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.

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