Improvisation Is Key To Cultural Engagement

American evangelicals want to engage the culture on moral issues, but they don’t always feel prepared to do so. In a recent survey of U.S. evangelicals, 89 percent said they want to promote biblical truths among people they know, but far fewer (56 percent) said they’re willing to discuss these truths with people who disagree, as few as 27 percent said they’re equipped to do so, and only 17 percent said they’re eager.

Part of the uncertainty among believers may be that there’s no consensus on how Christians ought to engage the culture. Arguments about concepts like Christian nationalism and cultural retreatism take a lot of the energy away from learning to live rightly. Each option has strengths, but many of them seem to draw more from contemporary cultural assumptions than from centuries of Christian experience.

In Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church, Stephen O. Presley, associate professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, retrieves a vision of early church life to inform contemporary conversations about cultural engagement. The two primary trajectories are isolation or confrontation, but, as he argues, “what is left is a sense of division and conflict built on two conflicting assumptions: the tendency to assimilate to the culture or to withdraw to the safety of a confined community” (11).

While neither is wrong per se, there’s a better way: cultural sanctification. According to Presley, this was the early church’s approach. Pagan converts to Christianity were still embedded within their local societies, but they knew Christian patterns and practices would be countercultural.

Defining Cultural Sanctification

Cultural sanctification focuses on virtue. It’s woven into Presley’s definition of the term: “[It] sees Christians as embedded within the culture but seeking sanctification so as to promote virtue and reject vice in their personal lives, in the church and in the activities and institutions of the surrounding world” (164).

As such, his model of cultural engagement isn’t a guide to reclaiming the West; it’s a clarion call to let God’s Spirit reclaim us while we continue to work, entertain, suffer, rest, argue, and enjoy life in a repaganizing Western civilization. It’s not a third way as much as an ancient way. This ad fontes approach puts Presley deep in the diverse works of early Christian thinkers like Justin Martyr, Origen, and Tertullian.

These diverse sources show that, though the early church was committed to a single way of life, they weren’t monolithic. Spread among different cultures, they discerned how to live through improvisation. This improvisation was vitally important. Presley argues, “There is no script for the Christian life that comprehends every possible engagement with the world. Those who improvise draw upon their skills and past learning to perform their role in the drama” (47). Similar skills will benefit Christians in our rapidly evolving culture.

Though the early church was committed to a single way of life, they weren’t monolithic.

Yet improvisation must begin with a solid understanding of the setting and scene. For Christians, catechesis and liturgy can provide the needed theological and moral competencies. The patterns of Christian doctrine and the narrative of Scripture helped the early church in “cultivating ‘a cultural discerning’ spiritual life—one that was actively indigenizing within the culture but always sorting out the virtues and vices lodged within it” (115). Then, just as now, Christians had to exegete their culture as they exegeted Scripture.

Improvised Christian Ethics

There’s more in this book on early Christian morality and practice than specific applications to modern Christianity. This isn’t because the early church lacks wisdom but because Presley is limited in what he sets out to do. He asks questions such as “What would such respect for political authorities look like today?” (72) and “Should we choose to remain within the ruins of Christian institutions and continue to work to redeem them?” (92). However, he leaves the reader to work out the answers in his or her context.

If we’re to engage the world like the early church, we must wrestle with these questions. Yet there are substantial points of difference between our modern world and the ancient world. As Presley notes, modern Christians aren’t starting with a clean slate. Our culture isn’t emerging out of paganism; we’re merging back into it. Christianity comes with historical baggage, and that presents a unique challenge for us. However, we also enjoy exclusive benefits and privileges. He writes, “The early church worked from the margins of the culture and did not enjoy many of our freedoms and opportunities to influence political and social life” (19).

The book emphasizes symmetry rather than asymmetry, so it doesn’t focus on contemporary cultural analysis. This is intentional. Presley argues, “A pragmatic focus on how to respond to the urgencies of the moment often neglects the importance of prior identity formation through discipleship in Christian doctrine and morality” (165). If we’re to reach the culture with the gospel message, we must first learn and internalize that message ourselves. When leaders prioritize fighting the newest frontier of the culture war instead of teaching believers what sort of people they ought to be, it tends to create short-sighted Christians, who cannot faithfully improvise Christian ethics and pass down the faith to the next generation. This doesn’t undercut the need for pastors and theologians to draw explicit moral boundaries informed by Scripture and tradition, but Presley rightly stresses ecclesial renewal as logically prior, overflowing into cultural renewal.

Unfinished Metanarrative of Hope

Amid ubiquitous conversations about Christian public and political engagement, Presley offers a sobering reminder to modern evangelicals about the early Christians’ slow, steady virtue-centric approach. It’s neither Christian nationalism nor cultural retreatism, but it’s also not a complete rejection of everything within these paradigms. Cultural sanctification borrows elements from both extremes by creating clearer lines around the Christian community but also fully embedding Christians in the culture.

If we’re to reach the culture with the gospel message, we must first learn and internalize that message ourselves.

At the heart of cultural sanctification is the belief that the church’s public witness depends on our personal and corporate sanctification. The early church’s central concern was that Christians were characterized by virtue, whether that helped win the culture or not. And sometimes it did.

Cultural Sanctification reminds readers that misrepresentation, persecution, and even martyrdom will not derail the church’s mission. Christians must set their hope on the heavenly kingdom and the King who’s coming to judge the living and the dead. This book offers a powerful reminder that we can participate in this story of triumph too, but only if we’re willing to revisit the ancient path of the early church.