Tag: Allegiance

Book Plunge: Beyond the Salvation Wars Chapter 4 Part 2

How does Bates see faith? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Faith is one of the most misunderstood words in Christianity. A lot of atheists see it as belief without evidence, and unfortunately, a lot of Christians seem to agree with them. This hasn’t done the discussion any favors. I have written my own article on the meaning of faith here.

Bates meanwhile says:

I contend that Protestant-Catholic wrangling has been plagued by overly restrictive understandings of “faith.” How faith is used today or how related terms were used at the time of Protestant-Catholic split in the sixteenth century may or may not correspond to the Greek word pistis. What matters is the meaning of the ancient word pistis.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 1442-1445). Kindle Edition.

This is something we should all consider. We could be taking a first-century concept debated in 16th century thought and applying it with 21st century understandings. No wonder we’re so confused! Writing that sentence was even confusing!

The problem Bates sees is not the content of the gospel was disagreed with. In Galatians, you do not see Paul arguing for the resurrection of Jesus. You do not see him arguing for the deity of Christ. What you see him arguing about is more on how people live in light of those realities.

Peter’s behavior wasn’t moving toward or in alignment with the truth of the gospel. This suggests not a compromise in the gospel’s content but a compromise of the gospel’s lived effect, actualized benefits, or practical results. Peter had not compromised the gospel’s raw content but its theological truthfulness as this pertained to its behavioral outworking. In Galatians 2: 14 Paul uses “the gospel” in a part-for-whole fashion to refer to behavior that results from the gospel’s truth that affects the wider community.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 1532-1537). Kindle Edition.

Let’s acknowledge also that to some extent, we all struggle with this. We all claim the kingship of Jesus, and many times we live as if He is not the king. We live like we are the ones that have to maintain control in our lives. I am not at all endorsing frivolous living, but I am saying we should trust that the king cares deeply for His subjects.

So what this means is that the Galatians were living as if allegiance to Jesus was insufficient for salvation. Not only do you have to swear allegiance to Jesus, you have to undergo circumcision and follow the Old Testament Law. Paul is writing to tell them that the Law was always insufficient for salvation in itself. It was always by grace through faith. If the Law was sufficient, there would be no need for Jesus. The only reason you need to keep the Law for salvation then is if you believe the sacrifice of Jesus and swearing allegiance to Him is insufficient for salvation.

While there could have been parallels to some events in the time of the Reformation, we should not read Galatians as if it was written to deal with a 16th-century question. It is a 1st-century text for a 1st-century question. Of course, it has relevance for us today, but we must see what the relevance was for them first and then apply it today.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Beyond The Salvation Wars Chapter 2 Part 2

What is the gospel? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Okay. So if we’re going to critique Catholicism and Protestantism, we need to be sure we’re on the same page. So what is the gospel? Bates lists ten parts of the gospel.

The gospel is that Jesus the king

1. preexisted as God the Son,

2. was sent by the Father as promised,

3. took on human flesh in fulfillment of God’s promises to David,

4. died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,

5. was buried,

6. was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,

7. appeared to many witnesses,

8. is enthroned at the right hand of God as the ruling Christ,

9. has sent the Holy Spirit to his people to effect his rule

10. will come again as final judge to rule.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 734-747). Kindle Edition.

Some people will look over this thinking something seems to be missing that we normally speak of.

There is nothing here about justification or forgiveness in any way. Does Bates not care about those? Of course, he does, but he says they are not in the gospel message itself. Those are truths that exist BECAUSE of the gospel message. Because the gospel is true, forgiveness is available. Because the gospel is true, you can be justified.

This would be the same for the news about the Caesars. Good news, a new Caesar is on the throne! That was enough. That was the news that was good. What he would do would be a result of the good news that he was on the throne. For some, it would be good news. For others who opposed him, not so much.

So how do you respond to a king? This gets us into what faith is. As one ignorant atheist I saw say today speaking about Christians:

They call their beliefs ‘faith’ because, well, there’s not one single shred of evidence. Not one. Otherwise it would be called FACT.

Of course, atheists say this without one single shred of evidence that this is what was meant in the biblical world and do not see the irony. Now they could go out and get a Lexicon and look up the word pistis and see what it means. Nah. That requires too much work.

So what does Bates say?

The royal context makes it highly probable that pistis, traditionally translated as “faith,” is better understood as fidelity, loyalty, or allegiance here. (And this is true for all the occurrences of pistis in Rom. 1: 1– 3: 26.) 16 That is, Paul is emphasizing not mental trust in Jesus’s ability to effect forgiveness, but rather external behavior—“ the obedience characterized by fidelity”: embodied, allegiant obedience to a king.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 820-823). Kindle Edition.

Which would entail if you are showing allegiance to King Jesus, that will include seeking forgiveness for what you have done. This will also then entail political action. It requires a changed life. Hence, the debate about faith vs. works becomes moot. If you are allegiant to Jesus as King, then good works WILL follow. Those works aren’t done so you will be allegiant, but because you are allegiant already.

We’ll continue on to chapter three next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Beyond the Salvation Wars Chapter 1

What is the battle going on? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I want to thank Dr. Matthew Bates for sending me a copy of his latest book in electronic format. He and I have had a good relationship since my podcasting days and I consider him a friend. When he has a new book coming out, he contacts me and several others and I always make sure to help him out.

Something I really like about Bates is how easy he is to read and also how needed he is. He writes about doctrines that the popular audience needs to hear and he also writes about them in a way that they can understand. He is an excellent scholar, but he speaks on the popular level. As one in PhD work myself now, it is one of my goals to make sure I never get so academically inclined that I leave the average person behind.

Anyway, his latest book comes out today is Beyond the Salvation Wars. In it, he talks about issues between Catholics and Protestants on the nature of the gospel and the doctrine of salvation. Much of what is said about Catholics could apply to Orthodox Christians, but for many of us in America at least, the former two groups are the most prominent. This is not a criticism. It’s just the way the situation is.

He starts off this first chapter taking us back 500 years in time to the killing of Ulrich Zwingli. This is something I suspect most Catholics today would look back on and not see as a good move. What is interesting for us today is how the two accounts we have of his death go.

The Catholic one talks about the praise given to God for delivering the wicked men into their hands so he could die at their hands. The Protestant one talks about how he looked to God alone and rejected the aid of a priest. It talks about how Zwingli was told to call on the Mother of God and the saints, but Zwingli rejects any help but Christ.

Today, we find all of this strange. I meet regularly with several Catholics on a Zoom call to discuss Aquinas. We get along fine. We know we disagree, and it’s cool. We would never think of excluding one another from salvation and especially never taking up arms and going to war against one another.

So why did they?

For them, this was all about salvation and these people were keeping people from salvation. Catholics and Protestants both thought the other side was doing that. In that case, some of them did think it was acceptable to stop people using violent force if necessary to ensure the eternal salvation of souls. We don’t agree today for the most part, but we can see that for them, it made sense.

As Bates says:

We nod our heads “yes” on Sunday

morning: Jesus is indeed worthy. But we have more pressing concerns: Can you believe what Khloé Kardashian just posted on Instagram? Can Patrick Mahomes orchestrate another comeback win? What’s on Netflix tonight? We declare our passion for the gospel but then wear out our couch cushions. Meanwhile, Catholics and Protestants of the sixteenth century were willing to die for a correct understanding of salvation.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 193-196). Kindle Edition.

And this is Protestants and Catholics both.

Bates then goes on to list reasons for hope in unity eventually and then says:

Protestants cannot responsibly say that Catholics believe an individual is justified by good works instead of God’s grace, for they certainly believe no such thing. Grace is required all along the way by both Catholics and Protestants. Grace, however, is configured differently by each.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 319-320). Kindle Edition.

What is good to see about this is a book of critique like this from a Protestant perspective, would likely list all the things the author thinks the Catholics get wrong. Bates does list those, but he lists the mistakes of those of us who are Protestants as well. He then lists one major problem seeing as a lot of debates hinge on justification and sanctification.

(“ faith/ fidelity”) to the king from the ground up. The individualized distinction between justification and sanctification within classic Protestantism is false. That is, the division between a person’s justification and sanctification has an insufficient scriptural warrant and obscures how Scripture actually describes the salvation process.

Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 432-434). Kindle Edition.

No. He won’t leave that hanging. He will defend it throughout the book. Bates wants us to be clear on what the gospel is and why it matters. It is only when we know what we are talking about that we can reach unity.

Next time, we’ll look at the second chapter to see what he has to say about the gospel.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Salvation By Allegiance Alone

What do I think of Matthew Bates’s book published by Baker Academic? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Matthew Bates has written a book with a certainly interesting title. One can expect based on that that people on both sides will be tempted to go after him. (Cue James White having a twelve part series on his show about this.) That would be a shame if it happened because a lot that needs to be said is in this book.

Bates is not wanting to undermine grace, but he is wanting to get rid of a sort of system that is more centered on getting people to get saved instead of getting them to realize Jesus is their king, which would include salvation. We are at a point where we want to get people to sign on a proverbial dotted line and then lo and behold, our work is done. A church group will go out and witness in the streets and get one person to commit their life to Jesus, most likely to get his evangelists to shut up, come back to church shouting success, and that person will never ever darken the doors of a church. Discipleship is not a part of the process.

Bates starts with going after the term faith and that we really shouldn’t use it. I agree with him on this. Faith is a term that has been so misunderstood in our day and age that it leads to more problems. Bates looked at some bad definitions of faith. He wrote about Mormons who wanted someone to believe on faith based on the burning in the bosom. I would have liked to have seen in this section of bad usages of faith the fact that new atheist writers regularly describe faith falsely. People like Dawkins and Harris call it belief without evidence. Peter Boghossian called it pretending to know things you don’t know.

Another good one to look at would have been the Word of Faith movement. Bates looks at this some with saying some people think faith is positive thinking, but this is certainly that and going beyond in a more twisted way. This faith results in the death of children because, hey, you’re not supposed to go to a doctor. Have faith.

With this, it’s time to return to the full Gospel. The Gospel is not me-centered. It is Jesus-centered. It depends on what God has done in Jesus. He gives the Gospel eight parts. Not all have to be explicitly mentioned, but they are all part of the story. Jesus pre-existed with the Father, took on human flesh to fulfill the promises to David, died in accordance with what Scripture says, buried, raised on the third day again as prophesied, appeared to many, sits at the right hand of God as Lord, and will return to judge. This is indeed much more thought out than “Jesus died for my sins.”

It’s also important to realize Jesus taught this Gospel. Too many times when we want the Gospel, we jump straight to Paul. The Gospels pretty much tell us about how Jesus lived, but if you want to know about salvation, you really need to go to Paul. This is not to be anti-Paul or to say that Paul and Jesus contradict, but it is to say we should look at what Jesus said about the Gospel.

Bates then goes on to say that true salvation is allegiance. This is not to make people think of works salvation, as he gets into when he answers questions. We could say one does works not to earn salvation, but because one has sworn allegiance to Jesus as king.

Some of this part to me is still unclear. We do know that John wants us to know we have eternal life (1 John 5:13) and we don’t want to have people living in fear of their own salvation. At the same time, we don’t want to undermine obedience to Jesus. As someone in a ministry position, I do know for instance of many men who come to me and who want to be good Christians, and yet have the struggle of dealing with pornography. Bates does recognize we still have entangling sin and he himself has some sins he is struggling with, but I wonder how this would be handled in a pastoral situation, but more on that later.

The next major section is on new creation. Bates says we have too often made Heaven the goal of Christianity. I couldn’t agree more. Some of my biggest problems with funerals today has been the emphasis on Heaven. Don’t get me wrong. There is a glorious after-death waiting for us. The problem is that the grand coming of it is not until the resurrection and it’s not in a place far far away. It’s right here on Earth. God is going to recreate this world and it will be better than ever before.

Bates then says we need to restore the idol of God. Some people might wonder what he’s getting into with a chapter like this, but he’s entirely correct. Bates says that in ancient Hebrew terminology, we being in the image of God would mean we are the idol of God. We represent God. No piece of wood could ever do that. The main example of this is, of course, Jesus.

When we restore humanity to its rightful place, we will also treat one another better. Each of us is someone who bears the image of God. To treat your neighbor unjustly is to treat God unjustly. To love your neighbor rightly is to love God rightly.

The final chapters are much more theological and the systematic theologians will love it. This is looking at the ideas of righteousness and atonement. Those who are curious about the New Perspective on Paul will find an interesting look here at the material.

I would liked to have seen more on the pastoral side in the book as it is written for the lay audience. I could picture a mother reading this and saying “So does that mean when my son accepted Christ at a young age that it was illegitimate because allegiance was not sworn?” I do not think Bates would say this, but I think there needed to be something like that there. I do agree that we need allegiance brought in. We said the pledge of allegiance to the flag every day in school. Why not to our Lord every Sunday in church?

While there are points of clarification that will be brought out later, Bates book is full of good material that needs to be learned. It is a call to return to discipleship. It is a call to remember Jesus is indeed your friend and you have a relationship with Him, but He is your king and deserves no lesser treatment.

In Christ,
Nick Peters