In his new book, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church, historian Stephen O. Presley draws on the Bible and an extensive array of early church primary sources to tell stories of Christians (including Paul) engaging their pagan neighbors wherever and whenever they could. Faced with a hostile culture, the natural reaction would have been to hide—and early Christian communities did plenty of that. But more often, Christians reached out to others, sometimes at great personal cost, owing to their conviction that the gospel was a matter of life or death. In the process, Christianity spread—as did its sanctifying effect on the ambient culture.

Sometime in the early 50s AD, the ever trouble-prone Apostle Paul found himself jailed in the Macedonian city of Philippi. Originally named after Philip II, the great Macedonian conqueror of Greece and father of Alexander the Great, by Paul’s time the city was best remembered as the site of a major battle. Almost a century earlier here, in 42 BC, the armies of the Second Triumvirate, led by Octavian and Marc Antony, decisively defeated the forces of Julius Caesar’s assassins. It proved one of the final death knells for the Roman Republic. Perhaps this political history was of no import for Paul, but for the thoroughly Roman culture of the town it certainly mattered. 
What was this pre-Christian Roman culture like? We forget, living in a world inescapably shaped by two-thousand years of Christianity, that many of the gentler aspects of the West have resulted from the slow but steady Christianization of culture. In particular, Christianity is how we learned to hate genocide, to treasure human life, to respect the dignity of all persons, and to abhor the casual cruelty towards the weak so common in the ancient world. It’s impossible read about the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a classic of Western history, and not recognize the stark difference between cultures that affirm the value of all persons according to the imago Dei and ones that do not.
The latter view was a defining contrast between early Christianity and pagan religious practice, difficult to us in 2024 to fathom. Pagan gods most certainly did not love human beings, as a casual perusal of Greco-Roman mythology reminds. Much of the time they didn’t even like them, plotting their abuse and destruction in various ways. By contrast, according to Christianity, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). 
Paul’s sojourn in Philippi is illustrative of the revolutionary nature of Christian thought in the world of antiquity. Spending his night in jail worshiping God, Paul does not rail against the injustice of his arrest and the oppressive power of the empire. Instead, he remains steadfast in his faith, ultimately converting and baptizing the jailer and his family. He teaches him the gospel and equips him to start a local church, one that grows into a flourishing congregation—as Paul’s own letter to the Philippians a decade later attests.
In other words, instead of keeping to himself in the Philippian jail, Paul used this opportunity to reach local leaders. In the process, he sanctified local culture, bringing Christianity into this outpost of the Roman world.
Read More
Related Posts:

How do you communicate with other flesh and blood people with neither the ability to read nor listen deeply? This is a civilization-destroying kind of crisis. Without the possibility of deep, meaningful communication across society, there will be fewer deep friendships, fewer relationships, less healthy marriages, and more intergenerational strife as communication between parents and  children becomes harder. There will be less collaboration beyond our immediate circles. All of these activities rely on effective speaking and listening, on remembering information, on understanding people and their ideas, on holding multiple ideas in one’s mind and discerning patterns or conflicts between them. There is significance, as the early Christians knew well, to the idea of God as Word that became flesh. Words can be transcendent. Words are how God communicates with us. 

In a city center somewhere in the ancient Greek world—let’s say Epidaurus in the sixth century BC—a religious festival is in progress. The mood is festive, buoyed by the free barbecue that religious sacrifices occasioned for the entire local populace. Animal sacrifices were ostensibly for the gods, but it was the humans who benefited tangibly from the opulent community cookouts. The gods largely just enjoyed the smell. And now, bellies full, the moment everyone has been waiting for has arrived: entertainment.  
A bard begins singing in a clear voice, accompanying himself on a lyre. Dramatically inflecting the familiar lines, he sings a tale well known to all. Even so, it always is a delight; besides, every bard tells it just a little differently. If it’s Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey the recitation will take around twenty-four hours in total, with the crowds dispersing at dark and returning on the morrow. But return they will, that much is certain. While few of them can read, they delight in these occasional festival performances and look forward to them each time.  
Fast-forward a little over a century. It is 430 BC in Athens, and the leading democratic statesman of the day, Pericles, gives the Funeral Oration, commemorating the war dead at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The reason his speech survived is because one of the thousands in the audience that day, the historian Thucydides, not only heard the speech, but remembered it so well that he could transcribe it down from memory later. This might seem impressive to us. It wasn’t for the Athenians, who were used to turning up regularly for dramatic performances and public speeches, which people remembered in detail years later. These works, heard rather than read, formed the shared literature of the Athenian democracy. 
And yet, when we speak today of the wonders of Greek literature, the very term we use is misleading. After all, “litterae,” Latin for letters, whence the term “literature” derives, were only invented sometime in the eighth century BC, when the Greeks adapted their own alphabet, borrowing heavily from the Phoenicians. The Homeric epics, composed orally, were not written down until sometime in the sixth century BC in Athens. Then, once writing existed, few were literate enough to make use of it. Still, this did not hamper their ability to create, maintain, and appreciate a highly developed culture of storytelling that valued the beauty and complexity of narratives reflective of both the intellectual and emotional elements of the human experience. 
These achievements of pre-literate Greek artists came to mind as I read Beth McMurtrie’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Is This The End of Reading?” In some ways, it may appear to be yet another one in a long series of (alas) warranted jeremiads on the decline of literacy in our society. Thirteen years ago, for instance, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book, Academically Adrift, bemoaned the decline in students’ ability to write. Arum and Roksa’s solution was: Make them write more, not less.  
Read More
Related Posts: