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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Matthew Bates
This is Matthew Bates, Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary.
David Capes
Matthew Bates, Matt, good to see you. Welcome back to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
Matthew Bates
Thanks so much, David. It’s great to be with you. It’s good to be back.
David Capes
It’s always good to have you. You’ve been with us before to talk about some of your other books, and today we’re going to be talking about Beyond the Salvation Wars. But since you were on last, you actually changed institutions. Tell us a little bit about that.
Matthew Bates
That’s right. I spent some 14 years as professor of New Testament at Quincy University, which is a Catholic Franciscan University in Quincy, Illinois. It’s been a great season of life that’s just come to an end in August, when I accepted a new position as professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. I’m working alongside Nijay Gupta in the New Testament department and some other great folks too, like David Fitch, Ingrid Farrow, Beth Felker Jones and Marshall Hatch. Some great folks. It’s been a rich season.
David Capes
That’s in Chicago land, but you and your family are getting ready to move to Oregon.
Matthew Bates
Yes, it’s a position that combines remote teaching over Zoom and other things, with occasional in person opportunities. Our doctoral program is still in-person, and that’s an intensive format. If you’re looking to do a Doctor of Ministry or something along those lines, then drop me a note. But the master’s teaching is mostly over Zoom. We also do occasional in-persons there when we’re starting a cohort, or as people have time and opportunity.
David Capes
That’s going to be great. I’m just excited that you’re with us today to talk about this book. It’s a great book, and I appreciate it so much. I’ve had a lot of dialogue over the years with various Protestant people and also with Catholics. And a lot of the things we talk about has to do with salvation and what we believe and think about the cross, justification, sacraments and those kinds of things. And your book deals with all of that one way or another. By the way, the subtitle of the book is “Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How They Are Saved.” Interesting title.
Matthew Bates
It’s an ambitious book in that sense. I don’t think that this book is going to heal all Catholic and Protestant wounds. The idea is to make a step forward in our ecumenical dialogue and our ecumenical progress. This is a book about how both Catholics and Protestants, though, have gotten things wrong. It’s more of a theological manifesto, in that sense, as it makes a scripture and history-based case for a certain kind of configuration of soteriology that’s got something to say to both Catholics and Protestants. And the claim isn’t that everyone is getting everything wrong. We don’t make claims such as Catholics have fundamentally misunderstood salvation, or Protestants have fundamentally misunderstood it.
It’s that we can maybe sharpen our conversation about certain aspects of salvation, and as we nuance those very specifically, where we make a small tweak here, a small tweak there. These tweaks would have some support in the tradition or people who believed such things down through the eras. Nevertheless, when we bring it all together, it may be a slightly different package. There’s a holistic model that’s a little bit different than what you would find offered within, I think, Catholicism, or any strict Protestant denomination. I call it the gospel allegiance model. I have experience in the Catholic world, as I did a PhD at Notre Dame and spent 14 years as professor in a Catholic institution. But I am Protestant by conviction. This is a critique from within on the Protestant side, semper reformanda,
[Latin for] “always reforming’ critique, trying to aim even more precisely toward the truth.
David Capes
One of the things I think that gets in the way is the language that we use. I’ve been in places where Protestant will say to Catholic, when were you born again, or when were you saved? And a lot of times, Catholics don’t use those terms in the same way as Protestants. And I’ve been in other places where somebody says to a Catholic, are you a Christian? And they said, I’m Catholic. Those kind of word choices don’t help us at all. And sometimes I think it would help us just to discuss the language that we use around salvation, which is a part of what I think you’re doing.
Matthew Bates
Yes, a lot of the energy in the book is bent toward that, both from a scriptural and historical framework, saying, what exactly is the gospel? I think that, on the one hand, we might fault Catholics for gospel imprecision. They teach the gospel absolutely in the catechism and other places. Once you clarify what the gospel is from scripture. But they often tend to call it the faith or the creed. This can be confusing, as they will also talk about the Apostle’s Creed, which is very close to the biblical and apostolic gospel. They call that the creed, obviously, then they build on it with the Nicene Creed, and it begins to fold into some additional traditional elements. But certainly the gospel is thoroughly taught.
Meanwhile, on the Protestant side, I think that sometimes there’s been a little bit of slippage specifically around justification by faith, and that’s partly because Luther emphasized that so heavily as part of the gospel. He built it into Protestantism from the initial framework onward. And I think that a more precise way to speak about justification by faith would be to say it’s a true doctrine, but that justification is a benefit that flows from the gospel, and that faith is actually how we respond to the gospel. But technically, justification by faith is not the heart of the gospel. It’s better positioned as a benefit we
receive in light of Christ’s accomplished work in winning justification for us. But our actual receipt of justification is a benefit that we get from the gospel, not the gospel itself. So, trying to clarify language like that is part of the task that I’m undertaking in Beyond the Salvation Wars.
David Capes
Early on you give a definition to the gospel allegiance model. Let me read that and let me get you to comment on it. The big idea you say within the gospel allegiance model is easy to grasp: “We are saved not merely by trusting that God’s saving promises for us are true in Jesus, but by bodily allegiance to Him as King.” Now that is a little different way of construing things. Tell me what you mean by that.
Matthew Bates
That’s the big claim in the model, that the gospel is royal. I think this is increasingly being accepted by more and more people. Not just scholars, but people in the pews as the idea of a King Jesus gospel is trickling down. Christ, of course, it means anointed one, but in terms of how it was utilized in Jesus, there it was mostly royal Davidic language. The claim Jesus is the Christ means Jesus is the King. And if we scrutinize scripture with care, that’s actually the most common summary of the gospel, is just the assertion Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the long-awaited Davidic hope. When we begin to realize that the gospel’s basic framework is about a king, that might help us rethink what faith means.
We’re talking about putting faith in Christ. If we tend to just treat Christ as a name, then we might think of it as all about just believing the promises that are true in association with this person. But if instead we see that it’s royal language, then that begins to help us to rethink what faith might mean. And we might see that, on the one hand, faith can mean trust in, but it can also mean allegiance toward. And that maybe both of those ideas are in view and that we need to think more about allegiance to this king. So those are some of the central claims that are operating in the gospel allegiance model.
