ANDEarly in my reading and study of early Christianity, I was struck by a statement by an unidentified author writing to a man named Diognetus in the second century. This author, in his Epistle to Diognetusdeclared that “what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.”
The author was getting at a paradox that lies at the heart of our faith: Christians inhabit the world, but in the beliefs they profess and the virtues they seek to model, they also transcend the things of this world. While Christ and the apostles taught this same principle, the EpistleThe analogy of the soul to the body is compelling. Although existing in a mortal body, Christians are destined for immortality. Just as the soul holds the body together, they are to hold the world together. Their task is to live in a way that makes the world a better place because of their presence.
Stephen O. Presley, a scholar of early Christianity, articulates this view wonderfully in Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church. The book explains how early Christians saw their place in a world that increasingly looks and feels like our own.
In a secular age, the insights and wisdom of early Christian voices can help us reclaim a vision of how to inhabit a society that has no room for religious exclusivity and little desire for transcendent moral reasoning. By exploring and connecting prominent 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 is not just suspicious of the church; Christianity is seen as the antagonist. “Christianity,” he writes, “is no longer marginalized because it is religious, but because its moral claims often run counter to new expressions of social progress and moral diversity.”
Ours is an age of “expressive individualism,” as author Carl R. Trueman argues in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Selfhas no need for transcendent theological claims and classical ethical foundations. Thus, Christian witness in the twenty-first century must increasingly answer the question, Is this good and beautiful? Without convincing today’s world that Christianity is attractive and desirable, we will have difficulty convincing it that Christianity is true.
To illustrate this, Presley assesses the nature of early Christian identity. Conversion, as the early church understood it, was not a mere mental assent to propositional truth claims. Through catechesis and participation in the liturgical life of the church, new believers had their identities purified and remade.
Catechesis, or intentional instruction in doctrine, identified false beliefs and sought to replace them with biblical concepts. But it was a deeply spiritual experience. It served as a form of exorcism, cleansing the heart and mind of satanic assumptions and making room for life-giving nourishment. The liturgical life of the church, which included baptism and the Lord’s Supper, ordered all of life around the work of Christ and God’s redemptive story. As Presley observes, “This liturgical formation reminds us that the early church was not just interested in evangelism and preaching, but in forming a community.”
While always implicit in Christian faith and practice, this idea of “liturgical formation” needs to be recovered in our day. This is not an argument for high-minded worship in the church alone, but a call for intentional practices of worship and formation within the body of the church. The Christian community must extend beyond a causal relationship with a church down the street and instead be seen as a vital collective of unified and committed men and women.
Furthermore, Presley highlights the cultivation of intellectual life among early Christian thinkers. We are privileged to see a revival of this impulse in much of contemporary evangelicalism. But early Christian thinkers can help us take it further.
By placing their lives of thought in dialogue with literature and philosophy, these thinkers brought all learning under the yoke of Christ. Scripture was the guiding compass, indeed the very framework of knowledge, for early Christian thinkers. While evangelicals (mostly) have maintained a keen attention to Scripture, we have often lost sight of how God’s Word should shape the way we engage with all other forms of knowledge.
As Presley notes, “The church has recognized the importance of intellectual engagement and interaction with the philosophical climate of the world around it.” Early Christians, even under persecution, did not consider withdrawal an option. Today’s Christian leaders, in an age of moral and epistemological confusion, need to reinvigorate the church for compelling and irenic intellectual engagement in the 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 topic into two separate chapters, one on citizenship and one on public life, the underlying ideas are similar in both. On one level, Christians understood their loyalty to Christ and his kingdom. They also sought to demonstrate their service and commitment to temporal authorities as those they had been ordained by God to serve. Christians were not “anti-imperial,” as Presley notes; they affirmed the established order and sought to live faithfully within its boundaries.
Presley identifies this mode of public life as an “active political dualism.” It involved prayers to government officials, commitments to pay taxes, and efforts to promote virtuous living for the common good. This, of course, did not guarantee acceptance by pagan neighbors. But the consistent witness was convincing enough to win some to the community of faith. If nothing else, it demonstrated the supernatural nature of the Christian community.
Although Christian worship was much less public than Roman polytheism, it does not follow that Christians resided in the shadows. Their lives and witness were in tune with what was happening around them. Early Christian faith always impacted public life, whether inspiring a faithful caring presence in the community, a public witness against violence and atrocity, or a prayerful attitude toward civic authority. A stance of active dualism tempered expectations while reminding believers that they were ultimately pilgrims bound for a heavenly land.
Faithful presence
Presley’s main claim, put simply, is that Christians today need to relearn and apply the lessons of this active dualism. He is aware, of course, that recovering voices from early Christianity is not an exercise in cherry-picking idealism. We should not assume, in other words, that every Christian in the first three centuries of the church did the work of cultural sanctification perfectly. (Here it helps to recall Nadya Williams’s recent work on the presence of cultural Christians within the early church.)
Yet the framework of faithful presence advocated by early Christian thinkers and attested to by non-Christian observers remains compelling. The church today must not operate with a triumphalist mindset, but that does not mean cowering in fear of the surrounding culture. As Presley states, “The Christian call to cultural sanctification is a call to pursue holiness and Christlikeness within any and every cultural context.”
The general model provided by the early church and handed down to us by Cultural Sanctification is solid. It may require some of us, however, to deal with cancers that threaten to infect our view of the church, the world, and our place in it. Cultural rejection is not the solution. Neither 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, even as it longs for the world to come.
Coleman M. Ford is assistant professor of humanities at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of Formed in His Image: A Guide to Christian Formationas well as a book that will be released soon, Ancient Wisdom for the Care of Souls: Learning the Art of Pastoral Ministry from the Church Fathers. He is a co-founder of the Center for Ancient Christian Studies and serves as a fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
