor move nor be.”COMMENTARY ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 17.28A.

CREATION AND RE-CREATION. BEDE: “We are” very rightly “called the offspring of God, not in the sense that we were brought forth out of his nature but in the sense that through his Spirit we are both created by his will and re-created by his adoption.” COMMENTARY ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 17.28C.