Early on in my reading and study of early Christianity, I used to be struck by an assertion from an unnamed creator writing to a person named Diognetus within the second century. This creator, in his Epistle to Diognetus, declared that “what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.”
The creator was getting at a paradox resting at the guts of our faith: Christians dwell on this planet, yet within the beliefs they confess and the virtues they seek to model, in addition they transcend the things of this world. While Christ and the apostles taught this same principle, the Epistle’s analogy of the soul to the body is compelling. Though existing in a mortal body, Christians are sure for immortality. As the soul holds the body together, they are supposed to hold the world together. Their task is to live in a way that makes the world higher due to their presence.
Stephen O. Presley, a scholar of early Christianity, articulates this vision splendidly in Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World just like the Early Church. The book unpacks how early Christians viewed their place in a world that increasingly looks and seems like our own.
In a secular age, the postures and wisdom of early Christian voices might help us reclaim a vision for dwell inside a society that has no room for religious exclusivity and little desire for transcendent moral reasoning. By exploring and connecting outstanding themes of early Christian public witness, Presley channels the analogy presented to Diognetus and amplifies it through the voices of early Christian thinkers.
Active dualism
Presley begins by reminding us that our world isn’t just suspicious of the church; Christianity is seen because the antagonist. “Christianity,” he writes, “isn’t sidelined anymore since it is religious but because its moral claims steadily run contrary to recent expressions of social progress and moral diversity.”
Our age of “expressive individualism,” as creator Carl R. Trueman argues in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, has no need for transcendent theological claims and classic ethical foundations. Thus, Christian witness within the twenty first century must increasingly answer the query, Is this good and delightful? Without convincing today’s world that Christianity is appealing and desirable, we’ll struggle to persuade it that Christianity is true.
To illustrate this, Presley assesses the character of early Christian identity. Conversion, because the early church understood it, was no mere mental assent to propositional truth claims. Through catechesis and participation within the liturgical lifetime of the church, recent believers had their identities cleansed and remade.
Catechesis, or intentional instruction in doctrine, identified false beliefs and sought to switch those with biblical concepts. But this was a deeply spiritual experience. It served as a type of exorcism, cleansing one’s heart and mind from satanic presuppositions and leaving room for life-giving nourishment. The liturgical lifetime of the church, which included baptism and the Lord’s Supper, ordered one’s entire life across the work of Christ and the redemptive story of God. As Presley notes, “This liturgical formation reminds us that the early church was not interested just in evangelizing and preaching but in forming a community.”
While at all times implicit in Christian faith and practice, this concept of “liturgical formation” should be recovered in our day. This isn’t an argument for top church worship alone, but a plea for intentional worship and formation practices inside one’s church body. Christian community must extend past a causal relationship with a church down the road and as an alternative be viewed as an important collective of unified and committed men and girls.
Beyond this, Presley highlights the cultivation of mental life amongst early Christian thinkers. We are privileged to see a recovery of this impulse inside much of up to date evangelicalism. But early Christian thinkers might help us carry it further.
By putting their thought lives into conversation with literature and philosophy, these thinkers brought all learning under the yoke of Christ. Scripture was the guiding compass, indeed the very fabric of information, for early Christian thinkers. While evangelicals have (mostly) retained a high attention to Scripture, we’ve got often lost the notion of how God’s Word should shape the way in which we engage all other forms of information.
As Presley observes, “The church recognized the importance of mental engagement and interaction with the philosophical climate of the world around them.” Early Christians, even under persecution, didn’t consider retreat an option. Christian leaders today, in an age of ethical and epistemological confusion, must reinvigorate the church for winsome and irenic mental engagement in the general public square.
Central to Presley’s argument, then, is a portrait of how early Christians understood their role in public life. While he separates his formal discussion of this subject into two separate chapters, one on citizenship and one other on public life, the underlying ideas are similar across each. At one level, Christians understood their allegiance to Christ and his kingdom. They also sought to display their service and commitment to temporal authorities as those that had been ordained by God to serve. Christians weren’t “anti-imperial,” as Presley observes; they affirmed the established order and sought to live faithfully inside its bounds.
Presley identifies this manner of public life as an “lively political dualism.” It involved prayer for governing authorities, commitment to pay taxes, and efforts to advertise virtuous living for the common good. This, in fact, didn’t guarantee acceptance by pagan neighbors. But the consistent witness was compelling enough to win some to the community of religion. If nothing else, it demonstrated the otherworldly nature of the Christian community.
Though Christian worship was much less public than Roman polytheism, it doesn’t follow that Christians resided within the shadows. Their life and witness were attuned to what was going down around them. Early Christian faith at all times impacted public life, whether it inspired a faithful presence caring for the community, a public witness against violence and atrocity, or a prayerful demeanor toward civic authority. A posture of lively dualism tempered expectations while reminding believers that, ultimately, they were sojourners sure for a heavenly country.
Faithful presence
Presley’s core claim, simply put, is that Christians today must relearn and apply the teachings of this lively dualism. He is aware, in fact, that retrieving voices from early Christianity isn’t an exercise in cherry-picking idealism. We must not assume, in other words, that each Christian within the church’s first three centuries carried out the work of cultural sanctification perfectly. (Here, it helps to recollect Nadya Williams’s recent work on the presence of cultural Christians inside the early church.)
Nevertheless, the framework of faithful presence espoused by early Christian thinkers and attested by non-Christian observers stays compelling. Today’s church shouldn’t operate with a triumphalist mentality, but that doesn’t mean shrinking in fear of the encircling culture. As Presley asserts, “The Christian call to cultural sanctification is a call to pursue holiness and conformity to the likeness of Christ inside any and each cultural context.”
The overall template provided by the early church and transmitted to us by Cultural Sanctification is sound. It may require a few of us, nevertheless, to take care of cancers that threaten to contaminate our view of the church, the world, and our place in it. Cultural rejection isn’t the answer. Nor is replacing our current culture with some thoroughly Christianized alternative. The only answer to a world that rejects the church is a church that loves the world with faithful discernment and patient engagement, whilst it longs for the world to return.
Coleman M. Ford is assistant professor of humanities at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and creator of Formed in His Image: A Guide to Christian Formation, in addition to a forthcoming book, Ancient Wisdom for the Care of Souls: Learning the Art of Pastoral Ministry from the Church Fathers. He is cofounder of the Center for Ancient Christian Studies and serves as a fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
