Review Essay of Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church.[1] Stephen O. Presley, Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2024. 230 pages ISBN 9780802878540[i]
Introduction
Christianity stands today at a decisive crossroads. Once the cultural and intellectual lodestar of the Western world, it is now frequently sidelined, contested, or ignored. Yet Christianity remains the world’s largest religion, a global force shaped by two millennia of energetic work and profound historical shifts. Among these, none was more decisive than the fourth century transformation under Constantine, when Christianity and imperial power became fully intertwined for over a thousand years. If the twenty-first century church is to navigate a post-Christian West, it must reckon honestly with this legacy—not nostalgically seeking to revive Christendom, but learning again from the pre-Constantinian centuries when Christian communities flourished on the margins of, and in the center of, a powerful self-assured empire. Stephen O. Presley’s Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church offers a timely lens for such reflection, inviting a recovery of the vibrancy and clarity of the earliest Christians in a cultural situation that, in key respects, resembles our own.
The thesis of this essay is that the first three Christian centuries represent the best and most authentic Christianity and the kind of Christianity the twenty-first-century urgently needs to learn from and recover. The intervening centuries have much to teach us—but much of it is cautionary, showing what the church ought not to be. Christendom’s social dominance in the West is over; churches must wake to this fact and decide what kind of faithfulness is now required. The question is not whether the “religion of Jesus” is finished; global Christianity is growing. The question is what has happened in the West—and what believers might do, under God, to live faithfully now. The most illuminating way to answer is to examine the early development of Christianity within the self-absorbed and powerful Roman Empire—and to appropriate what the first believers discovered about identity, citizenship, public life, intellectual life, and hope.
Modern Christianity: How We Got Here
Across the West, Christianity is widely judged irrelevant or suspect. The modern academy’s skepticism is not new, but it was sharpened by currents churches addressed poorly. Historical-critical movements that matured in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries styled themselves “scientific,” yet often rested on philosophical naturalism; their claims outpaced their evidence and left congregations disoriented.[2] Darwinian evolution received uneven and inadequate theological engagement; the Social Gospel reframed salvation in political-economic terms without a robust soteriology and eschatology. More recently, churches compromised their own credibility: the spectacle of celebrity “mega-church” culture, unholy alliances with partisan politics, and grievous moral failures among leaders.[3]
Going further back, medieval and early modern Christians founded all of Europe’s great universities—Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and others —yet the Enlightenment re-cast intellectual authority around rationalism and empiricism.[4] Alternative, non-theistic worldviews became “live options.”[5] Meanwhile the Reformation, while theologically corrective in crucial ways, often preserved state-church power arrangements that blurred discipleship with citizenship.[6] All this forms the backdrop for today’s Western situation: a culture not pagan but post-Christian, tired of a faith it believes it already knows.
Constantine as Turning Point
By the early fourth century, the Christian population of the Roman Empire had grown very substantially—probably to a strong minority across the empire.[7] In 312, before fighting Maxentius, the Roman Emperor Constantine experienced a vision directing him to adopt the sign of Christ, which he did along with his soldiers. He won a decisive victory at the Milvian Bridge.[8] Consequently, and remarkably, in 313 the Edict of Milan legalized Christianity and restored confiscated property to Christians and churches. Imperial patronage soon flowed to the church: basilicas were built, bishops received civil honors, church councils were convened by the Emperor himself (notably Nicaea, 325), and Christian teaching gained political shelter.[9]
This dramatic development bore gifts for the church (space for doctrine to clarify; protection from persecution) but also deadly costs. The fusion of church and empire blurred Jesus’ “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s… and to God the things that are God’s” distinction (Matt. 22:21). In a dramatic shift, coercive power that once oppressed Christians was sometimes now turned around—to pagans, “heretics,” and Jews. In many places, the church assumed a civic role funded by taxation. The distinction between the Kingdom of God and the imperium tangled. Even the Reformation did not finally dissolve the Christendom reflex: Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican settlements preserved state churches. In the New World, forms of establishment lingered. In Quebec, the church retained formidable civic authority until the 1960s “Quiet Revolution.”[10] Lord Acton’s proverbial caution—“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—resonates; but a biblical anthropology says it more precisely: power removes restraints on inherent human corruption; absolute power removes those restraints absolutely.
A twenty-first century Christianity that would be faithful must therefore disavow “Constantine’s Christianity”—not the person of Constantine as a political actor, even a providential one, nor the ecumenical councils as doctrinal achievements, but the model that conflates the church’s mission with civilizational management. The church’s calling is not to sanctify culture but to make disciples; any cultural change is derivative and unpredictable (Matt 28:18–20; John 18:36).[11]
The Earliest Church as Model
The pre-Constantinian church grew primarily not by elite conversion or imperial favor but by the steady multiplication of transformed persons and households, who embodied a distinctive way of life amid a pluralistic empire.[12] The documentation is rich: Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, Irenaeus, the Alexandrians (Clement, Origen), Tertullian, and, on the cusp of Constantine, Eusebius; later Augustine synthesizes much of this tradition Many were pastors of urban congregations in a suspicious imperial environment where civic order (the Pax Romana) was the highest good. They wrote to stabilize fragile churches, defend the faith in public, and nurture holiness in ordinary life.
Early Christians navigated a three-way inheritance: Hebrew wisdom (action/obedience; covenantal justice), Greek philosophy (conceptual clarity; metaphysical reach), and Roman administration (order, law, citizenship). But the decisive novelty was Jesus: his life, teaching, death, resurrection, the gift of the Spirit, and the formation of a community called “church.” Out of these materials, believers forged something genuinely new: a worshiping, catechizing, hospitable, morally serious, sacramental people whose existence quietly undercut Rome’s claims. In this context, Presley’s lenses—identity, citizenship, public life, intellectual life, and hope—prove helpful.
Identity
“Christian” named a new social identity, not a mere private spirituality. To confess “Jesus is Lord” directly relativized the emperor’s claims (Rom 10:9; Phil 2:11). Conversion was an intensive learning process—months or years of catechesis reshaping imagination, habits, and loyalties.[13] Baptism signified entry into a new people, a new household; the locus of growth was the oikos (household).[14]
Here lies the crucial distinction that animates this essay: Presley’s phrase “cultural sanctification,” taken baldly, risks conflating the arena of discipleship (culture) with the object of sanctification (persons and communities). The New Testament speaks of the sanctification of people within culture, not the sanctification of culture as such (Rom 12:1–2; 1 Thess 4:3). The early Christians did not attempt to “Christianize Rome” but to become a holy people in Rome. Ironically, once “Rome” largely converted, the social logic inverted: identity began to mean “citizen of a Christian empire,” not “disciple of a living Lord.” Recovering the pre-Constantinian pattern requires re-grounding identity in union with Jesus and membership in a pilgrim community, not status in a civilizational project (1 Pet 2:9–12).[15]
Sociologically, this identity was “sticky”: lived in households, reinforced by table fellowship, sexual ethics, care for the vulnerable, and weekly worship.[16] The identity was also hopeful: martyrs like Polycarp embodied an age-defying new calculus of life and death—“Eighty-six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong”—signaling that belonging to Jesus relativizes all earthly threats.[17]
Citizenship
The Roman civic order was thoroughly religious: festivals, oaths, guild rites, and sacrifices reinforced the imperial cult. Christians faced continual tension: to participate compromised allegiance to Jesus; to abstain invited suspicion or worse.[18] The apostolic counsel is twofold: honor rulers, pay taxes, pray for peace; and yet acknowledge a higher citizenship in heaven (Rom. 13:1–7; 1 Tim. 2:1–2; Phil. 3:20). Early Christians practiced a creative fidelity: fulfilling ordinary civic duties, seeking the common good, and refusing idolatrous rites. This “double vision” made them seem both reliable and peculiar. They neither withdrew into sectarian invisibility nor sought to capture the magistracy. Their political patience proved potent: communities outlasted persecutions; fidelity outlived emperors.[19]
Public Life
Public life is where early Christian identity and citizenship became legible. Pagan observers accused Christians of novelty; yet they also noticed unusual mercy. During epidemics and food shortages, Christians nursed the sick, fed the hungry, honored the dead, and gave material help across lines of class and ethnicity.[20] Widows and orphans were organized into networks of care; enslaved persons were welcomed as siblings in worship and, where possible, manumitted. Sexual morality was conspicuously rigorous: fidelity in marriage, chastity outside it, rejection of exploitative practices widespread in Roman society.[21] Christians refused certain public entertainments—the blood spectacles of the games; forms of theater and ritual that catechized vice.[22]
These practices did not “sanitize” Roman public life. They formed an alternative public: a visible people whose habits carried an implicit critique. Cultural impact followed, but as a byproduct. It is telling that the most durable growth dynamics in the first three centuries are those least dependent on cultural leverage: hospitality, catechesis, chastity, economic sharing, and resilience under pressure.[23] For the twenty-first century, the parallel is obvious: in post-Christian spaces, the most persuasive public witness will again be concrete love, economic and familial integrity, and countercultural patience—not campaigns for dominance.
Intellectual Life
The early church also thought. In a world ordered by rhetorical contest, philosophical schools, and civic cults, Christians made a two-front claim: the gospel is true, and the gospel is good. Justin Martyr framed Christianity as the “true philosophy” that fulfilled the best aspirations of Platonism and Stoicism.[24] Irenaeus mounted a pastoral metaphysic of creation and redemption against Gnosticism’s elitist mythologies.[25] Tertullian distrusted philosophy’s pretensions—“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—yet made penetrating arguments about law, custom, and conscience.[26] Origen’s vast synthesis married biblical exegesis with philosophical inquiry; later, Athanasius and the Cappadocians deployed refined metaphysical grammar (ousia, hypostasis) to articulate Nicene faith without surrendering biblical substance.[27]
Presley rightly highlights the intellectual labor of the early church, but the order matters: thinking served worship and discipleship. The aim was not to gain cultural prestige, nor to sanctify the academy, but to confess Jesus intelligibly and defend the flock. When intellectual work abandons this telos, in any century, it collapses into rationalism or fideism. The pre-Constantinian model kept doctrine bound to doxology and discipleship. For today, the implication is not anti-intellectualism but re-ordered intellectualism: universities and seminaries should prize work that arises from and returns to the church’s life, commending the faith as both rationally satisfying and existentially transforming.
Hope
Finally, hope. Ancient Christians did not possess optimism in a modern sense; they lived in the confidence that the crucified and risen Lord reigns and will come again. This eschatological horizon re-scaled suffering, persecution, and death (Rom 8; 1 Pet 1). It freed believers to risk generosity, to endure injustice without vengeance, and to refuse despair. Hope did not sanctify Roman culture; it relativized it. The church believed that the Kingdom of God had already broken into this age, and that Caesar’s claims would wither before Christ’s appearing (Rev 11:15). That confidence animated martyrdom narratives, sustained communities through plagues, and nourished moral renewal. In a post-Christian West, where rival hopes are thin (therapeutic, consumerist, nationalist, or technological), the recovery of theological hope is essential to patient endurance and joyful public witness.[28]
Presley’s Proposal—Strengths and Limits
Presley’s framework (identity, citizenship, public life, intellectual life, hope) is historically attentive and pastorally useful. Read in the key argued here, it helps pastors and communities organize their common life without confusing the arena (culture) for the mission (discipleship). His patristic engagement is generous (Clement, Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius; later Augustine); his account of marginality is a salutary antidote to nostalgia for Christendom.[29]
Yet the title phrase — “cultural sanctification”— remains misleading as a summary of the church’s task. Christians are sanctified in cultures; cultures do not have souls. The church’s mission is to make disciples who obey all that Jesus commanded; whenever that mission flourishes, communities and institutions may be leavened, but the shape and extent of that leavening are not for Christians to control (Matt 28:18–20; Matt 5:13–16). In a Constantinian or post-Constantinian key, confusing means and ends has repeatedly damaged the church’s witness. The better prescription is the pre-Constantinian pattern: thick identity, patient citizenship, visibly different public life, worship-anchored intellect, and resilient hope.
Disavowing Constantine’s Christianity
To disavow Constantine’s model is not to deny what God accomplished in and after the fourth century: the canonical consolidation of Nicene faith, the “Christianisation” of Europe, the preservation of learning, the outgrowth of monastic holiness, the rise (and reform) of institutions that carried biblical witness outward. Believers can be grateful for doctrinal clarity (Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon) and still very doubtful about the fusion of church and civic power. They can honor political goods (order, justice, peace) and still insist that the church’s power is not coercive but sacrificial. Wherever the medieval and early modern church bore Jesus’ character, believers rejoice; where it bore Caesar’s, they must certainly repent.
In practical terms, “disavowing Constantine” today means at least: (1) refusing the fantasy and heresy that cultural dominance is necessary for faithfulness; (2) re-centering the congregation (rather than the platform) as the locus of formation; (3) prioritizing catechesis that forms people in prayer, Scripture, communion, household and family economy, and works of mercy; (4) re-learning political patience—fulfilling civic obligations with integrity while declining idolatrous liturgies of party and tribe; (5) rebuilding Christian intellectual life as a ministry of truth for the church’s sake and the world’s good; and (6) re-proclaiming hope with eschatological bite, freeing Christians from fear, resentment, and the corrosive attractions of power.
Conclusion
From Jesus to the world’s largest religion is an astonishing arc. But the way forward for Western churches is not to pine for the era when Christianity managed a civilization. That project formed Christians for many centuries—and often malformed them. The path of renewal runs further back: toward pre-Constantinian Christianity’s thick identity, patient citizenship, visible public life, worship-anchored intellect, and stubborn and joyful hope. Presley’s work succeeds not because it offers a new mission—“cultural sanctification”— but because it helps Christians look through the right window: the lived reality of the earliest believers who flourished not only on the margins but in many levels of Roman culture. In a post-Christian West, where influence is fragile and suspicion strong, the church’s future will again be found in becoming what it is: a people sanctified in Christ within the cultures of this world, bearing light and salt not as instruments of dominance but as signs of an alternate kingdom, a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Matt 5:13–16; Heb 12:28). If the twenty-first century would learn from the third, then let the church again become a school of discipleship; let denominational leaders and lead pastors embrace political patience; let households become centers of hospitality; let scholars teach not just other scholars but the saints; let worship re-train desire; and let hope make believers fearless. That is how followers of Jesus once quietly discipled huge swaths of an empire. That is how, under God, believers might serve the world again.
Howard Andersen holds a BSc in Math and Physics from the University of British Columbia and PhD in New Testament Studies from Manchester University. He is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Languages. During his long career, he served as both President of Northwest Baptist Seminary and College and as Academic Dean of Northwest Baptist Seminary.
Author copyright.
Howard G. Andersen, review essay of Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church, Stephen O. Presley, Northwest Institute for Ministry Education Research, www.nimer.ca, (November 14, 2025).
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———. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
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Notes
[1] Stephen O. Presley, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024). The publisher indicates that Steven Presley is Senior Fellow for Religion and Public Life at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy and associate professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also the author of numerous articles and essays that look to retrieve ancient wisdom for modern Christians. From their beginning, Southern Baptists have had a powerful impulse to evangelize the world and their insightful scholarship on matters relating to this are always very welcome.
[2] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 31–85.
[3]See Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory; American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, (New York, Harper, 2023).
[4] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 171–176.
[5] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 3–22.
[6] See and compare Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[7] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 6–7.
[8] Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum 44; Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.28–32.
[9] Pelikan, Christian Tradition, 1:173–82.
[10] Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); on Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution,” see Taylor, A Secular Age, 437–440.
[11] Matt 28:18–20; John 18:36; cf. Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–15.
[12] Stark, Rise of Christianity, 73–128 (household growth dynamics; plagues; social networks).
[13] Presley, Cultural Sanctification, 27–35 (catechesis as an intensive learning process).
[14] Stark, Rise of Christianity, 95–128 (oikos/household as basic growth unit).
[15] 1 Peter 2:9–12; see also Everett Ferguson, Early Christians Speak: Faith and Life in the First Three Centuries, 3rd ed. (Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1999), 33–49.
[16] Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 3–25, 145–176.
[17] Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3.
[18] Tertullian, Apology 35–38; Justin Martyr, First Apology 17, 46.
[19] Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), Ch. 1.
[20] Dionysius of Alexandria (as quoted in Eusebius, HE 7.22); Stark, Rise of Christianity, 73–94 (on plagues and care).
[21] Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3–15, 117–160.
[22] Tertullian, De Spectaculis 1–3, 24.
[23] Stark, Rise of Christianity, 95–128.
[24] Justin Martyr, First Apology 4–7, 46; Second Apology 10–13.
[25] Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.pref., 3.24–25; 5.1–5 (creation/redemption themes).
[26] Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, 7 (the Athens–Jerusalem quip appears in De praescriptione 7).
[27] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 90–132, 206–240 (on ousia/hypostasis and Nicene development).
[28] Augustine, City of God 19 (two cities; hope’s political consequence).
[29] Presley, Cultural Sanctification, Chs. 2–6.