Acts 17:28

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

The nearness of God to all, the fact of every man's being "in him" as the basis even of physical life, and the truth that men are God's offspring (in the spiritual sense) - all these things reveal conclusively that the earliest Christian conception of God was that of his being invisible, eternal, spiritual, omnipotent, omniscient, and ubiquitous. Therefore the postulations of the radical scholar John A. T. Robinson, as advocated in his book HONEST TO GOD in which he criticized the concept of "a three-story universe," "God up there," etc., denominating such absurdities as "the usual Christian conception" of such things, are themselves founded upon even a greater absurdity, namely, that any Christian familiar with the New Testament ever believed any such things. Moreover, his confession that he himself had long held to such naive views must be construed as the result of ignorance of the New Testament, or as a flat failure to be "honest to men!" in his book.

As certain of your own poets have said ... "These words are the first words of a hexameter found in Aratus, a Cecilian poet, whose poem antedates Christ some 270 years."[42]