#241 | Cultural Sanctification with Stephen O. Presley, Pt. 2

We've had a vision of the Christian life that is often fragmented. Either the only path forward is political maneuvering or the only path forward is just.

Is just care for the poor in this instance, or the only path forward is catechesis.

And you realize the challenge lays out is really committing that Christian culture, especially at a local level, where people know each other, trust each other, love each other, are living the Christian life and community that I think is. Is what has to happen, at least on some level, as we move into what is this postmodern, post Christian world.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations, Fragmented lives.

It actually sounds like a 90s grunge band. Unfortunately, it is all too often the way that we live our lives, isn't it?

Work over here, family over there, leisure over here, faith on Sundays, maybe perhaps some sports, hobbies in this room, running to Costco, scrolling on our phone, posting on Insta. And the list goes on and on and on and on and on. And the world of the Internet has really allowed us to fragment our lives even further.

It's crazy when I think back to my grandparents and what they would have seen and known. I mean, just the modern world that they lived in and then to see where we're at now. Yeah, it's crazy.

You know, we aren't, though, designed to live such fragmented lives.

And perhaps one of the reasons why the church in the west is having such a difficult time right now is that we are so fragmented and we really don't know what to do about it. We don't know how to respond. Today we're continuing Our conversation with Dr. Steven O.

Presley about his book Cultural Sanctification, about how we engage the world around us, like the early church. And when I'm talking about the early church, I'm not talking about the Book of Acts. I'm talking about post Acts, the second and third Centuries.

If you haven't listened to part one, I would recommend going back, checking that episode out. And honestly, this is one of the most fun episodes I've ever done because this is what C.S. lewis described. Friendship happens.

The moment when one person goes, you too. That's what I found with Steven Presley, someone else who saw the cultural moment that we're in Just like we are seeing was pretty incredible.

To have that type of connection, that type of common language, and just having met on the show to have that type of camaraderie already.

We are continuing this conversation, picking up right where we left off, asking ourselves the question, how do we live compelling, integrated lives in a world that is so opposed to the message we carry and the way that we live right now? So without further ado, let's jump right in to my second conversation with Stephen Presley. Happy listening.

So I went as an undergraduate to Moody Bible Institute, and we would get jobs because in Chicago at that time, we were nestled between the Gold coast and Cabrini Green. So you got the ghetto and you got really this opulent world. And we would have, you know, we had to do ministries while we were students.

So we would go into all these different areas of Chicago and we would work. And a lot of people wanted to hire Moody students because we were honest. We had a great community. All of these things, right? These young people.

We were trying to do what God wanted us to do. Fast forward. I've been in ministry for about six, seven years, and I meet this guy who's in business, and he's offered me a job. I'm in seminary.

I'd already been in ministry. I'd gone back to seminary. And he goes, I'm going against my conviction to hire a Christian. This is a man who is a Christian.

And I'm like, wait a minute. What do you mean going against it? This violates what I had grown up with in college. Like, you want to hire Christians?

He goes, I don't like to hire Christians. And I'm like, why? He goes, well, they take advantage of me because they know I'm a Christian.

And they talk about doing this and witnessing, and they're not doing their work. They do, you know, and that was the first time I ever heard anything about that, Right? Like, wait a minute. There is a negative here.

And of course, that's not what we want. But I think back to what Russell Moore had said in his book as he. He talked about. What's the name of the title of the book? Oh, Losing Our Religion.

In the book where he talks about, we're seeing young evangelicals leave evangelicalism not because they don't believe what the Bible says is true, but because. Because the church itself doesn't believe it. In other words, I'm observing the community firsthand and grown up in it.

Now, there are many we know that are. Okay, let's state that out right now.

There are some Genuine people that love Jesus, that are sacrificing, that are living faithfully, godly lives, and they're listening to the show right now.

But we know that if we were to have that invitation today, we're not offering a better humanity in many instances because our churches has become microcosms of a business personality cult that uses the Bible rather than a holistic rehumanization of society, offering a better way to live the way. Do you agree with that? Disagree with that. What are your thoughts on that?

I mean, a couple things. Like, I've spent. I've been training pastors for ministry, you know, well over a dozen years. And, you know, that's one thing.

You work in seminaries, you see godly people who are. I have so many godly students are going out into the world, taking churches and doing, Doing good work. But.

But one of the challenges, and you can see in the way I structured the chapters, one of the challenges is that it's not just the spiritual life is holistic and flourishing takes on a holistic vision. In other words, I can't just talk about catechesis. Catechism. Catechesis isn't the only answer. Catechesis is. This is the baseline, the, the formation.

And then I gotta talk about, okay, how do I now view political power? How does now a Christian think about when I venture into the world? I now have to have an understanding of political power based upon A. Romans 13.

Based upon. And I mentioned, I mentioned polycarp, like I said, quotes Romans 13. It's amazing.

And, you know, then you think about how do I address the prevailing intellectual challenges, you know, that are, that are invading our lives? How do I address that? Then? How do I address my public life?

Okay, how do, how does, what does human flourishing look like within the Christian community? And then, and then, yeah, I end with kind of hope and the way that kind of thread that ties everything together.

But, but you realize sometimes we've lived these fragmented. We've had a vision of the Christian life that is often fragmented.

Either the only path forward is political, is sort of political maneuvering, or the only path forward is just. Is just care for the poor in this instance. Or the only path forward is catechesis.

And you realize the challenge lays out is really committing that Christian culture, especially at a local level, where people know each other, trust each other, love each other, are living the Christian life in community. And that, I think, is, is what has to happen, at least on some level, as we move into, what is this postmodern, you know, post Christian World.

We actually call that missio. Holistic. That's what we call it. That's our little term for it.

I like it.

You have to have the entirety of one's life drawing on Chris Wright's work, the mission of God and the hermeneutic. That is. It's.

It's all moving to something where it's hinging on the biblical story, drawing on less significant, which you actually do, rooting it in the second century that they noted that they were a part of a greater story and they played a role in it. And then taking in Kevin Van Hooser's. It's a.

It's a performance script on the stage of the world to show how we play our part in the midst of a society and how we play it out. But that also is a political theology that's got that in there. It's a public theology. How do we engage? Because the gospel is a political statement.

It is. Has to be lived out publicly, not privately. Does have to take in our vocation.

You even reference Joseph Pieper, which we're talking about leisure, which is something that we have not talked about very often within evangelicalism. How does our leisure point at the glory of God? God does allow that. And because we are, as Kelly Capoc has said, we are only human.

And we have to live within the limits as being human because we are trying to show the rehumanization of a society that's seeking to have us to live this certain kind of defragmented, deformed, idolatrous life that Christianity actually gives as a counter formation to all that. Sorry, you're getting me so hyped up right now. I am so hyped up.

Well, you know, these impulses are great because like, if you read, for example, if you read Irenaeus's demonstration of apostolic preaching, one of the earliest catechetical manuals that we have. The whole. The whole thing is like the story of salvation in. You know, in the.

In the mid 20th century, there was something called the biblical theology movement. Biblical theology, Chris Wright. It's kind of evolved and taken on. But in the mid 20th century, there are several that are pointing back to.

Irenaeus is like the father of biblical theology because. Because he basically frames the story. Well, that's the thing.

He's framing the Christian meta narrative over and against the other options that are embedded in the culture. Yeah, part of the Christian catechesis is saying, look, you're living a different story. You know, we're all embedded in this world.

They're Living one story that has one telos. The Christian story has a different telos. And you are performing. And so the catechesis was coming to understand this is this.

You find the same thing in Augustine's City of God, the second half of the City of God, where Augustine walks through the history of salvation and is saying, look, you people, that, you know, he's writing it in light of Rome burning down because, you know, they're going, well, let's just go back to the pagan gods. And Augustine reminds them of the story of salvation. And that same impulse, I think, is coming back today and needs to come back today.

You're living a different story.

Well, it's fascinating you said that because I just got this one, the Great Story and the Great Commission, and it's Chris Wright's new book that's out and he's writing on that, but Mike Goheen has written on that, the Divine Drama of Redemption. I think through we teach this class, or we're getting ready to teach this class called the Story of God.

I said, Zack Snyder filmed the movie and then his daughter died in post production and so he had to pull out. And they brought in, I can't remember his. It's one of the big directors. They bring him into Joss Whedon. That's who it was.

They bring it in to finish it. So you watch the movie. It's 121 minutes long, but the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The characters aren't very developed.

You don't understand certain characters. You don't understand where it's going per se. But you get a superhero story, you still get that part of it, right?

It's in black and white. But it's amazing because now you start to see the fullness of the story that was condensed in the first one that was missed.

And I think that's what we got going on in the church today. We've got this idea of we still get the superhero idea kind of in that two gospel idea.

Like Jesus came to save us from our sins and offers us eternal life and forgiveness and purpose and things like that. Yeah, that's great. We still get the story.

But when you start bringing in the full story of God, you start to understand the prophets, you start to understand man, your mind is blown because you start seeing your participation in it.

Yeah, absolutely. If you look at, like, you find this already in Acts, like Stephen. Stephen's sermon in Acts 7 is the story of salvation history up to that point.

Even I mentioned Paul on Mars Hill, that he tells kind of a narrative. I've often used Hebrews 11, the story of salvation culminating in Christ.

And then if you get into the end of Hebrews 12, it culminates in the coming kingdom of God. He talks about that kingdom that cannot be shaken from Haggai. And like, you start to see, oh, the Scriptures are portraying this narrative.

The early church is seeing themselves living this narrative.

And yeah, when you start to see kind of how the salvation is not merely maybe the simplistic form we give it, but it takes on this beautiful totality that is something that's every nation, tribe and tongue. And there's a beauty of it that is fascinating. I taught in seminary a couple times.

I've taught classes called the Narrative and Thematic Structure of the Bible. And I had the same experience with a lot of my students that had grown up in church. You know, God has a wonderful plan for your life.

You'd hear these simple gospel presentations. We're all true.

Then you step back and you're like, oh, man, God is doing something amazing and capturing every nation, tribe and tongue in ways that are incredible.

This is another element as you bring that up.

I mean, across in some ways, faith perspectives, ethnic perspectives, and then how it takes root in a certain individual and culture, which I think becomes extremely important for many of us simply because we've only engaged people, for the most part, are like us. And as Craig Bartholomew mentions in a lot of his works, the greatest challenge is not always secularization, although that's one.

But even a religion, a world religion like Islam, which we have to learn to address and as partly in engaging other faiths, helps you to see the contours of your own and where the shortfalls in your theological approach or education have been, that they're there. Okay, Biblically they're there. The story is there.

But how do we help people see in the middle of all of the stuff in which they're trying to engage, the need to be able to reach out to someone who is very different from them. They might look like them, may not look like them. I mean, they could be of the same ethnicity, but different socioeconomically.

They could be the same socioeconomically, but different ethnically, different worldviews. And today, with the proliferation of our digital life, you can get into whatever subgroup you want to get into.

How do we find that common ground and the need to indigenize was the term that you borrowed from Walls? I would like to say the affirmation and the challenge, you know, the antithesis, little drawing, a little Kuiper there. What's the bridge in?

And what's the way the Gospel challenges it? But how do we go about doing that in a world that, number one, is open? They have a framework. Some do. But, yeah, let's start with there.

In a world that is at least open, but yet we don't have necessarily a common language to bridge?

Yeah, I use that Wall, his history, Missiology, and let me back up and say I'm coming at this from my work in patristics and early church, and you do that work.

And what I love is I get into the missiological literature, and I realize so much of the good work happening in that literature is now helping me to make sense of what's happening. So I had to get up to speed. I've read Andrew Walls. I've heard Andrew Walls speak. But when I read that history of missiology, I then compared it.

Vince Bantu also wrote a work in which he cites Walls, and that's. He uses the language cultural sanctification, which is. Which is one kind of connection or link point with that, the title of the book.

But when I'm describing cultural sanctification, I'm using Wall's categories of. Of simultaneous indigenizing and pilgrim. Indigenizing and pilgrim.

So he's talking about every time Christianity takes root in a culture, it's oscillating between those things as it takes on the forms and features of the culture.

It's indigenizing, drawing on the forms and features of the culture, but then always maintaining a distinction and a uniqueness that is never fully enmeshed in the culture, and that those kinds of things have waxed and waned as Christianity has taken root in a whole variety of cultures.

And so that's why Walls was so helpful for me to Start to make sense of that, because that's what I was seeing happening in the second and third century. And this gets back to your question, I think, gets back to why catechesis is so important.

Because once you form those first tier things, those first principle things, what is Christian orthodoxy? What is liturgy? That's why I use the language of the rule of faith. These are early creedal confessions.

This is what you confess at baptism, and this is what you confess as you become a member of the people of God and in the family of God. So once we start to get those first principle things. Yeah, we start to then take up shop in a.

In a culture, and we can start to evaluate and navigate the virtues and the vices of a culture, of the institutions there, as we see the way, they either help to proclaim or they latch up with what the Gospel proclaims. We use those. Those forms and features to explain the Christian gospel. So that's how I think.

This is why catechesis of formation is so, so important, because it forms those first principle things that then when we embed ourselves in the culture, we can have conversations.

I think even some of our conversations are about pop culture or some good illustrations of this where we can say, we can sift the wheat and the tares, and we can start to see. I'll give you an example of the way this happened.

The early church, they would often read the philosophers, they would read Platonism, they would read Stoicism, and they would say, look here. Here are the weaknesses, and this is the telos of the worldview that you have. Let me show you a better path.

But that knowing some of that allows that kind of discourse, missiological discourse, to go on. So those are some of the things that I see happening in early church and today, too.

Well, Keller, I think, mentioned that too. He said, you earned social capital by being able to explain someone's position to them in a way that they themselves agree with.

Yep.

And then they earn listening. And one of the things that we talk about in our. In our approach that we're hopefully going public with very soon. But we talk about the earned right.

And in our culture today, where words are many, you have to really earn the right to be heard. Now, how do you earn the right to be heard? I mean, you can say whatever, but to really make a lasting impact, you have to earn that right.

You can't just be a talking head in many respect. What I see is what I call Christian tabloids. You have to earn the right. Now, how do you do that? You listen, you serve, sacrifice, and you suffer.

And if you can do that, and that's why we picked Apollos as one of our namesakes, is because here's a guy that gets converted after. I mean, we're assuming, according to Acts 18, because he starts preaching about the baptism of Jesus by John.

That's how he's converted in some way, and he starts preaching on that. And then he preaches someplace when Aquila and Priscilla hear him and they're like, this guy's awesome, but he doesn't know anything.

And it pulled him aside to explain the way of God more accurately.

And he listened.

That's where it's like, we want to have that type of posture. We recognize that we have our own conceptualizations, our own convictions that we believe are true, our own confession.

But I love what Tim Keller once said when he put himself in the room in the video series that came out from the Reason for God. He put himself with all these atheists and someone said, could I convince you that Christianity is not true?

And he said, I mean, that's like, if he says yes, all the Christians are going to freak out and they're going to be like, wait a minute, how can you do this? And then if he says no, then they're saying, well, what kind of conversation we're going to be able to have? And then I love what he does.

He says, could you intellectually convince me that Christianity is not true? You're a group of very smart people.

Yes, you intellectually could, but there's an experiential part of me, and that part's going to have a very hard time being convinced. And I'm like, you know, in my head I'm going, that's a Jesus answer. You know, that's a Jesus answer.

But I think it's very true is that we have to be able to establish a dialogue, a relational dialogue. And that means listening, not just speaking.

And I think one of the reasons that our culture is having such a very difficult time with Christianity is they do like the benefits. And yes, there are going to be oppositions that are to it, because, you know, the world, as Jesus said, the world hated me, it's going to hate you.

Okay, we know the world's going to hate us. However does it hate us for being actually a follower of Christ? Or does it hate us because we have taken a posture that is deaf to their actual need?

Yep.

And that's the question.

Yeah, I mean, I. As you were speaking about that experiential piece, it just reminds me a couple stories in the book.

I don't quite bring this out, but this conversation has forced me to think about it in that way. The Keller illustration too.

Like, for example, in the Blandina narrative where she's getting martyred, or in the Polycarp narrative where he's getting martyred.

At several points in the text, the text points out because of their piety or because of their devotion or because of their resilience or fortitude or commitment. Even the Romans become softened and become persuaded.

It's like Polycarp was sitting there praying and they're trying to get him back to the, you know, the amphitheater. And they're like trying to convince him, you know, because they feel so guilty.

Because you're such a good guy. You're such a good guy, such a.

Good dude, you know, Or Blandina. Or Blandina, you know, you know, they say, you know, they couldn't apply any more tortures to her and they're just amazed at her resilience.

Go back for a second. Because most people don't know who Blandina is. They might be familiar with Polycarp.

Tell that story just really quick because it's a very gripping story.

It is. You know, I encourage you to go online. You can download. It's again, another early martyrdom account.

It's called the Martyrs of Leon and Vieja, which were. Which were martyrs in around 176, 177 AD in what is modern day Lyon.

I've actually been to the amphitheater in Lyon, France where these martyrdoms took place. And the account is of the. Of members of the whole community who are martyred. Multiple people get martyred, including the bishop there.

But the story culminates and ends with Blandina. And so she is the last one alive. She's the last one martyred. The text use a beautiful. She is like a noble mother, you know, who.

Who is there demonstrating her faith. And you know, the community was. The church was concerned that she might capitulate. Others capitulated, but she is. She is used as an example.

Eusebius, the 4th century church father, who writes the kind of the first church history. He records this, which is how we got. You can actually read the account in. In Eusebius's church history in the fourth century.

That takes place in the second century. And it is, it's a staggering story. That's why I end in the last chapter on hope.

I use her because the text actually opens with that great Pauline passage. The sufferings of the present moment are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is, that is to come.

And then she becomes kind of an example, an illustration.

And the community is, is stirred on to be faithful because she's willing through Christian fortitude and commitment to remain faithful to the, you know, the calling that's on her life. And so there's hope there.

Well, the fact that as it goes on, in her torture, she becomes more resolute. But the fact that the church was nervous because they didn't think she was strong enough.

Yeah, the text says that. And then, you know, you know, you just see sort of lived out. God uses the weak of the world to shame the wise.

And God uses the, you know, the broken to shame the strong. And God uses those who are suffering to, to shame the powerful. And it is just the living illustration.

The community was concerned and they, they say that and they talk about how much they admire. They, they really present her in ways that are admirable because of her resolution, kind of drawing that illustration of the weak.

Things are shaming the wise.

I don't know. Have you read Scott Sundquist book the Hope of History by any chance?

I haven't.

And he talks about hope being a uniquely Judeo Christian concept. And he said even in the language of Tamil, there was no word for hope, because it was.

And again, missiology, this is where to me, missiology is the key for the church moving forward. And it makes me sick to see so many schools pulling out.

Like Biola just closed the Cook School for Intercultural Studies because there's not enough enrollment, not enough students. And I know that's happening across the board.

However, I still think missiology is the key because it provides the tools of having to communicate cross culturally in a different cultural milieu or topography. That's where we're finding ourselves. It's, you know, who moved my church?

The culture has shifted and shifting before our eyes in the last 25 years to make this message known. But one of the things that he mentioned, he said in Tamil they looked at history cyclical.

It was always repeating itself, whereas Christianity and Judeo Christianity put it in a trajectory to a finished ideal, the consummation. And I don't think we can let go of that. I think we have to grip that because I do think people have an idea and wondering about hope.

I mean, Justin Brierly is the surprising resurgence of a belief in God, as he's talked about that. I know I was chatting with a woman who had done PhD studies in England. She had been at Cambridge and then at Aberdeen, if I remember right.

And she talked about how many professors were coming to Saving Faith in Jesus at Cambridge.

And you're seeing like an intellectual resurgence even within the west, because people are seeing the bankrupt nature of the secularized worldview because it doesn't have any ending, it doesn't have any. Any trajectory. And this is where I think that the second century provides that example for us.

As we continue to look historically and around the world, we're always mining it to see the cultural circumstances are similar or different. But I mean, I want to go back to something you said in the book.

You mentioned intellectual life, and you cite one of the friends of this show, which is Mark Noel. He's been on here a couple times, as well as David Bevington. And these are my people, my historical peeps.

And he says the thing about an evangelical and intellectual life is there's really not much one. Um, and I know people are like, well, wait a minute. I think, oh, it's. That's not what it's talking about. What do we mean by an intellectual life?

And how do we cultivate that in the midst of this world?

That's, it's a, you know, as I was trying to, to sift out, when you look at the sort of the panoramic view of all the texts that are being written in the early Christian world, they are engaging the philosophical tradition of the day. They're engaging the modern philosophies. So I mentioned in there, like a great book is Robert Wilkin, Christians as the Romans Saw Them.

It's a great book.

I want to read that book.

It mentions it in there. He walks through all the pagans and the scathing critiques of the pagans. I mean, it's, it's funny. Kelsis, for example, Kelp.

Kels is a True Word is one of the earliest that I mentioned. And in Origin, the Church Father actually takes Kelsis work on True word many years, 70 years or so after Celsus is dead.

It's clear this Text has become an important kind of manual for responding to Christians, this sort of intellectual argument. But you read Kelsis on True Word, and it's.

It's really hilarious because the Christians are like, they're meeting people in the street and they're sharing the gospel. They're creating kind of backyard Bible clubs. These sort of like, you know, they're meeting people, they're engaged, they're embedded in the.

And the intellectuals, the pagan intellectuals, the rhetoricians, the philosophers and whatnot are just mocking them and just laughing at them and think they're stupid and think they're ignorant. And, you know, Celsus has a great line where he says, the only thing that's true comes through the Greek mind.

And so I've said, as I've talked about this book, I said, you know, what the Romans are asking you to do is put your. All your faith, your hope, your trust in the Greek mind. Like, you know, that's what you're asked to do.

You asked to place your entire life in the rational inquiry of a Greek mind. Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to think that?

My entire life now, all my existence is predicated upon the mind of what a philosopher comes up with. And, you know, the church is engaging that. And the church is engaging it, as you said, with hope.

And that's why I think that theological virtue threads, threads so much of their interchanges. As I talk about hope, I talk about it eschatologically. Yeah, we're looking forward to that kingdom that is to come. But hope guides how you live now.

It gives you confidence and fortitude. And look, I know Christ is going to come again in glory, judge the living and the dead and establish a kingdom that has no end.

That is going to happen.

And so it gives someone like Justin in, in his first apology, he's talking about the kingdom of God and he's writing to the emperor and he says, when you hear us mention kingdom, you think that it's like an earthly kingdom. Like, you think it's like the Roman Empire.

You don't understand that we're talking about a spiritual kingdom that is to come in which Jesus Christ is our king. And so you can already see how the Roman mindset is an eminent frame, to use kind of Charles Taylor's word. It's an eminent focus.

It's all about here and now. It's all about building the glory of Rome.

The Christians come along and they're like, well, you know, we're going to live faithfully and we trust that just as Christ said in Acts 1, just as the angel said to the apostles, as you have seen him go, you will see him come again. We believe that and we live our lives in light of that truth.

So come what may, we are going to be faithful and committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the proclamation of the Good News.

And so that kind of intellectual discourse is something that had to go on as they were responding to some of those intellectuals, but that should never be separated from kind of the embedded public life. That's the next chapter. I don't want to pit those against each other, but see them as complementary approaches.

We've got to address the intellectuals, but we've got to address the everyday person that we meet on the streets that are in our jobs. So those things kind of coincide together in the early Christian. I see in early Christian apologetics.

Well, I think you also see that embedded within creation itself, with the idea of vocation, where you're to work for the, you know, for the betterment, flourishing of society. And I, and I know I argued with the president of the school that you teach at.

We're talking about what does it mean to flourish as a society in the midst of this world and how is Christianity essential or helpful in that?

Because as I alluded to, and I think I mentioned this in the beginning of our pre show walkthrough being in Charlottesville with all these different intellectuals, there were some that were there that just weren't Christians at all.

And when I asked them why they were there, they said, because I do believe that Christianity is essential for a liberal democracy in order to function, because it does guarantee a form of religious freedom and it does guarantee a form of pluralism in that it enables people to flourish and practice because it wants people to come to the saving knowledge of Jesus. And again, there's different kinds of pluralism there and how that works.

Now, I know some people might bristle at that and they'd say, well, there's other governments that don't have any Christianity at all. I understand that because we're all borrowing from Greek and Rome.

But in order to have a moral foundation, you have to be able to call something good and something bad, if not becomes, you know, an aristocracy or it becomes a dictatorship or something else as we get into the aspects of democracy. But still before you even get into that part of it, because it is good for the flourishing of society.

And that's what the early Christian apologists were arguing for. But yet it had to be embedded within the local community and that identity had to be forged within the local community. And this is what I found.

We've had Mike Goheen on the show and Mike is taking a lot of Leslie Newbegin as well as some of Kuyper's work. And he's written about the missionary identity and developing a missionary ecclesiology.

And returning to that rather than a managerial or a kind of a, I don't want to say celebrity idea of ecclesiology, that attractive nature, that seeker sensitive idea. But what does a missionary ecclesiology look like? How do we develop that in the midst of this world?

And they had that very much in the second century in a way that I think we would have find to be very startling today.

You talk about that in the book because in order when people would come to faith in Jesus, they were catechumens, they had to go through a period of evaluation. We don't do that anymore, or very few of us do.

What was this period of evaluation before they could ever be baptized and brought into the greater community?

Yeah, this is a good question.

I actually, and we talked about this in kind of in the pre show too was one of the things that sort of motivated me along these lines is some work, some time I spent among missionaries when I was actually working. You know, I come at this as an academic. I've spent all my life, sort of at least my early years in the academy.

And then I started hanging out with missionaries. I was working with an organization that was sending missionaries overseas to kind of unreached people groups.

And I just sat around and looked at the joy on their face, just the sheer joy of the mission that lays before God's calling upon their life, taking their families with them, discipling their families, preparing them. And, and I even talk about missiology in the book.

And when I talk about those are some of the people I have in mind, people I've trained at seminary, people that I've worked with that are going overseas. And I see that kind of joy, that missiological joy that is, is just stirring. And I, and I love it. But I want to go back to as leading into that.

You know, a really interesting one other book, I mentioned it in the book by Robert Wilken is Liberty of God in All Things. In the early church you have sort of the first defenses of a religious liberty.

So you have Tertullian in his apology, he's speaking to a Roman audience and he says, why would you want to create irreligion by forcing us to worship against our conscience? And he starts to Use that religious liberty language.

In other words, Tertullian is appealing to kind of a natural law, or appealing to him saying, do you want hypocrites as citizens? Do you want us to be hypocrites? Do you want us to deny what. What we believe?

Because in order for us to pinch insensitis or worship gods, we have to deny what we believe.

So you see this early appeal embedded within Christianity, this motivation and for a religious freedom or religious liberty, a pluralism, a willingness to work alongside people not like you, but a firm commitment in who you are and in what you believe. And so you can already see Tertullian is not the only one.

I think a lot of the apologists of the second century are kind of, look, hey, all we want right now is you to allow us to embed ourselves. And we trust that if we embed ourselves, you're going to see the beauty of the gospel in our community.

Justin says these things along these lines, the second century apologist, we're your best citizens. We're the good people. Stop killing us. You know, we're the good people. You get rid of us, you get rid of the most virtuous people that are around.

And it's just, it's. It's like staggering to read it and think about today. Then again, I think, and I love.

I have used Mike Goheen's work in class before, especially the story of God or the story of scripture that he wrote and those kinds of texts. I think the work Mike's done in missiology that I've read is spot on. And again, they had to answer the final question.

They had a period of catechesis that was longer. One text mentions three years before baptism. I would not advocate showing up with your pastor and saying, hey, pastor, I got a great idea.

Three years of discipleship before baptism. I say that I was to say that to my students in class. Don't voice that.

But the point being is this longer season of preparation, of discipleship, of catechesis, that demonstrates a membership in the church that comes with both obligations and blessings and a unity that is formed through that. I think those are the impulses we see in early Christianity. I think we see it in missiology, I think is important for today.

Yeah, well, what are. I mean, there's so much stuff that we can go through. And I do heavily recommend the book. First of all, I want to know, Stephen O. Presley, what's the.

Oh, the O is Orin, after my grandfather who was an American Baptist pastor in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Orin. Wow.

Orin Presley.

You know, it's funny, we've had Alan Noble on and his first name is O. Alan Noble. It's O. That's the first name. Alan is his middle name. So I'm always like, O. I've never had anyone that actually has like, the actual name.

I'm like, what's O? And he's like, it's Orville. And I'm like, well, thus you have the abbreviation. This is such an important work.

I am going to recommend this to a lot of our audience. I mean, we do read a lot of books on here.

I think this is a very important one because I think you're attempting to do what we're also attempting to do. We're all grasping for language. You and I talked about this at the beginning of it.

We're all grasping for language to articulate how to proceed in this cultural moment. What's the narrative? What's the story that we hang on that we go about this because it is different.

We can't keep doing the way that we have been doing it because we're seeing people just continue to leave now. There's always a purification, there's always an ebb and flow.

The church is going to continue in some way, shape or form, and we're grateful for that because the message of Jesus is going to go forth.

But we're not necessarily the institutions as you've already talked about, and the groups that we're with aren't guaranteed to be a part of that necessarily. And drawing on Philip Jenkins work, the Lost History of Christianity, we know of places that were once bastions of Christian faith.

Syria, Lebanon, Iraq. I mean, these were Turkey bastions. They were just citadels of Christian faith that now in some ways are dry wastelands.

Even in New England, where we had in America the Great Awakenings. And yes, there's new movements that are happening. We praise God for that.

But they have now such a small amount of evangelicals, and we're actually starting to see this across the Midwest and even into the Bible Belt, where cultural Christianity is still there.

And I think that it's been redoubled, if you will, with the Great Migration people looking for a conservative environment with Judeo Christian principles. So that's been kind of buttressed too.

But that won't last as we go on culturally without another framework or an apologetic in which we are to approach an unbelieving world. And you did talk a little bit about this, we can withdraw for maybe a period of time trying to follow the Benedictine idea.

But overall, for many of us, we can't do that. We have to be engaged. Our world is too interconnected to be able to do so.

So while I appreciate Rod Dreiser's book and Live not by Lies and even the Benedict option, I do wonder how viable that is. I know some are trying, and God bless you as you go, but we do still need to be engaged.

Daniel, I mean, and Daniel couldn't leave, and he's a great example, I think, in this cultural moment.

But the question that I have is we do finish up our conversation here, and I want to have you back because this is just such a delightful conversation and so many overlaps of what we're trying to accomplish. What is a water bottle that we can give our people to, to a spiritual truth that they can hold on to and just nourish them?

This week, the water bottle, I would emphasize, is hope. It's how I end the book. And when we think about hope, I mean the theological virtue of hope.

And I think that virtue threaded every word that they, or at least tried to thread every word that they say. They live their lives as if God, as if it's true that Christ rules and reigns.

Right now, it may not look like it, but the early church walked in hope.

And that hope gave them fortitude and confidence and love, allowed them to, in the midst of the twists and turns and ups and downs and ins and outs and hot spots and cold spots, to remain faithful to Christ when the world was broken.

And so I think the theological virtue of hope, that one day Christ will come again in glory, judge the living and the dead and establish a kingdom that will have no end. And right now, Christ reigns. Christ reigns. And Christ will come again, sustains them. And I pray it can sustain us, too.

Amen. And amen. People can follow you. They can get the book wherever books are sold. It's produced by Eerdman's. We have the gift as a. As a.

As a gift from them to be able to read the book. I would recommend those that get out to see it. And for whoever it was that recommended the book online, our YouTube channel. Thank you.

We do take your recommendations seriously. When you make comments on our page or this video, we listen to you. And so we want to give you the best to fulfill your mission wherever you are.

And I believe this will be a help in that. Stephen, thank you for being a guest on Apollo's Water.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. What a great conversation.

Hope. It's so easy to give up hope when we look at the world around us today.

For so many, faith in our institutions has been shattered, often with good reason. It doesn't matter if those institutions are civic or governmental, or even the church itself.

We are tempted to retreat into ourselves, to insulate and isolate. Faith becomes more and more privatized and other voices can and do fill the void. It's no wonder the culture so opposes many aspects of our faith.

It's no wonder that we find the idolatries of the broader culture seeping into our own lives and to our churches. But there is hope. For all their mistakes and missteps. The second century church lived their hope for them.

It wasn't just wishful thinking or pie in the sky ideals. It was a real hope, a theological virtue. One that is convinced that Christ rules and reigns right now, even when it doesn't look like it.

This hope permeated the lives of the second century church. And that was crucial because their culture was even more opposed to them than ours.

Our culture in many ways lives off the virtues of its Christian past.

Stephen mentioned Tom Holland's excellent book Dominion, in which he, an atheist, shows that many of the virtues we cherish today come directly from Christianity.

The problem is that we have divorced.

Those virtues from their source. So it's no wonder that tolerance and compassion get turned on their head.

It's no wonder that freedom becomes I get to do whatever I want and no one can tell me what to do. Christian hope says that there's a better way.

A way that looks forward to the future and lives in the here and now in such a way that our neighbors, co workers and the people that we rub shoulders with in our day to day can't help but take notice of it because it's better. However, we can't do this alone. This isn't a kind of pick yourself up by your bootstraps theology.

No, we have to be transformed by Christ and then further formed by the content of our faith. And we have to live it out together as the body of Christ. This great community that God brings us into, that's what we're called to.

As Stephen said, the second century church was faithful to Christ when the world was broken. And the question that we have to ask ourselves is, are we? We are working on some resources to help tell the better story that Stephen mentioned.

To be formed in the way of Christ, so that as we go about our lives, we will be seen differently. Not as judgmental or holding our noses at those around us, but showing them a better way of living, just like Jesus did.

Now we're not going to be perfect, that's okay. But God is continually transforming us to look more and more like Him.

And in order for us to be able to create reality resources like this, we need your help now more than ever. It's summertime and if you don't know anything about ministries such as ours, this is when giving drops off across the board.

But we need your support so we can concentrate our efforts on creating these resources so that you can live Christ's mission where you are. We invite you to join us today by simply clicking the link in your show notes.

And we need to raise another 8, $8,000 each month to be able to accomplish this. Now any amount helps. Whether it's becoming one of our monthly watering partners or giving a one time gift.

Know that your gift is enabling men and women leaders like you to be equipped to fulfill the mission of God where they are for such a time as this. We can't do this with without you. Thank you in advance for your support. I want to thank our Apollos watered team for helping us to water the world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo is watered. Stay watered everybody.