The gospel is central to Christianity. Protestants and Roman Catholics have been reflecting on and debating the gospel’s content for centuries. However, Matthew Bates argues that most of Western Christianity to date—Protestant and Roman Catholic—has completely misunderstood the gospel.
In Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved, Bates, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, claims that the traditional Protestant view of justification by faith alone and the traditional Roman Catholic view of justification by imparted righteousness, distributed through the Roman sacramental system, are thoroughly mistaken understandings of salvation. He attempts to set everyone straight.
Bates’s counterproposal is what he calls the “king Jesus model” or “gospel allegiance model.” In this paradigm, he argues salvation is by faith but redefines faith as allegiance to Jesus, which is primarily about our commitment to Christ as well as social and political action. Although belief must play some role in Bates’s articulation of faith, the emphasis is squarely on our works of allegiance to Christ as the way to receive gospel benefits. Bates’s gospel and his arguments for it have several significant flaws.
Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved
Matthew Bates
Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved
Matthew Bates
God has provided salvation, but when does it begin? What is required of us? Can we lose it? These and other disputed questions have divided Christians for centuries. Bates offers a new model, encouraging Protestants and Catholics toward long-term unity. But his proposal contains strong medicine: it doesn’t sugarcoat current Protestant and Catholic errors but diagnoses with precision for the future health of the church.
Recycled Revisionism
Throughout this work, Bates says the primary reason someone would reject his new articulation of the gospel is out of blind commitment to prior confessional traditions. He asserts, “All too often denominational leaders are more committed to actions and social politics that will reinforce their brand than they are to the truth” (2). In contrast, Bates promotes himself as “striving toward a truth-based unity for the future of the church” (2). He claims that his “gospel-allegiance model seeks to expose the truth about how salvation happens according to Scripture and early Christian history” (3).
The trouble is that Bates doesn’t escape his own prior theological commitments. As the endnotes show, he relies prominently on a certain strand of revisionist New Testament scholarship. At least since E. P. Sanders, there has been a revisionist trend among New Testament scholars such as James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright, David deSilva, John Barclay, and Scot McKnight to claim new insight that freshly demonstrates how the church has been seriously mistaken. Dismissing traditional theological arguments is nothing new within New Testament Studies. Yet dismissal of historical theology became much more acceptable during the controversy over the New Perspective on Paul over a decade ago, when N. T. Wright implied his work is the theological equivalent of a heliocentric model supposedly enlightening John Piper’s soteriological geocentrism.
Bates hasn’t locked himself into any formal churchly confessional tradition. He argues that “the creeds are not a good stand-alone teaching tool about the gospel without an intervening reframing” (54). Presumably his reframing. Nevertheless, he embraces the arguments of a particular New Testament guild as the new standard of orthodoxy. This is most obvious in his chapter about justification in Galatians, where he takes the New Perspective on Paul interpretation of Galatians for granted. So, when confessional Protestants feel bruised by Bates’s accusations that they are neglecting exegesis for tradition, we need to see that he succumbs to the same problem of precommitments that he views as a fatal flaw in others.
Hiding the History
Bates presents himself as offering fresh theological structures to explain the gospel and how to receive its benefits. However, he regurgitates historically held ideas without owning them as such. According to Bates, the biblical teaching about election and justification reflects corporate rather than individual categories. He specifically labels this statement as erroneous: “The gospel includes the personal receipt of justification by faith” (56, emphasis original).
Bates presents himself as offering fresh theological structures to explain the gospel and how to receive its benefits.
Instead, he argues that God has predestined a group, namely those who choose to swear and practice allegiance to Jesus Christ as King, and has granted justification to that group. As he summarizes, “There is no valid scriptural basis for claiming that individual salvation truly begins with God’s predestining election of certain individuals before the foundation of the world rather than when a person responds to the King Jesus gospel with loyalty” (156). Individuals by their unbound free will must choose to become part of that group elected to receive salvation.
This structure of election (perhaps uniquely applied also to justification) reflects a classic Arminian argument. It isn’t new, though it is selective. He follows some, but not all, historical Arminian arguments in claiming that faith itself (redefined as personal allegiance) is credited to us for the righteousness of justification, not Christ’s active and passive obedience imputed to us.
I’m not so much concerned that Bates is wrong by arguing Arminian positions (though I think he is) but that he’s rearticulating historically Arminian theological structures while claiming to argue for fresh, strictly exegetical positions that supposedly transcend any historical Protestant or Roman Catholic bounds. Bates seems either not to know the relevant historical theology or to assume his readers are unfamiliar with the history of these debates. I fear that a little of both is true.
Anti-Augustinianism
Yet Bates diverges from the entire Western Christian tradition in its Protestant and Catholic understandings by positioning himself as consciously anti-Augustinian. For example, he affirmingly summarizes Justin Martyr as he rejects the idea “that we have inherited a sin nature from our parents that leaves us in total bondage” (132, emphasis original). Thus he discards the doctrine of original sin.
Against Augustine, Bates also minimizes the discussion of grace at the beginning of or throughout the Christian life. He explicitly rejects the idea that “God must act alone in giving pre-faith assistance via regeneration” (169). According to Bates, “One opts to undergo baptism to be reborn because she or he has seen a more enlightened way and wants forgiveness and a new lifestyle. Regeneration or rebirth is what happens after we have seen enough of the light that we choose to believe, repent, and be baptized while expressing fidelity” (131, emphasis original).
Bates’s gospel amounts to us working our way into heaven, tinged with the prospect of forgiveness. He announces,
The gospel is not individualized justification by faith. Rather, the gospel is the power of God for salvation, because it announces the reign of Jesus as king. . . . He is the justified one who lives by allegiance so that we can be justified by allegiance too, and in so doing tap into his resurrection life. (47)
Notably, in Bates’s gospel, we receive justification by performing the same actions as Christ, stressing Christ as exemplar rather than Savior. If faith is justifying for Christ and for us in the same way, Bates’s model of salvation diminishes—if not displaces—Christ’s role as the mediator who saves his people.
At times, Bates invokes part of the Roman Catholic structure of justification, saying, “Allegiance-based good works performed with the assistance of the Spirit are part of the basis of our final justification” (233). At other times, Bates goes further than Rome in asserting that allegiance “is the sole instrument of justification” (235). Still, he rejects Rome’s sacramental structure as a way to provide grace and emphatically focuses on our works.
Bates’s gospel amounts to us working our way into heaven, tinged with the prospect of forgiveness.
Now, I have no sympathy for the Roman sacramental structure. However, I can appreciate that their sacramentalism at least intends to provide the grace that enables those works needed for final justification. In contrast, Bates seems not to have a clear outline for how grace comes to sinners. He also seems to reject the idea that one can even know which good works that we need to do for final salvation. Accordingly, he claims we cannot develop a list of universally binding commands that God expects of us.
Beyond the Salvation Wars is theologically presumptive and often dismissive. Bates’s goal is to unite Protestants and Roman Catholics around premises of salvation. Based on his work, there’s perhaps one question we can all ask in agreement: Can Bates’s paradigm for salvation even be considered a gospel at all?
