Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church
By Stephen O. Presley.
Eerdmans, 2024.
Paperback, 230 pages, $24.99.
Reviewed by Winston Hottman.
What should be done about the decline of Christianity in the West? While some proposed solutions have been more progressive in nature, others have looked to the past, seeking to mine church history for relevant models of cultural engagement. Those of a purportedly muscular character have found inspiration in figures like Charlemagne or Boniface, while others have called for more insular models of community aimed at the protection and preservation of a thick Christian identity, the most famous being Rod Dreher’s “Benedict option.” But do any of the proposals look back far enough?
Many of these proposals are based on models from predominantly Christian contexts, or at least contexts in which Christians enjoyed a more felicitous status than that of a disenfranchised minority, none of which correspond well to our own. By contrast, in Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church, Stephen Presley proposes a model of cultural engagement that looks to the earliest centuries of the Church, its fledgling period before the so-called “Constantinian shift.” Given the ongoing dismantling of the structures of Christendom, the earliest period of the Church offers an ever more fitting parallel to ours, one in which religious devotion is regarded not merely as irrelevant but increasingly as a threat to social order.
For Presley, what we find in earliest Christianity is a precedent of cultural engagement that synthesizes both the Church’s indigenizing and pilgrimizing principles. It is a model that is neither retreatist nor warmongering, neither given over to isolation nor confrontation, but committed to cultural sanctification. Rejecting the naïve assumption that we can or should escape the world, it understands that the Church is called to the renewal of culture through its own sanctifying presence. But in order to sanctify, the Church must be sanctified. This requires a commitment to both the internal and external dimensions of the Church’s calling, to both the centripetal and centrifugal forces of her mission.
Over the course of the book, Presley teases out the contours of this dual commitment, beginning with the formation of identity. For early Christians, cultural engagement was rooted in a process of formation nourished through catechesis and liturgy. Catechesis bridged the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical divide between Christianity and paganism. Liturgy shaped the social imagination of converts as they sought to live the way of Jesus. Both were fully embodied practices, involving not only the conversion of the mind but the inculcation of radically new habits and social relations.
Formation in Christian virtue prepared believers for a life of spiritual discernment that required improvisation as it navigated the contingencies of various geographical, political, and cultural situations. Presley traces how this formation shaped the political and public dimensions of early Christian cultural engagement, including key areas like citizenship, the intellectual life, and marriage and family. Emerging from this survey is a profound sense of unity between the Church’s inner and outer life. Early Christians sought to preserve the purity of their identity while also expressing the love of Christ through robust social engagement, a harmony that reflected the admonition of Jesus’s brother, James: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
One of the book’s primary contributions is to remind Christians that the Church does not so much need a strategy for cultural engagement as it needs to remember that its own existence is God’s strategy for cultural transformation. The Church is how God is changing the world. While Christians in all times and places are called upon to exercise spiritual discernment in our relationship to the broader culture, this process must begin by recalling who we are. Christian cultural engagement is ecclesiocentric. Only through the cultivation of a robust social identity can we begin to discern a faithful public witness. In a technological age with so many counter-influences at play, this will require a recovery of catechetical and liturgical resources from the past that deeply embed believers in the life of local congregations and parishes and that foster a sense of identity with Christians across space and time.
But Presley’s project is not just about recalling us to the past. The capstone of the book is a chapter on the formative role of hope in the early church. Presley movingly captures the profound sense of expectation that inspired and sustained early believers through suffering, oppression, and persecution. For those familiar with the period, the cultural swagger of early Christians is so impressive that it often comes as a shock to remember what a beleaguered minority they were. This was an age of martyrdom, but it was a militant martyrdom.
While there is always a tendency to romanticize the period, one cannot help but be struck by the triumphalism of a community with little to no access to the reigns of cultural and political power. The Apostles, Polycarp, Ignatius, Felicity and Perpetua, the martyrs of Lyon—these and countless others were convinced that through nothing more than their faithful witness God could turn the world upside down. None of them foresaw the fortuitous events of the fourth century, but their hope, oriented as it was towards a more distant horizon, sustained their faith. And faith, for them, was the victory that overcomes the world.
The future of the Church is not a re-pristinated Christendom. We must be open to a new and unprecedented work of God. In the face of such ambiguity, we must recall our identity as we look to the past while renewing our hope as we look to the future. The Church of the martyrs does not call us back to itself but points us forward to the One for whom, with them, we expectantly wait.
Winston Hottman is a pastor at Lake Highlands Baptist Church in Dallas, TX, and a PhD candidate in historical theology. He is a founding director at the Center for Baptist Renewal.
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