Beyond The Salvation Wars, Matthew Bates - Spring 2025
TLDR: I think that Beyond the Salvation Wars was an excellent read. Bates writes a very challenging book that offers serious critiques of both Catholic and (prevailing) Protestant models of justification while suggesting a Biblical, coherent, useful, and powerfully simple model to take their place.
Full disclosure: I’m a huge Matthew Bates fan. I preordered this book and put a bookmark in my previous book (Roman Faith and Christian Faith, Theresa Morgan - currently on page 122 with just 500 pages left to go) to read this one as soon as it arrived. This book builds on Bate’s previous works. If you really wanted to, you could skip them to read Beyond the Salvation Wars, but I would recommend against it. This is especially true for Salvation by Allegiance Alone. That is a river you should cross with due attention before you’re ready to deal with the implications of an “allegiant” faith model, which you’ll find in the book I’m reviewing here. As a reminder, I consider Salvation by Allegiance Alone to be the most important book I’ve read in the last 15 years. I have given it to several people, and I have a handful of fresh copies sitting in my office right now to be given away. Do you want one?? Reach out to me and I’ll mail it to you in exchange only for your promise to read it!
Here is a brief summary of what this author has established in previous works that is drawn upon here:
Pistis - the Greek word typically translated “faith” in our New Testaments is best understood and even translated as “allegiance.” This allegiance must be embodied. It is a willful, voluntary response to the Gospel of King Jesus, not imparted to the believer, and not entirely an interior state as commonly asserted by various Protestant theologies.
The Kingship of Jesus is the centerpiece of the Gospel.
While Justification by grace through faith(allegiance) alone is a result/benefit of the Gospel, it does not belong to the Gospel itself.
The Gospel is one narrative about Jesus. Specifically, that narrative is: Jesus the King…
preexisted as God the Son,
was sent by the Father as promised,
took on human flesh in fulfillment of God’s promises to David,
died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,
was buried,
was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,
appeared to many witnesses
is enthroned at the right hand of God as the ruling Christ
has sent the Holy Spirit to his people to effect his rule, and
will come again as final judge to rule. (BtSW P. 39)
Much of the earlier portion of this book is spent establishing these points. However, unlike in previous works, these points in Beyond the Salvation Wars are made primarily in the context of critiquing Catholic and prevailing Protestant theology. Whereas Bate’s previous books were primarily a matter of model construction, BtSW is very direct about what Bates intends to correct with his theological position. This format makes BtSW a real firecracker. Regardless of your prior theological commitments, you are almost certain to find a difficult challenge to one or a few of your own presuppositions in this book.
Bates’s critiques of the prevailing Protestant model assert that the Gospel does not actually include personal justification by faith, but that it is instead a possible benefit of the Gospel itself. Bates draws on recent scholarship to show that the Reformation era inclusion of all bodily acts as “works” in Pauline literature is without warrant. He argues against the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints (‘once saved, always saved’). Finally, he argues that the model of imputed righteousness is without Biblical warrant.
Bates’s critiques of the Catholic model focus on their understanding of the sacraments. Bates defeats an ex-opere-operato understanding of Baptism (more on that below), and challenges how these and the other sacraments can be the medium of justification. Finally, he argues against the Catholic doctrine of imparted righteousness (in parallel with the Protestant, imputed righteousness).
However, there is more to this book than a critique of these models. Bates affirms that both Protestants and Catholics, in their core understanding, essentially get the true Gospel (outlined above) right - these critiques notwithstanding. Then, Bates takes key components of these models and shows how they can be combined and used in a Gospel Allegiance model, which could potentially create a path towards Church unity.
Bates takes the secondary Catholic metaphors from the Council of Trent of ingrafting/union and pushes them to the front. He also encourages the Catholic insistence that conversion requires and includes real moral change (works). From the Protestant side, Bates maintains that salvation is by faith alone, when properly understood as allegiance, and that our righteousness is derivative, received from Jesus the Christ. This process rounds into a closing presentation of Bates’s third-way model for justification, which he calls “incorporated righteousness.” Bates’s presentation of this model is Biblical, powerfully simple, and compelling. I think that you need to read it.
This Book Pushed/advanced my understanding of Baptism
As I mentioned above, the format and boldness of this book virtually guarantee that some of your theological positions/presuppositions will be challenged as you read it. For me, that came with Bates’s chapter on Baptism. Functionally, Bates’s handling of Baptism in this book serves to side with the Protestants against the ex-opere-operato understanding of Baptism in Catholic dogma. Therefore, the chapter is postured slightly towards establishing what water baptism does not* do. My working thesis on the topic going into the book is that water baptism is described in the New Testament as ordinarily the moment of spirit-infusion / justification. However, Bates challenges this understanding in a few ways.
He argues that the fact that we are not told that the Apostles ever underwent baptism in the name of Jesus, yet received the Holy Spirit, is evidence that water baptism is not necessarily the occasion for the bestowal.
He argues that Cornelius’s (& household’s) reception of the Holy Spirit in Acts 10 shows that water baptism is not the occasion for justification, but then asks himself why Peter then proceeded to baptize Cornelius and answers “We don’t know.” before going on to speculate that it may have been to “devote the physical body to God.” This, in my mind, indicates a somewhat underdeveloped understanding of the purpose of water baptism in the New Testament that I would want to have further conversation with Bates about.
He explores the ritual washing practices of the Essene community, knowledge of which is available to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the literature of Josephus related to John’s baptism to construct the theoretical context for the New Testament sacrament of baptism. Here, he finds that a physical consecration of the body was key to these antecedent practices and suggests that this was a key presupposed understanding for the baptismal practice of the apostles.
I’m intrigued by these arguments. I’d say I’m leaning towards agreeing with them. My hesitations are based on the construction from silence about the Apostles’ own baptisms being tenuous and a general resistance to overplaying the importance /influence of Qumran literature upon the 1st century world (I think that because we have so much of their literature so well preserved we too heavily consider the role of this small band of zealouts doing life out by the dead sea). There are more important developments in Bates’s baptism chapter:
He establishes, successfully, from Scripture, the fact that baptism must be voluntary.
He asserts that Baptism in the New Testament era was performed via self-immersion. This is really interesting to me, his case sounds pretty good, but I’m suspicious for two reasons: One, I’ve read two much larger academic treatments of Baptism in the Early Church (Everett Ferguson and Maxwell Johnson) and don’t remember seeing this there. In Fact, Ferguson argues that NT baptism was administered beginning with John the Baptist. (Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church. Eerdmans, 2009, p, 88). The second is a Biblical text that Bates does not bring up. If NT baptism was self-administered, what was Philip doing down in the water with the eunuch in Acts 8?
He examines the literature of the Didache, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus on the subject. Here, he points out that the earliest Church literature makes it abundantly clear that baptism must be voluntary and feature a confession. Importantly, Bates notes that the literature that he references was not available to the earliest reformers or to the Council of Trent. Those theologians were missing these crucial witnesses to the Church’s earliest understanding and practice on the subject of baptism and faith/works, and Bates leans on them to pave a way forward that cuts through the Protestant/Catholic divide.
He points out that we should distinguish between the singular event of water baptism (i.e., the physical act of going under the water) from the complex, multi-event ‘baptsim’ which he argues often appears in the New Testament as shorthand for the ordinary conversion event grouping which would include belief, repentance, and an allegiant confession. I think this is a really helpful distinction, and it is new to me. It makes sense of how baptism can be called saving in the New Testament (1st Peter 3 explicitly, Romans 6 implicitly) and how we could also see evidence of salvation in someone like Cornelius or the thief on the cross before, or apart from their physical baptism. I’d love to have a conversation with the author about the pastoral/practical implications of this distinction.
Bates makes a convincing case from scripture that the allegiant profession of Jesus as King is the key event to which we should tie the infusion of the Holy Spirit and justification. He notes several times throughout the book that the ordinary or premier occasion for such a confession was/is in the baptismal waters. Thus, contrary to Catholic Dogma, water baptism is not the occasion of salvation. Bates contends that water baptism is not the “necessary or exclusive way” for a person to enter into Holy Spirit union, but that it is the “ordinary” way (p. 259). I think that I can agree to his construction, this certainly marks a development in my understanding from prior to reading this book. You can see much of Bates’s position on Baptism in the quotes that I have selected from the book below.
I wonder how differently Bates’s treatment of the subject of Baptism would read if he were not confronting/defeating the ex opere operato pedobaptism of Catholic dogma. If involuntary baptism was removed from the discussion, would Bates make a correction(s) to, say, Zwingli’s position on Baptism, which thrives in much of the Protestant world today?
Here are eleven key quotes from the Book:
Although inclusive of it, saving faith is not primarily trusting that God's saving promises in Jesus are true. Nor is it trusting that faith alone is effective. Rather, faith is a relational way of life, bodily and communally expressed, from start to finish. For personal faith to be saving it must be relationally externalized bodily as enacted allegiance to Jesus in his capacity as the rescuing and victorious king announced in the gospel. (P.22)
The apologists were somewhat available to second-generation Protestant Reformers, such as Calvin, but not to the first generation, nor to the vital early decrees of the Catholic Council of Trent. Thus the Catholic-Protestant divide was forged without pertinent information that would allow the Bible's teaching about salvation or the church's earliest doctrinal history to be fully understood. The same is true with respect to the Calvinist-Arminian disjuncture. (P.13)
Paul never identifies the attainment of individualized justification to be part of the gospel itself per se. Nor does any other New Testament writer do so. Rather, as we will see more fully in the next chapter, in Scripture/personal justification is a result or benefit of the gospel when an individual is united to King Jesus and his body via the Spirit. (P. 63)
Paul's earliest interpreters who weigh in on the matter, second-century Christians such as Jenatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenacus, interpreted Paul to be saying that good works in general have a saving value as an expression of faith but that works of the law as an independent system have no saving value (e.g.. circumcision, food laws, and observing special days). The earliest church's understanding of Paul's theology was that works of the law had no independent saving value, but within an allegiance to the Christ framework, good works formed part of the basis for final salvation. (P. 87)
Any single baptism is a complex process that consists of numerous smaller events. When we read in Scripture that baptism is saving, we must consider that a specific part or parts of the process could be uniquely definitive for actualizing salvation, whereas other parts may be merely customary or optional. In other words, to say that baptism is saving is imprecise with regard to baptism as a complex, multipart event that may have essential and inessential subparts. (P. 109)
However it happens within the larger sequence of events that connect with water baptism, immersion in the Holy Spirit must be achieved, for that is put forward as the moment personal salvation is decisively entered for the first time… although there are important exceptions, it is normally presupposed that Spirit union will be achieved during the baptismal process. (P.119)
Simon's example teaches us that voluntary individual repentance was required as the true cleansing agent for personal salvation as part of the baptismal process, even amid a group baptism. (P.121)
Baptism in the New Testament and by the apostles and their immediate heirs was not interpreted as effective by virtue of the sacramental action itself as performed by a priest or other functionary… Rather, the baptismal candidate's own invocation oath was essential. The baptismal candidate was expected to call upon the Lord Jesus personally as part of self-immersion and self-washing during the baptismal process. (P. 124)
The New Testament in general and Paul's letters in particular regularly put forward pistis as the instrument of justification. If Paul understood saving faith as a definitive loyalty oath that causes justification-which was coterminous with union with the Holy Spirit-then all the pieces fit. Baptism per se is never described as justification's specific instrument in Scripture. This suggests that the apostles deemed baptism saving because it was the premier or definitive occasion to invoke the name to express loyalty to King Jesus. (P.125)
Personal salvation starts when a person declares loyalty to the Christ decisively so as to enter the Spirit-filled community. In the New Testament, this ordinarily (but neither necessarily nor exclusively takes place when a person voluntarily undertakes baptism. (P.171)
This explains why "the righteousness of God" is repeatedly for those who perform the pistis action: it is a benefit we receive when we are united to the righteous king by joining his Spirit-filled body through our professed allegiance. But it remains the Christ's righteousness first and foremost as the extrinsic source: it is ours only derivatively, when we join the group that is united to him and Spirit-infused. (p. 248)