Gospel Allegiance

This is a more popular-level sequel to the author’s Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017). It is pitched and formatted to put into the hands of pastors and the laity to apply and promulgate Bates’s new conceptualization of the gospel message. Readers are urged to mention this book “on social media, on blogs, or in conversation. Rate or review it for others” (p. 10). The author conveys urgency that this corrective volume on the gospel reach far and wide.This is understandable in light of his repeated contention that from Billy Graham to current leaders such as John Piper, R. C. Sproul, Matt Chandler, John MacArthur, Thomas Schreiner, and others, mainstream evangelicalism is substantially misrepresenting what the gospel is. Even the Gospel Coalition’s statement on the gospel is substantially erroneous (pp. 98–99). Bates often seeks to strike a conciliatory tone, as though his proposals are a friendly amendment to the message of Piper, the Gospel Coalition, and the like. But in light of the whole book, I do not think Bates’s gospel is compatible, nor do I think he regards it to be (see the title of ch. 2: “Not Faith but Allegiance”). Hence his zeal to publicize this new gospel message and displace the current popular flawed one.What is Bates’s freshly discovered gospel? In a word, it is about pistis defined as allegiance shown in outward actions, not God by sheer grace conferring on a sinner through faith alone the personal benefits of Christ’s saving work on the cross, leading to good works (as per the Reformation heritage). Also, faith does not center on Jesus in his saving work of the cross and resurrection, though those remain important. Rather, faith means active and bodily allegiance to Christ the king. What saves people is their corporate declaration—necessarily embodied in acts of allegiance—of Jesus enthroned as king, not personal faith in Christ crucified and risen resulting in union with Christ and a subsequently transformed life.So drastic is Bates’s rethinking that, as he understands it, “no portion of the actual gospel is a matter of dispute among Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox Christians” (p. 110, his emphasis). This could come as a shock to readers who arrived at saving faith by the gospel of God’s grace from Catholic, Orthodox, or nominal Protestant (including evangelical) backgrounds, only to learn now that their salvation is apparently based on a misunderstanding.Bates knows that some will think immediately of a text such as Eph 2:8–10, which seems to affirm the importance of grace through faith in Christ leading to good works by virtue of Christ’s atoning and reconciling death (Eph 1:7; 2:13, 16; 5:2, 25) and resurrection (1:20; 2:6). Bates devotes a lengthy section (pp. 212–19) instructing lay readers methodically how to unpack this text according to his pistis-as-allegiance model. I discovered that I am apparently wrong about almost every clause, so I was fascinated. A few highlights: Eph 2:8–10 is not the gospel—this is because Paul does not explicitly say that is the gospel. This strikes me as an instance of the word-concept fallacy: the thing is not present if the precise term is not (more broadly, see p. 41, where Bates limits definition of “the gospel” primarily to just a few texts that contain that exact word). To return to Eph 2:8–10, “grace” refers to Christ the king’s death, resurrection, and enthronement, a gift that “must be reciprocated by the return gift of allegiance” (p. 214). “Saved” is collective, not individual (p. 215), so personal salvation is not in view at all. “Faith” may refer to Christ’s faithfulness—Bates thinks it does—rather than to an individual’s faith, but Bates concedes this is disputed (p. 216). In any case, faith is not inner trust but outward (or “external”; see below) bodily allegiance (p. 217).A brief review cannot do justice to this stimulating book. At many points, I found myself tracking closely with Bates’s concerns. But in the end, key concerns predominate. I will name just three. First, while like Bates I am an NT specialist and so respect the importance of his specialist exegesis, he seems to be inviting us to accept his interpretation of “gospel” and “faith” rather than the apostle Paul’s. Paul highlights the cross and resurrection. Bates makes them ancillary by comparison to corporate affirmation of Jesus as king and then living a life of allegiance—faith defined as obedience—to that king. I would not blame Christian readers for preferring Paul’s emphasis on Jesus’s death (e.g., Rom 3:24) as the Archimedean point of personal redemption, sealed of course by his resurrection (e.g., 4:25). Paul’s prototypical depiction of Abraham’s proleptic faith (Rom 4) could hardly be clearer.Second, Bates shifts the weight so far toward “external” faith that the fervent internal personal trust modeled in Scripture is minimized by comparison. For example, commenting on the history of Protestantism going back to the Reformation and including the Reformers, Bates states, “Without denying its interiority, saving faith must be externalized as allegiance to Jesus the forgiving king for it to save” (p. 161). I observe in this definition (echoed over a dozen times elsewhere) a discounting of saving faith’s necessarily individual and personal nature.If one reads the Psalter carefully, much of it given by David, and observes the personal nature of the psalmists’ expressions of faith, and if one then traces the Psalms forward into the life of the Son of David, the overwhelming impression is not the corporate and external nature of the Psalms’ testimony but the personal and interior—which is not to deny corporate and external expression, any more than sola fide rightly understood excludes works. Jesus’s intimate citations of Psalms passages on the cross dramatize my point. Davidic and dominical faith is intensely personal or interior faith. Is Martha’s confession at Lazarus’s graveside, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world” (John 11:27), really just “a proposition about an external reality,” bereft of interiority, as Bates asserts (p. 154)? I believe the opposite is likely true.The entire OT witness to God’s personal dealings with his (often remnant) people, one by one, seems to tell against the rarified corporate allegiance to king Jesus that Bates urges. How much more “interior” should faith placed in Jesus be? Of course, I concur that true faith grows inexorably toward allegiance to Christ and all he stands for: an evangelical axiom, epitomized, for example, in the motto of that flagship evangelical institution and my alma mater, Wheaton College, is after all christo et regno eius—“For Christ and his kingdom.” That is a pledge of allegiance as well as mission statement. But I think the Reformers, Piper, the Gospel Coalition, and others whom Bates seeks to correct have typically seen such loyalty as an expression of confidence and commitment growing out of the assurance of a promissory righteousness, one won on the cross and received personally by faith and nothing but (Gal 3:2, 5), not an assurance ensuing from a sufficient allegiance. That would be an unattainable and soul-crushing goal—or a temptation to an ugly pride.Third, throughout the book Bates concedes that Jesus’s cross is important. But I was unclear as to just how until near the end. Finally, I read that Jesus “wore a crown of thorns;” this along with everything else in his “entire gospel career ... is purposed toward fostering allegiance” (p. 222.). This is a moral influence construal of the atonement, perhaps an unavoidable consequence of redefining faith in the way Bates does, not as God’s mystery but human industry (“allegiance”). I find the NT good news of Jesus’s death for all who hear and receive the gospel to be fuller than and different from this.This book no doubt means well but fails to sustain its central argument. The Reformers and their faithful heirs today (granting that some whom Bates singles out are not faithful) were not wrong about the gospel, though of course we should be semper reformanda in validating the gospel message by our reading, proclamation, and lives in each generation. Bates is a prod for that project, and on that score we can view his book with thanks

Allegiance · Faith · Gospel · Jesus christ · Political science · Politics · Theology · Law · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

• Strategy for improving the spirituality of the GBI Church in Bandung based on 2 Timothy 2

  Open Access•Yanto P Hermanto, Rivosa Santosa•HTS Teologiese Studies /…•2024

  Add to list