Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 279 Matthew Bates - What Does the Bible Really Say About Salvation?
Matthew Bates joins us today to work out salvation. What is it? What have we got wrong? In our contemporary moment, we find ourselves wrestling with a profound misunderstanding of the gospel - a narrative that has been truncated, individualized, and stripped of its royal, communal essence. The gospel is not merely a personal transaction about individual salvation, but a comprehensive royal announcement about Jesus the Christ. For too long, both Protestant and Catholic traditions have inadvertently narrowed the expansive biblical vision of salvation. We've reduced faith to mental assent or ritualistic practice, when in reality, faith is fundamentally about allegiance - a comprehensive, embodied loyalty to King Jesus that transforms not just individuals, but entire communities and, ultimately, all of creation. Matthew seeks to recover a more holistic understanding. We are saved not just from something, but for something: the full restoration of our image-bearing capacity, the renewal of God's glory in and through us. This isn't about personal spiritual escapism, but about participating in a cosmic restoration project. In our conversation today, we'll explore how reimagining salvation as allegiance can bridge denominational divides, challenge our narcissistic cultural assumptions, and invite us into a more profound understanding of discipleship. We're not just talking about theological abstractions, but about a transformative way of being in the world. Prepare to have your understanding of the gospel radically expanded.
Matthew W. Bates is Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. His books have won top honors from Christianity Today, Outreach Magazine, Jesus Creed, and Englewood Review. When he isn't hiking, baseballing, or chasing his seven children, he co-hosts the OnScript podcast. A Protestant by conviction, Bates holds a PhD in theology (New Testament) from the University of Notre Dame. His popular titles include Salvation by Allegiance Alone, Why the Gospel?, The Gospel Precisely, and The Birth of the Trinity. He lives with his family in Quincy, Illinois. Learn more about his books, lectures, or conference-speaking at MatthewWBates.com.
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We are saved not just from hell or not just from our own selves, but we're saved for full restoration of our image bearing, so that the glory that is currently lacking in our lives and lacking in creation can reach a maximum again, so that we're restored to full health.
Unknown:You Hello
Joshua Johnson:and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson, well, Matthew Bates joins us today to work out salvation. What is it? What have we got wrong in our contemporary moments, we find ourselves wrestling with a profound misunderstanding of the gospel, a narrative that has been truncated, individualized and stripped of its royal, communal essence. The gospel is not merely a personal transaction about individual salvation, but a comprehensive royal announcement about Jesus the Christ. For too long, both Protestant and Catholic traditions have inadvertently narrowed the expansive biblical vision of salvation. We've reduced faith to mental ascent or ritualistic practice, when in reality, faith is fundamentally about allegiance and comprehensive, embodied loyalty to King Jesus that transforms not just individuals, but entire communities and ultimately, all of creation. Matthew seeks to recover a more holistic understanding we are saved, not just from something, but for something, the full restoration of our image bearing capacity, the renewal of God's glory in and through us. This isn't about personal spiritual escapism, but about participating in a cosmic restoration project. In our conversation today, we'll explore how reimagining salvation as allegiance can bridge denominational divides, challenge our narcissistic cultural assumptions and invite us into a more profound understanding of discipleship. We're not just talking about theological abstractions, but about a transformative way of being in the world. Prepare to have your understanding of the gospel radically expanded. So join us. Here is my conversation with Matthew Bates. Matthew, thank you for coming on. It's a pleasure to have you on shifting culture. So welcome. Hey. Thank you. Joshua, yeah, I'm excited to dive into beyond the salvation wars, why both Protestants and Catholics must reimagine how we are saved. It's fantastic book that really is standing on the shoulders of a lot of your work for a long time. So can you just give us a little overview of why you dive deep into the gospel and into salvation, and why this is a particular point of fascination and interest for you.
Matthew Bates:Yeah. Thanks. This has been a long abiding interest for me, and partly that emerges out of my own story. Right as I grew up in a very traditionally minded church. Now I'm still traditionally minded, but, I mean, we're talking about, like, really arch conservative. And as part of that, you know, there was a lot of conversation about faith, the danger of works about, you know, just trusting Jesus and and all of that, you know, was well and good to a certain degree, but also it caused me questions as I continued my training. So I personally was wrestling with questions about, How are we really saved? Like, what does it mean to trust Jesus and and wrestling with all those kinds of constructs? On the other hand, I also saw, as I continued to grow up and just see church culture around me, a lot of churches that seemed like there was a lot of discussion about trusting Jesus or things like that for salvation. But on the one hand, people anxious about whether or not, like, am I trusting him enough? Those kinds of concerns, but also like, sometimes the fruit of people who had accepted the gospel, and there was no practical effect in their life that I could see, but they were trusting Jesus that he'd forgiven their sins. Is that really all salvation was so all these questions kind of percolating in the background, and when I went to seminary, I began to think more as I was doing Greek training about the range of meaning of the word faith, pistus, and like what they got, like how the gospel is actually described in the New Testament. So all that's kind of the background to why I got interested in the whole topic of the gospel salvation just really comes out of a heart for the church. And you know, in my own personal desire to To know such things.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, it seems like from your past work gospel, allegiance and salvation by allegiance alone, allegiance is a big key and a big word for you. What then is allegiance like? Give us a foundation to. Get us going. Yeah.
Matthew Bates:So really, at the heart of my my previous books salvation by religious law and gospel allegiance would be kind of twin claims, like one is that the gospel is predominantly royal, and so that whenever we think about what it means to respond to the gospel, it's not just believing Jesus died for my sins or trusting in the promises of God, as those are found in Jesus. That's not a those are those categories, although they they capture part of the truth. Aren't big enough. There's like a bigger framework. And the bigger framework is Royal. It's one about how Jesus has become the Christ, the which, which isn't just an empty signifier. That means the king, and so realizing that the climax of the Gospel is about Jesus, not just dying for our sins, not just being raised from the dead, as important as those things are, but him attaining the royal office at God's right hand, like realizing that's really the climactic energy of the gospel is now Jesus is enthroned as the ruling Christ. What then does it mean to have faith as kind of part two, or kind of the twin focus in my previous work, I do this word faith is a big floppy plastic word. It can mean a lot of things. It's the Greek word pistus. It's a wide ranging word in antiquity, and can mean many things, from trust to belief to truth. Different kinds of ideas can all be connected to actually, the Greek word pistus. But an important category is actually not just faith, but faithfulness, not just trust, but trustworthiness, which is quite different. It's a quite different thing to say that I trust you. You know Joshua. It's a quite bigger claim if I say you're a faithful man, you you are trustworthy in the way that you act. One would be like seeing you as like that I can put my confidence in you. The other would be that like you are like somebody who lives out a trustworthy or faithful or loyal, like aspect of your life. So it's this claim that allegiance, then, or loyalty, is a big part of the range of meaning of faith, and that that actually best explains what it means to respond to the Christ or to the gospel. If the gospel is Royal and it's about Jesus, the Christ, then I argue that faith means allegiance to the Christ.
Joshua Johnson:I think allegiance is is crucial. One of the things that I I've typically seen. So just as a background, I was in the Middle East, work with a lot of Muslims, Syrian refugees and the phenomenon of of Jesus appearing in dreams and visions. Israel have met a lot of Muslims have had dreams of Jesus. Every single person that I've met that has had a dream of Jesus, or I've heard there has always been a a summon of Jesus to say, Follow me, give my your allegiance to me. It wasn't about faith. And this is just like a personal anecdotal experience of allegiance is key, which is opposite of what we typically think in the west of it is by mental assent or believing that Jesus did these things. So can you just give a couple of the common ways that we think of the gospel, both Protestant and Catholic? Maybe some misconceptions. And then, what is the gospel? Yeah.
Matthew Bates:So some common misperceptions about the gospel would be, on the one hand, on the Protestant side, it might be taking Luthers key, you know, kind of insight that really kind of baked this into the DNA of Protestantism would be that the gospel is justification by faith. That would be one kind of typical Protestant way of thinking about it, that God has made promises. Those promises are valid in Christ Jesus, the promises primarily pertain to forgiveness of sins, and that forgiveness of sins is another way of speaking now about that would be getting right with God or being justified. So the Protestant claim would be that we're declared righteous by God on the basis of our faith alone and not by works. And unless we kind of get that, unless we kind of come to accept that, then we're like interjecting our own doing. We're in danger of somehow not fully trusting Jesus. But we just have to, like, realize that that salvation is a free gift, entirely undeserved, and it's a gift that we get right with God by faith alone. That would be a typical Protestant understanding on the one hand. So I'll just move to quick critique, and maybe I could do bigger critiques later. But a quick critique would be that it doesn't seem that this is actually the gospel. There's no passage in scripture that would define the gospel in terms of justification by faith. So Luther is key insight could be true. That could be true that we're justified by faith, but it could also be true that that's not the gospel that, like Luther, kind of slotted it in the wrong category. Would be another way of putting it, that we could affirm justification by faith to be true, but it it might be the case that that's actually. Actually that the gospel is defined otherwise, right? And so that's part of where I'm going with my critique here. I would affirm justification by faith. I think we need to nuance what we mean by faith. But I think that Luther was kind of a little bit sloppy in positioning that as part of the gospel. All right. So now on the Catholic side, the Gospel isn't discussed much within Catholicism, it's sort of been eclipsed by the sacraments. And so really, the Catholic articulation of salvation is really not going to say a whole lot about the gospel. In fact, if you look through the Catholic Catechism, which is, you know, my copy of it is 650, ish pages, the Gospel gets two short sentences, and it really focuses on the Paschal Mystery of Christ's death and resurrection, but it doesn't elaborate what those are. It kind of just affirms that these are important to the gospel. But there's not really an exposition of what the gospel is, and that's because within Catholicism, really what you need is you need to get baptized. When you're baptized, this is where you get right with God and then, and that's based on really the church's faith as a whole, rather than your personal faith, like you're you're an infant usually when this happens. So your personal faith is not really in view. It's really the church's faith. And then, subsequently, then you're going to be confirmed, and so, and then if you send you need to go through the process of sacramental reconciliation. So the Catholic articulation of the gospel tends to be pretty weak because they're just not very invested in that framework. It's more about the sacraments. Now the on the positive side, because that sounded quite critical, both both Catholics and Protestants, and this is part like part of the heartbeat of the ecumenical kind of impulse of the book, part of the good news is that both Catholics and Protestants affirm the actual biblical gospel. They both affirm that Jesus is King. They both affirm that he was sent by the Father according to the promises right that he took on human flesh, that He died for our sins, that he was raised, he's now enthroned at the right hand of God, that He will come again. All these things, that the Spirit's been sent, all these things are affirmed by both Catholics and Protestants. So here's the irony, right? Catholics and Protestants both agree about the actual biblical gospel, but there's also some misarticulations of the gospel that are happening in both in both camps, and this causes needless harm to our ecumenical efforts to be one in Christ.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, that's so key, and it's the misattributions. Is, is the misconceptions, is the misrepresentation of what we actually say. So we have to be careful with what what we're saying, and where we're headed and what we're doing. What do you think that we can actually then articulate, what is, I think, helpful to move us in the right direction? So if you could say, like, there is this one, one key that would move us in the right direction, towards what is the true gospel, and knowing that a and it is allegiance to Jesus. Jesus is King, and we're moving towards towards him in that way. What? What's the key there for us? Well, I think
Matthew Bates:there are a number of things we need to consider. If I would just select, if you're trying to get me to drill down on like, what's most central? I think that's good. No, I like that, because the book has many, many dimensions, right? And I would say that it's it's really that allegiance can help us. Can help us reconcile over faith works problems that, like a traditional kind of Protestant view, is that we're saved by faith, not by works, right? But then there's some sloppiness around all that, as modern scholarship has shown that faith actually involves our bodies, right? It can't be just as disembodied mental ascent, right? That, like the word pistus just means it involves, like communal communal structures. It involves relational ideas. It's covenantally framed, as my colleague, EJ Gupta, has done and his work on Paul in the language of faith. So scholars who have done work on this word faith have shown that it actually involves bodily dimensions, and it's not just a ghost in a machine kind of idea. So when we recapture an embodied notion around like faith, and we see it as loyalty or allegiance to a king, I think this helps us make sense right of both Catholic and Protestant concerns, because Catholics have always been concerned that we actually do right things right. They're just not just like a blanket declaration of innocence, even though there's been no life change. I think that this helps address some of those concerns in one fell swoop, but there's a lot of conversations swirling around that need to be cleaned up and interlocked in order to see how the proposal really works. But I would say, yeah, that faith as allegiance, as overcoming, the faith works dichotomy,
Joshua Johnson:if I think of then justification by faith alone, if there's a re definition of faith as faith. Faithfulness. It actually does involve what we do. It's not just what we believe. It doesn't say justification by belief alone, right? So there, there is that thing I think would help a lot,
Matthew Bates:yeah, and it makes sense of why Paul speaks about us being judged on the basis of our works quite clearly, right? I mean, he says it again and again, that we will be judged on the basis of our work. Well, how does that fit in? Right? If we're just this, like it often, the typical Protestant answer is like, well, first we get justified, and then, if our justification is genuine, that'll be worked out through a process of sanctification. So we'll continue to do these good works, and the works will be a confirmation that we really were saved in the first there's this, this complicated construct that's a way of explaining it, but I don't think it's actually like when we we attend very carefully to the biblical use of language. It doesn't actually work that way. That's not how the Bible tends to describe it, like faith is saving from the ground up, right? It's not something that is something where it's like and works are part of faith, I think, from the ground up. So it's, yeah, we can't dichotomize in those ways. How
Joshua Johnson:do you think our our individualistic culture has actually moved us into a direction that may not be helpful around a gospel and salvation conversation?
Matthew Bates:Yeah, so, I mean, a kind of radical individualism easily leads to a sort of narcissism, where we think that the universe is really about me, or that salvation is really about me and my personal quest in order to get right with God, and it kind of ignores the more communal and creational frameworks that are part of the conversation. Right as we want to say that our sin, you know, as we choose to deliberately define good and evil for ourselves, rather than listen to God's definitions of good and evil, like we realized, on the one hand, there is a personal dimension to that choice, but it also has social and cosmic implications. So the widest purview of the gospel, like, Why did God give the gospel in the first place? What's its purpose? When we actually look at the Bible's clearest statements about the purpose of the Gospel, Paul speaks about it being for the obedience of faith among all the nations, or Allegiant obedience among all the nations. This is Romans, one five, and Romans 1626, for instance, where he speaks about the purpose of the guy. I have a whole separate book on the purpose of the Gospel by the gospel. So I thought a lot about this topic, and I need to be concise, but really the key idea behind the purpose of the Gospel is that it's actually for communal allegiance to Jesus, right? It's for the all the nations to to give Allegiant obedience to King Jesus. And so when we begin to think about the purpose of the gospel is not like Paul didn't say, and the purpose of the gospel is so that your soul can go to heaven when you die. Or he says, the purpose of the Gospel is that all nations will be Allegiant to King Jesus. That's quite a different kind of purpose, right? One that involves community, one that involves, in fact, all of creation, ultimately. So I do think that when we get the gospel wrong, it kind of feeds our narcissistic tendencies to think that the Gospel must be good news for me, or it doesn't count as gospel, or something along those lines. So
Joshua Johnson:then what is the nuance? Then, as the gospel is good news for those who who believe and pledge their allegiance to to King Jesus, and walk that out through faithfulness, and then through the rest of creation, everybody else on Earth is there. Is there good news? Is there things benefits to the Gospel for all people. And what is the nuance between the two? Yeah, thank
Matthew Bates:you. Yeah. I do some work on this in chapter three of the book. And one way of putting it would be that we could kind of think of circles, okay, it would be like one way of thinking, like we have kind of benefits. And so the proper way of thinking about the gospel would be, on the one hand, we could summarize the gospel by just saying Jesus is the saving king, or he's the Christ. Okay, so it's as we respond to his kingship, by giving our loyalty to him, that we enter into salvation. But this entering into salvation means we're joining the community that is saved, or there's already a community that's confessed Jesus to be the king and has and has received the Holy Spirit. So to be to be saved, is to enter into the Holy Spirit community. Now the best way of thinking about that is that then there are benefits that we receive. So justification, if we're going to get really precise, like if it's not, if justification by faith isn't the gospel, word is, how does it fit? Okay? So the best way of speaking about that would be that justification is a benefit that comes from the gospel. So it's as salvation gets applied as we enter into the Holy Spirit community. The Holy Spirit community is the justified community, and when we enter into that community, the benefits of salvation are applied to us by the Holy Spirit. And so that we are justified because we're part of the justified. Body. And so that would be how kind of justification fits in. And so when we think about circles like that of benefit that could be helpful. So on the one hand, we have the narrowest circle that there are certain benefits that only belong to those who confess Jesus to be the king, right? So somebody who hasn't made that confession is not justified, like they're outside the Holy Spirit community, so they're not justified, but there's a circle outside, like a wider circle than that, okay? So you have the narrow circle of the true Church, right that receives specific benefits. A circle beyond that would be the world, because the world experiences the benefits of Jesus's kingship, whether or not they've confessed Jesus as kingship, and they do so because you and I as ambassadors of King Jesus, if we are authentic followers of King Jesus, if we're actually loyalists to him, right as we go out and we make disciples amid all the nations, we're actually bringing the benefits of Jesus to people so they They may receive healing through us. They may receive a charitable gift through us. They may receive just a message of good news about Jesus's forgiveness through us. These are, these are benefits that they receive even if they haven't accepted the benefits yet, there is some good that comes to them even if they've rejected Jesus's kingship. They might still get a meal right through an authentic ambassador of Jesus, and they might hear truth, which is also a benefit to them. And then the circle beyond that would be the cosmic circle, the circle of all creation, because our choices to turn away from God like produce consequences the thorns and thistles that we have in Genesis, right? Our work is no longer a delight, but it's now toil, and that all of creation is groaning for the liberation that comes through the revelation of the sons and daughters of God and and the glory. So what happens is that what the one way of talking about the major purpose of the gospel, beyond the obedience of faith in all the nations, will be to say that it's about glory, restoration. And so when we sin, we come to lack the glory of God, but salvation involves a recharging of the glory, so then we can then disperse it to creation. So all of creation needs to encounter the image of God in order for it to run properly. And so as the image of God is tainted or distorted, right, it's not receiving the creation care that creation needs through us. So it's through the restoration of our image bearing that we then bring the benefits to all of creation, to so three circles in the church, the larger human community, and then all creation. So
Joshua Johnson:as Jesus, as it says in Ephesians, that he's bringing everything and of the cosmos into him and making it new, and then this person out. So in Christ, everything is made new. Then what's our role in salvation, and our role of following Jesus and being a part of that here on earth today, being co laborers with Jesus? Is that something that is something that's part of what we as believers in Jesus, as followers of him, this King, Jesus, should be doing yes in our Yes,
Matthew Bates:yes, absolutely. I can give an emphatic yes to that question. Yes. I think Jesus invites us to be disciples, which means we imitate his ways, right? And then we participate in his work. So, yes, we co labor with Jesus, you know, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, which energizes and empowers us for all of these dimensions of bringing the benefits of the gospel to creation. So
Joshua Johnson:what does baptism have to do with with this is that am I saved through baptism as I walk through and some believe like baptism is required for salvation. What is baptism and why is it important? And what have we gotten wrong about baptism? Yeah,
Matthew Bates:so I have a whole chapter on baptism, and what I really strive to do in the chapter is to to really recover, like the early church and the apostles, views of salvation, and so baptism would be part of that. And obviously we have like, huge fights about this within both the Catholic and the Protestant world about the degree to which baptism is saving. So a couple things can help us get on board with what baptism is all about. One is that we have to kind of take seriously the Jewish context of the New Testament, like the followers of Jesus. Jesus himself first followers are all Jews, okay, and so Jews were very busy baptizing. Now sometimes people have denied that. It said, No, there was no Jewish baptism. And it's because they've been looking in the wrong place. They believe that, like, baptism was about religious conversion, and that was the only thing baptism was like, well, baptism is something you do when you're changing religions or something like that, right? Or when you're first entering into a religion. Well, if that's what you're looking for, it's true that there was not Jewish baptism. But if you're looking for something different, like we're the Jews, immersing things like baptism is not a word that means something religious in Jesus's world. It's like it means to dunk, to dip, to immerse. It's an informal non religious word that comes over time to have like religious overtones, but it's something that people were doing as part of their everyday life, but also in terms of their engagement with with various rituals in Jesus's day. And so vessels were being immersed as cleansing, but also people were being immersed. And so there were people who were being immersed. And one of the things that's interesting, for instance, is that Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced. We we have testimony from the Dead Sea scrolls that the community that were was gathered at Qumran. They ate a meal together each day, and as part of their common meal, they would actually ritually bathe before the meal. And this actually was not to cleanse their sins or to cleanse their impurities. It's actually the opposite. They were admitted to the community on the basis of of repenting. So in order to even be part of the community, they had to have repented from their sins. When they went into the water, they were actually creating a pool of purity. So the their their purity was being transferred to the water, not vice versa, like we tend to think, like well water washes away sin, and that must be the imagery. No, not at Qumran like actually their purity, on the basis of their prior repentance, was purifying the water and so that it could be then used for various other illustrations. So when we begin to look at things like that, we begin to think about like how Qumran and John the Baptist fit together, as we have testimony from Josephus that John the Baptist baptism was similar, that it was based on prior repentance, and that it wasn't the water that took away the sins or cleansed them, but that it was based on their prior repentance. And so since Jesus and his followers take over John the Baptist ministry, it's highly likely that they took over also his understandings, or at least, were congenial to them. So I draw some lines of connection from that into earliest Christianity, showing that baptism was understood to be based on a prior repentance from sins, and that it had to be voluntary because it was voluntary in the Qumran community, and voluntary for John the Baptist, and all of our evidence suggests that it was only voluntary in the early church. We don't have any evidence for non voluntary baptisms until the third century. So baptism was voluntary. And so what happened in terms of salvation with baptism? Thorny question, but the basic idea would be right at the heart of the baptism in or the earliest church, would have been an oath of loyalty, so that if baptism was saving, it was because you gave your definitive oil loyalty oath to Jesus at that time. And so I would say that baptism wasn't necessarily saving. There are other ways in which you could be saved, but that it was the premier way of expressing your loyalty to King Jesus, so that it was ordinarily saving and ordinarily the moment of regeneration. So
Joshua Johnson:you're saying the natural, libre, involuntary baptism, ducking into the water is wasn't valid. No,
Matthew Bates:not Yeah, not valid. And yeah. And so this gets into some Catholic Protestant differences, and where some of the pressure points in my book maybe fall squarely on Catholicism, that the Catholic Church will have to reassess their views of baptism ultimately, because they don't stack up within the bounds of history, which would be at what's called an ex operate operato view of baptism, meaning that it's Is Valid by virtue of the sacrament itself being performed in, you know, valid conditions, but that doesn't involve a voluntary commitment. And it's clear that that was essential to the earliest church. We see that in in we see evidence for that in the New Testament, but also in all of our earliest documents, the did I key, Justin, martyr Tertullian, we see, we see that baptism is purely voluntary, yeah.
Joshua Johnson:And so what is this, then, this communal aspect of baptism, it seems to me, in if we look at the New Testament, we're seeing a lot of people being baptized together. We're calling for repentance and baptism that actually coincide and go together, that it's not like repentance. Then take a year long class to understand everything, and then you can be baptized. What like? What is the role of both repentance, of baptism together and then the communal role of baptism? Yeah.
Matthew Bates:So obviously, baptism could be individualized, like an individual, personal experience, or it could be a communal, group experience. We have the Ethiopian eunuch, right, who's just himself baptized and not publicly, right? He's just, it doesn't need to be a public declaration. It's just right, right, with Philip, right? He's just baptized right there. But we have many other examples, and the norm would have been a more of a group process, right? But even within that, we see evidence in the. New Testament that it was personalized. My favorite example for illustrating this would be Simon magus, Simon the magician in in Acts, right? Where he's described as hearing the preaching of Philip, like having come to believe, right? He has a preliminary kind of faith intention, right, but that he personally doesn't repent. And because of that, when the Holy Spirit comes on the group. The Holy Spirit is not does not come upon him because he had not personally repented again. The voluntary personal repentance is something that is probably like a kind of a precursor to a valid to the Holy Spirit falling on somebody in a baptism. And so he offers to buy it right, quite famously, offers to buy the Holy Spirit, in which Peter then rebukes him and says, Your heart's not right, like unless you repent right? Then, then, then, then there's no hope for you, essentially. And so we, we have this complexity in the New Testament around group dynamics versus a new little but both seem to be valid. The New Testament does seem to take pains to stress, though, like that, when a group experienced baptism, like it's a household baptism, it will say like, you know, something like, and he came to faith together with all the members of his household. Came to faith, right? Like it doesn't usually, usually emphasizes that, like Luke seems to take pains and acts to emphasize that even within the boundaries of a group, there needed to be a personal or an individual commitment to the baptism, for that baptism to result in Holy Spirit union,
Joshua Johnson:you go into Galatians and say that the letter of Galatians can actually help both Protestants and Catholics in their understanding of salvation. What then does the letter of Galatians have to say for us so that we could help bring about a better understanding.
Matthew Bates:Yeah, Galatians, great question, because Galatians kind of been ground zero in the Catholic Protestant dispute, right? Like as Protestants have classically gone to Galatians and said, Look, we're saved by faith, not by works. Like you, Catholics have introduced works into the scheme, and therefore you're cursed and cut off by scripture's own standards. Because Paul, as he's describing the gospel, you know, says that anyone who disagrees with the gospel, as he presents it in Galatians, is cursed and cut off, even if an angel from heaven was to preach a different gospel to cursed and cut off. And so that Catholicism has cursed and cut itself off by scripture's own standard, that would be a kind of a traditional Protestant way of speaking about Galatians. And so there's a kind of logic that's like, you know, like that's being traced out there. I don't know that the classic Protestant critique has been quite precise enough, and how it's dealing with Galatians or mobilizing it. And so one way of thinking about what's going on in Galatians would be that, like Protestantism has moved maybe too glibly to assume that the gospel is justification by faith, and they've and how, why have they assumed it? Well, because it seems like Paul kind of says that in Galatians, But Paul doesn't quite say that in Galatians. He doesn't say that justification by faith is part of the gospel. That's an inference from a kind of certain way of reading Galatians. And so if, in fact, Paul identifies the gospel as a royal narrative, that the gospel is about how the father, you know, sent the Son in fulfillment of various promises. The son took on human flesh, and he died for our sins, and He was raised on the third day. He's now enthroned, that the spirit has been sent, if that's actually what Paul has in view, as we discover in First Corinthians, as we discover in Romans, where Paul actually gives the content of the gospel. He gives this royal narrative. And then at the opening, opening of Galatians, he talks about how that the sun has been sent to redeem us, right? It comes Galatians one four. I can't like the passages on the tip of my brain right now. But anyway, he speaks about, like the coming of the sun, right? And so he seems to set up a royal narrative, right? Or to kind of like, implicitly allude to it. So if that's actual, actually, Paul's Gospel is more of a royal narrative, then when Paul speaks about about the gospel compromise in Galatians, it's, it's, I think you can make a very strong case that what Paul is speaking about is a compromise to, on the one hand, The means by which the gospel is accessed, or our response to the gospel. So Paul is concerned about compromises to what it might mean to respond to the gospel, which is allegiance, I would argue, and that he's also equally concerned with with what this might mean for a gospel benefit, justification. But justification by faith is not the gospel on the one hand, it's the faith is the means by which we access the Gospels benefits, and on the other hand, justification is a benefit that flows from the gospel. But neither are actually the gospel like justification by faith is not the gospel. So once we kind of unpack all that, and we and we clarify the difference between. Mean the Gospel itself and its results and its benefits, it opens up some space for an alternative reading of Galatians, and in that alternative reading, we see that Paul actually sees justification by faith as the benefit that unites the church rather than separates it. So he sees justification as mainly language that has to do with the church not having separate parts or tears, but there's only one justified community, and it's not like you can be more righteous than I can be within this justified community, there's only one justified community, because there's only one king and only one gospel. That better reading of Galatians, I think, will help take Catholics and Protestants to a better place. Now that's just all I can do, by way of a quick overview. And I can't really evidence the case that I make. I do that in the book. I try to, you know, kind of lead through the evidential structure. So
Joshua Johnson:I think you know, if we know that, then the Protestants and Catholics actually declare the gospel and the true gospel of what, what it actually is, how can Protestants and Catholics better talk to each other? You laid out a little bit of a case in Galatians, what that looks like. But is there a way that we could talk to each other, that we can be used by that there is one one church and there is one gospel, and we're a part of it?
Matthew Bates:Yeah. So great practical question. Here's how we could better talk to each other. First of all, we could start more accurately, using gospel language on both sides of the aisle. If on both sides of the aisle we were to start calling the Gospel Jesus is the King, or Jesus is the Christ, that was like our starting point, right? And then we were to, kind of say, and a fuller gospel involves those various elements I've already discussed with you in being sent. You know, the death for sins, that the resurrect all that right, but that Jesus is enthroned at the right hand of King as king is really kind of the climax of the gospel. That would sort of help clarify our language, so we're not talking past one another. Because what happens is Protestants are like, you Catholics have compromised the gospel because you don't, you don't affirm justification by faith. And and Catholics, on the other hand, are like, well, it's really all about living the sacramental life, like, and yes, we do affirm faith. They're going to say, like, it's just part of baptism, right? And so we end up talking past one another a lot with our Gospel. And so cleaning up the gospel. Language secondarily, cleaning up faith. Language, right? If we, if we come to see that it's more about loyalty to a king and it's not just about trusting the promises of God. That helps clear up the faith works problem a bit, and so that we're not talking past one another on that front and then like we can recognize that actually the gospel does involve a certain kind of belief structure. It's quite close to the apostles creed, or something creedal, right? Whenever we talk, we talk about, I give 10 points that are an outline of the Gospel according to the Bible, and those 10 points map pretty decently onto something like the Apostles Creed. Now one of the things that's interesting is the Catholic Church has tended to call the creed. They've sometimes called that the gospel, or they sometimes call it the faith. The Bible has some justification for using that language, but it's slender, like, that's really kind of a later way of kind of framing all that out. It's not it ends up causing us to talk past one another a bit. So I think that clarifying all that well we could maybe all agree, hey, the gospel is something like the Apostles Creed. We should all agree that giving loyalty to King Jesus is the way in which we're saved. And then we can begin to see how sacramental structures or or other kinds of concerns might fit into those larger pieces. So
Joshua Johnson:if I I'm somebody that sees maybe the Catholic Church as a teaching structure that the Pope gets to declare what the church has said and what it believes and where it's going in relation to the bishops. But I'm am a part of the Catholic if I'm a part of the Catholic Church, I go, Oh, I don't really have a say, but I'm glad somebody does. Protestants would say, you know, everybody has a say, and so it's just a mish mash. And now we get, you know, over, you know, 1000s and 1000s denominations trying to emphasize one thing over the other. How does that that teaching aspect of both the Catholic Church and then the Protestant church, of everybody actually can find something in the Bible. What? How do we work that out with Protestants? Yeah,
Matthew Bates:that's it's a difficult issue, because you're right, that official Catholic position would be that, and this, this would be found in Dee verbom and other kinds of documents, would be that the teaching office of the Catholic Church alone has the right to interpret Scripture and authoritatively, meaning that you, if you're a private Catholic, whether a priest, whether whoever you might be, if you're a faithful Catholic and a devout Catholic, you have no right to decide what the Bible or the tradition means for yourself. Uh, you, you simply have the right to defer or assent to what the Pope, in conjunction with the bishop, says that it means you you have to kind of docilely assent to the dogma. Doesn't mean you don't have any questions. Doesn't mean you don't wrangle. Doesn't mean you can't read your Bible privately. You just have no ability to say, like, this is what it really means, right? Like, when I'm reading the Bible, let me tell you what it means. It means it means this. You can't do that within Catholicism. So this is a fairly major obstacle. But for Catholic Protestant ecumenical work, I don't think my book has a proposal for how to overcome that kind of fundamental disconnect between Catholics and Protestants. I think for the present, the biggest ecumenical hope for my book, it's more my book's more of a manifesto about where the truth is. Unless I'm invitation to ecumenically dialog, I hope that it does cause ecumenical dialog, but it's more like a statement of where I think the truth lies. I think the greatest hope would be that that that the historical truth claims of Scripture and history as those are increasingly clarified, that they pressure the Catholic Church to change its views and to re articulate its dogma. Now the Catholic Church is a hard time saying it's wrong. I don't, I don't, I don't say that to take pot shots at the Catholic Church, but it's sort of part of their infrastructure to have a hard time saying that they've ever been wrong about their doctrines. And so what they tend to do, rather than saying they're wrong, is to kind of clear their throat and sort of say in the past, we chose to articulate something this way in the in the wisdom of the past, but in the present, we are choosing to articulate it in a slightly different way, without ever really kind of retracting what was said in the past. So the hope would be, maybe that the Catholic church could take something like to kind of cut toward the end of the book, where I talk about their view of imparted righteousness, and I contrast that with Protestant views of imputed righteousness. And I put forward a model called incorporated righteousness. My hope would be, the Catholic church might say, like we now choose to articulate things in a more incorporated righteousness dimension, without really repudiating what they did in the past, but now clarifying that this is actually what they were aiming toward all along. That's probably the best we can hope for in anytime soon within the Catholic Church, would be that the Pope and the bishops opt to re articulate their positions in ways that are truer.
Joshua Johnson:Are we saved, or are we being saved through the faithfulness to Jesus, through our out our lives? What as people say, hey, once saved, always saved. It's there, it happens. Or is there a continuation, that we're actually continually being saved and we're moving towards faithfulness of Jesus. What is that distinction there?
Matthew Bates:Yeah, you're right. I mean, you're kind of pressing on the past, present, future dimensions of salvation and justification, and we need to be able to say all of those things like that, we have been saved in the past, like there was a moment whenever you declared your loyalty to King Jesus in an authentic way, right? And that you entered into the saved community, you were justified at that moment. And then you persevere in that community. Your Community membership is maintained by your ongoing confession of Jesus as Lord. If you stop confessing Jesus as Lord, then you are no longer part of that community, like you have left the boundaries of the Jesus confessing community. And so you left this, you've left the safe community, and you're not justified anymore. So there is and then in the future, right? Like, there will be a future judgment where you will be judged on the basis of your fidelity to King Jesus, which is not a perfect fidelity. Like you don't need to have perfect you just need to have an intention and a loyalty to him and allegiance to his ways, and that you're saved by that confession, that he is the Christ, and that you're actually trying to follow him. And that faith is something that actually involves works, like the works are kind of bound up in that from the ground up, so that your works, then will you will be judged on the basis of your works, as those confirm your your on the validity of your faith and are part of the equation. So there's a past, present and future dimension of of salvation and of justification. So I do not affirm what saved, always saved. I think that there that is. There's a small but vocal minority of Protestants who have favored a once saved, always saved, kind of construction. I don't think that there's really strong evidence for that in Scripture. Most of the confusion has to do with group categories. People will say, well, the Holy Spirit's a promise guaranteeing our inheritance, or things like that. But that's like, that's group language. It's guaranteeing our collective, like, the collective salvation of the group, not guaranteeing the status of any individual within that group. I think that we can commit apostasy, and that, as Hebrews makes clear, that we can have a genuine sharing with the Holy Spirit, as, as Hebrews says in Hebrews six, four through six, right? And. We can fall away in such a way that repentance doesn't happen.
Joshua Johnson:What implications does? Does it have to say Jesus is King, rather than just say Jesus is Savior alone? Is there an implication for us in the way that we live and the way that we work out our Christian life?
Matthew Bates:Yeah, so if we just say Jesus is Savior, I mean, we could fill out with additional content, but all we're really focusing is on, is on salvation from something, usually not salvation for something which is to misunderstand salvation in Scripture, like it's usually constructed in such a way that we're saved. You know, we have this plight. We're separated from God because of our sin, and so we need forgiveness so that we can go to heaven when we die. As true as all those things may be, that's not really what the Bible intends by its discussion of salvation. It's much more holistic, and that we are saved not just from hell or not just from our own selves, but we're saved for full restoration of our image bearing, so that the glory that is currently lacking in our lives and lacking in creation can reach a maximum again, so that we're restored to full health. So when we say that Jesus is Savior, I think that, unfortunately, a lot of people like have a kind of truncated content, right, that they they kind of associate with that, and they primarily have afterlife ideas in view, where Jesus comes to save us right now. Right now we enter into the eternal kind of life that will be a life that endures into the age to come into the resurrection age. So we have this eternal quality of life that we're rescued for and that we're saved into, right that involves this complete restoration. So, yes, it does change. There. There are, I think, big implications for discipleship as part of all that, right? Because we don't understand otherwise. Why, like Jesus says that we have to be disciples in order to be saved, right? I mean, he says, take up your cross and follow me. And he clearly predicates upon that, like your final judgment, right? Like that the Son of Man will come and, you know, and that and that he'll be ashamed, you know, of those who have not done so and so on and so forth, right? He, he makes it clear that taking up the cross is like non optional for our salvation, and following Him is non optional. But how are we struggle to put that together? And I think that part of the reason we struggle to put that together is overly cognitive ideas about faith that don't involve any kind of bodily loyalty to King Jesus. And so this correction is a hopeful one. I hope, I think, and hope for the church.
Joshua Johnson:I think so too. I have one question just I think is a little outside of what we're talking about, but this is, as disciples of Jesus. One of the things that the organization that I have been a part of has been teaching is the seven general commands of Jesus, that we could boil them, a lot of his commands, down to seven that then would then become more mature and like wider over time. But it's just a good starting place which we would say, Repent and believe and receive the Holy Spirit. Be one, be baptized, baptized, uh, break bread, which is communion or the Eucharist, love, which is God, your neighbors, other believers and your enemies, pray in the name of Jesus, give generously, and then go and make disciples. Is there anything that's that you think would be missing? That's a crucial piece. As disciples of Jesus, as we're working on our faith and we're pledging our allegiance to him, What Is there anything else that he has, like said, This is what it means to be a disciple that we haven't touched on in those Yeah,
Matthew Bates:that's hard because, I mean, love is such a big umbrella, right? I mean, I mean, what, what do you account within that? Do you count peacemaking, or do you count reconciliation? Do you, I mean, there's, there's so many dimensions of of love, and how does that interface with affections? Is like I was thinking about this because I just was doing DJ Gupta's book and thinking about my colleague at Northern Yeah. Anyway, so I think that given how we nuance love, right? I would say I don't think, I don't think of anything that's immediately lacking, but it's partly because that love, that love category, is pretty, pretty plastic. Yes,
Joshua Johnson:it is, it is, it's good. It's a good starting place, I think, for people, and we continue to grow in more depth and maturity over time and get the nuance of what those things are so good. I'm, I'm excited, yeah, no,
Matthew Bates:I think that's a good list. I think that's, that's a good starting place. If we all did that, we would be, we'd be doing a whole lot to, yeah, to improve the world and our walk with the Lord. Amen,
Joshua Johnson:that's good. So, Matthew, if you could talk to your readers, people pick up beyond the salvation wars. What hope do you have for your readers? Yeah,
Matthew Bates:so it's, it's, again, I want to stress this is kind of more like a theological manifesto about where. The truth lies, and then it has some proposals for how Protestants and Catholics have both misarticulated the gospel, misarticulated faith. But this doesn't mean like the church has been entirely wrong. I don't want to leave that impression or if somehow or another, like the gospel has been lacking until this blessed moment when you know it's been heroically discovered by scholars like me and others who are working along these lines, I think that would be a false narrative. The gospel has always been present in the church, and it's partly because the gospel is something quite like the Apostles Creed. People have been responding to the gospel. People have been responding to Jesus with loyalty, but sometimes they haven't talked about it that way, or haven't. There's been a lack of nuance. And so what, what I'm hoping is that this proposal will sharpen all that, and in so doing, remove some blockades, move some obstacles out of the way that have kept Christians apart, that have also, like stunted our discipleship and and cause people anxiety about salvation. As people, I think, sometimes are deeply anxious about their salvation. I hope this book is a hopeful a hopeful word for people that just kind of cuts through to the early Christian truth with clarity and that they find it to be a good resource for their own spiritual journeys, but also for larger ecumenical conversations with people in different branches of Christianity than they currently reside in. Oh, maybe it'll help them to see, like, why am I actually a brother or sister with this Catholic or with this Protestant? Or why can't I actually say no, Catholics are Christians? Why can I say that with integrity? It'll give them language to help them see why that's actually a biblical claim. I hope that would be my hope.
Joshua Johnson:That's great. That's good. Couple quick questions I have at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you
Matthew Bates:give my 21 year old self? It's probably the same advice I would give my current self, which is, don't be such a narcissist. Like, things aren't all about you dude. Like, Get that through your head. Remember that Jesus is the King. It's about serving him. It's about bolstering his people. It's about doing the work you can do. But that, yeah, it's not about your successes. It's not about your career journey. It's about doing his good work. I still need to hear that. Yeah, it's not just my 21 year old self. It's like a constant battle.
Joshua Johnson:Yes, and that's true, we all need to hear that. So thank you for sharing it with all of us. We need to hear that anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend, well,
Matthew Bates:I already mentioned NIJ Gupta's fine book. I have a podcast I do, called on script, and I just interviewed nej for that a week or two ago. So the affections of Christ Jesus are on my mind. So that's worth reading. I'm teaching a course at Northern on discipleship. So as part of that, I'm revisiting some of my old favorites, making my students read those so some Dallas Willard, we've been doing renovation of the heart, and we've been doing CS Lewis is the great divorce, but a new one for me that I hadn't read, that I quite enjoyed, is rich volodys, the deeply formed life, which I think does a nice job of speaking to our contemporary situation and to think through some issues of spiritual formation in our current urban busyness. So that's a nice book. Great.
Joshua Johnson:Those are good recommendations. How can people go out and get beyond the salvation wars? Is there anywhere you would like to point people
Matthew Bates:to you can get it anywhere. Fine books are sold, I suppose. But yeah, of course, Amazon's probably the place most people are going to trot over to and and, you know, Amazon's, of course, like a mixed blessing for the publishing world, right? There are people who feel passionately one way or another. The truth is, is it's a major force. And, yeah, sales on Amazon do help authors because it bolts their Amazon rankings. And most of the sales go through Amazon. So in some ways, it's the system we're forced to live with. Until we change it, I'll let let listeners be their own conscious conscience in terms of how they want to engage with it, with with that large beast, Amazon. Yeah.
Joshua Johnson:So you could go and listen to Matthew also on on script in his own podcast. You could go study with him northern seminary, which would be great. Is there anywhere else that you'd like to point people
Matthew Bates:to? Oh, I've got a personal web page. I'm allegedly on ax or Twitter or whatever they call it nowadays, but I don't spend much time there. Facebook. If you want to reach out Facebook, Friend me. I usually try to accept requests. But, yeah, I've only limited capacity to interact with people there, but I do better on that than any other social media. So I do engage people quite a lot on Facebook when I can
Joshua Johnson:perfect Well, Matthew, thank you for this conversation. It was great to go into the salvation wars. And then how can we go beyond those? What is the truth of. Salvation, what does the Bible actually say about the gospel, about allegiance, about being with and for King Jesus, making sure that we have allegiance towards him, and that we could actually have a better conversation between Protestants and Catholics, and we can know what is salvation? Very helpful, very good. I loved our conversation. I love your book. I think everybody should go and get your book, and then get all your your books from the past as well, and just do a deep dive for the next few months. And Matthew Bates and his work, so it's good. So thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you, Joshua, you
