Gospel Allegiance, Matthew Bates - Spring 2020

Introduction to this blog.

I’ve resolved to start keeping a blog about the non-fiction books that I’m reading. Here I’ll offer something like a summary, critique, recommendation, or reflection about a book that I just finished. They will be BRIEF. I have a timer running on this task (literally) I must complete each entry in 90 minutes spread over three days. This blog will help me synthesize and (hopefully) retain what I have read and might serve as a source of recommendation for good things to read. My current reading pace is approx 80 pages per week, and I read a mix of theology/ministry books. So, now you know what to expect.

Gospel Allegiance: What Faith in Jesus Misses for Salvation in Christ

Matthew W. Bates

Grand Rapids, MI. Brazos Press, 2019

In this book, Bates offers a critique of the modern understanding of the Gospel and constructs a path forward to correct these issues. It is a follow-up volume to another of his books that I have read, Salvation By Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King. These two books cover very similar ground, as you can just look at the title and subtitle of each and see that the keywords have simply been flipped; like “gospel” which jumps from the subtitle in the earlier work to the title in the later work and “Faith” which jumps from the title in the earlier work to the subtitle in the later work. I’ll begin with a quote that represents Bates’s key thrust in the book and then outline some of the most important material

”The conflation of the gospel’s content with its benefits and the required personal response to it has caused an incalculable amount of damage for Protestants and Catholics alike.” (209)

Bates argues that the Gospel is exclusively* the account of Jesus becoming king as established by key Christ events in scripture, which he develops into a list of 10 :

The Gospel is that Jesus is the King

1. Preexisted as God the Son,

2. was sent by the Father

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 burried,

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, and

10 will come again as final judge to rule (227-228)

Within this list, particular focus is placed by Bates (who argues that this is the focus of the Bible and the apostolic Church) on #8, Jesus enthronement as king upon his ascension. This book is primarily focused on reshaping the way that we think-of and speak-of the Gospel. The primary change to our Gospel understanding that Bates advocates for here, is the replacement of traditional models of justification with the proclamation that Jesus is King. In fact, he says that the absence of the latter proclamation is “Christianity’s largest problem:”

“Christianity’s largest problem today… it is not an overstatement to say, that the largest problem within Christianity today is the exclusion of Jesus’s kingship from the Gospel.” (98)

He argues that we have included the benefits of the Gospel (justification & salvation) in the Gospel itself to our detriment, and that the Gospel must be rescued from this conflagration by our clear delineation between the true-factual Gospel - the 10-fact account of how Jesus became king - from the things that we receive as a result. If this line is not drawn clearly than the gift that the Gospel offers can be removed from any sort of personal agency or even a clear manner of speaking and we spiral down into the weirdly-twisted, unbibliccal-sounding soteriology of the free grace movement and various other forms of protestant inanity.

6

He pairs this thesis about what the Gospel is and is not with an argument made in greater length in Salvation by Allegiance Alone that the best way to understand “pistis” (the greek word most often translated “faith” in the New Testament), and even the best way to translate this word would be “allegiance.” In this book, Bates repeats much of this argument and emphasizes that the primary dynamic of saving faith is external (as opposed to internal).

“Without denying its interiority, saving faith must be externalized as allegiance to Jesus the forgiving king for it to save” (161)

In Summary, The Gospel must be freed from the “salvation system” understanding that has been forced upon it in modern Christianity, and restored to the factual account of how Jesus, God’s son, became King (Messiah/Christ). Salvation is given corporately to the people who are allegiant to this king (through the allegiance (faithfulness) of our Messiah himself to God - which becomes ours). This allegiance includes the interior dynamic of faith (belief and trust) as we have come to commonly understand it, but this interiority is NOT primary. Saving Allegiance is primarily an outward facing pursuit of obedience to Jesus the King through the spirit of God. If Jesus is your King, you belong to the people of the Christ, and you are saved.

Joel’s Opinion

This is a great book. It is almost as good as Bates’s first major publication. Salvation by Allegiance Alone, which i am on record calling the second-best (to Surprised by Hope, NT Wright) book in this genre that I have read. This book expands out from Bates’s first by applying enthronement soteriology and allegiance-centered pistis to the formulation and proclamation of the Gospel in and by the Church. If you have to pick just one Bates book to read, start with Salvation by Allegiance Alone. While Gospel Allegiance covers the argument presented in the former book, the impact of the argument made successfully in Salvation by Allegiance Alone is so weighty and paradigm shaking that it deserves your full attention. Then* read Gospel Allegiance because you don’t* have to pick just one Bates book!

I think that what Bates offers in these two volumes is a fresh (to western civilization) recapturing of Biblical and apostolic soteriology. The creative and surprising (while also, somehow, forehead-slapping obvious) path that Bates paves through the modern junkyard of soteriological discourse (which is, at present, littered with the wreckage of poor modern attempts to capture the Biblical teaching on providence, sovereignty, justification, and sanctification) is incredibly clear and concordant with the earliest non-canonical presentations of the Faith to a degree that other formulations don’t come close to achieving. These books should be especially attractive to my brothers and sisters in the Restoration Movement because we have, thus far, failed to break through in the larger-protestant conversation about salvation which has been dominated, in our time, by disciples of 16th-century men, facing 16th-century questions, and giving 16th-century answers. In practice, we (in the Restoration Churches) have - i think - recovered the work of “faith” that we find in the Bible and in apostolic Christianity, but here, Bates has provided the rationale and hermeneutic structure for us to articulate our position.

Gospel Allegiance is not without weaknesses. In the book, Bates claims to have provided a means of reconciliation between protestant and Roman Catholic soteriology. But his treatment of Roman Catholic soteriology is polemic which prevents him from occupying their terminology and worldview enough to realistically create a bridge for reconciliation. The middle-path that Bates offers is solidly in protestant territory. Bate’s treatment of the role of the Holy Spirit in Gospel Allegiance also needs more work, especially when it comes to the agency of the practice of allegiance. His explanation of the Holy Spirit’s role in producing good works starts to blur the line of personal allegiance responsibly that he had drawn so clearly in these two books. This section of Bates’s book needs to be re-imagined; but I’m just being picky - this book is fantastic!