If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

(putative) Calvinists, again, on Matt Bates. And more on justice, humility, and scholarly conversation

Fellow Pilgrims,

I love John Calvin, and I love good Calvinist theology. (I don’t entirely agree with it, but I love it.) What I don’t love is folks, using the name of Calvin, policing the theology of other Christians, especially Arminians, and doing so without paying fair attention to the arguments of those they’ve decided to police.

John Wesley and his good Calvinist friend George Whitefield managed to disagree in friendship, with respect, with John reminding his fellow Arminians of the vast riches shared by Calvinists and Arminians.

Still, we can witness many a false claim by Calvinists against Wesley. (“You’re a Wesleyan, so you don’t believe in original sin, right?” from a freshman undergrad to his theology professor.)

Witness John Piper’s claims against N.T Wright.

Witness an attack against my colleague Matthew Bates’s work, first in a review at TGC and then in a hour long video discussion between Albert Mohler, Tom Schreiner, Jim Hamilton, & Steve Wellum. (I don’t want to provide direct clicks, but the footnote will let you find the sources).¹

Bates’s new book, Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We are Saved, takes his previous work on allegiance into conversation with Protestant/Catholic disagreements about salvation. It’s Bates’s perspective on the new perspective.

“The Greek word pistis, generally rendered ‘faith’ or ‘belief,’ as it pertains to Christian salvation, quite simply has little correlation with ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as these words are generally understood and used in contemporary Christian culture, and much to do with allegiance.” — Matthew Bates, from Salvation by Allegiance Alone

Bates, like Luther, is helping us to shift from thinking of saving faith as an act of cognitive belief—private, interior, individual, and disembodied—to understanding it as placing trust in Jesus Christ such that our allegiance is to him and not to the powers of this world.

“Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times. This confidence in God’s grace and knowledge of it makes all men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all His creatures; and this is the work of the Holy Ghost in faith.” — Martin Luther, Commentary on Romans

Bates’s new book has drawn fire from Calvinist gatekeepers who—frustratingly—do not engage adequately with his actual text.

Tom Schreiner accuses Bates of claiming that the church had lost the gospel.

“And I think for someone to say, ‘After 2000 years, I understand what the gospel is. I’m proposing a third way’—it’s just historically, theologically, very implausible.”

Schreiner, surely, is not ignorant of the many and various “third ways” proposed throughout church history, from debates within Augustinian theology ranging the 1000 years between Augustine and Luther, to attempts to mediate the disagreements of the reformation, to the origin of the so-called Arminian versus Calvinist debates themselves, up through the previously mentioned N.T. Wright, or, from the more Calvinist camp, a fine book like Darrell Bock’s Recovering the Real Lost Gospel.

Schreiner and company, surely, ought to pay attention to Bates’s own words.

“I am certainly not claiming that the church has been missing the gospel up until this blessed moment—as if it has been heroically rediscovered only now.”

Crucifix, 1230/40, Master of the Bigallo Crucifix (Italian, active about 1225-65), via the Art Institute of Chicago

But wait, never mind all that, let’s quote Romans 10:9:

“if you confess with you mouth and BELIEVE…”

“What,” says the critic “are we supposed to slot in there [in place of the word believe]?” (This is a quote from the Mohler panel, not me making up a hypothetical.)

As if theologians and Bible scholars aren’t constantly engaged in the project of trying to understand the biblical text more faithfully? As if we weren’t dealing with translated texts, received in context? As if it is completely obvious what it means to “believe”? As if preaching—speaking the Word for this time and this place—weren’t the basic task of Christian theology?

Look, I’m an old fashioned theologian. I like a little new perspective, but I keep insisting that it’s more coherent with the old than a lot of the rhetoric might suggest. I’m old fashioned enough to think quoting Romans 10:9 is a useful thing to do, old fashioned enough to think that it names a basic, normative pattern² for salvation. (A basic pattern for what happens when we profess allegiance to Christ the king?)

But however central such a basic pattern may be, it’s inexcusable to act as though all of our conversations about gospel and soteriology could be solved by quoting the right Bible verse.

As if one can’t quote back.

“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1-2).

And hey, that level of complication is right there in Romans, as annoying as it may be to those with antinomian longings.

Our “Calvinist” critics are worried that allegiance introduces works: works righteousness, salvation by works. Ironically, though, work like Bates’s is and has been central to setting so many free from the tyranny of that kind of legal burden.

As if “believe” can’t be turned into a work.

As if turning us back to King Jesus weren’t always the right response.

As if Jesus doesn’t change our lives, taking us out of the individual, personal, and cognitive and into the embodied life of the kingdom where justice and righteousness reign.

I don’t agree with Bates about everything. (If I were to sum that up, it would probably go like this: he’s trained in biblical studies; I’m trained in theology.) But the kind of critique we’re seeing here is disingenuous. Gospel fellowship, gospel scholarly conversation, must take care to be true. It must proceed in love and in humility. And it ought to pay close attention to the text being critiqued. Be like Whitefield. Be like Wesley. Be like Jesus.

“The gospel is not just a story about Jesus; it is a transformative story because the gospel unleashes God’s saving power for humanity.” — Matthew Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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1. Here are broken links (to view, copy and paste, then take out the spaces)

to the TGC review

https://www.thegos pelcoalition.org/reviews/beyond-salvation-wars/

and the Mohler panel discussion

https://albertm ohler.com/2025/05/06/have-we-really-misunderstood-the-gospel-for-2000-years/

2. But basic, normative patterns may well have exceptions. Anyone who assumes an infant who dies can be saved is—rightly—assuming that the normative pattern of Romans 10 does not apply in every case, or at least that it does not have to apply this side of the grave.