In the West, the term "God" has become virtually a placeholder, a moniker kept pristinely vacant. Even Christians have been known to treat the scriptures as butterflies to pin, probe and prod, comb and codify, until some "value" can be extracted. For the Church Fathers, things worked differently. They came to scripture armed with convictions about God, which in turn provided the framework and habitat in which they incubated their biblical theology and cultivated a genuinely ecclesial culture.
What might it mean to retrieve patristic culture-craft — the formation of communal life that flowed from their inhabiting the Bible — in the midst of contemporary secular society?Join Sam Fornecker for a second conversation with Stephen Presley, Senior Fellow for Religion and Public Life at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy and associate professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on his recent book, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Early Church (Baker Academic, 2025), on how the Church can learn from our ancient grandparents the liturgical, sacramental, and storied habit of scriptural engagement necessary to renew the Church in her vocation of "culture-craft" today.
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