Five Stars for Matthew Bates’ New Book, Beyond Salvation Wars.
Bates provides an excellent analysis of scripture and comes to some novel conclusions that deserve serious consideration.
This is the most important sentence in “Beyond Salvation Wars”
“The gift of time -- nearly five hundred years to reflect -- and the recovery of ancient documents that inject new information can help us remodel justification.”
To this I would add “and other elements of our theology.” Today’s theological elite simply know more than the saints of the 1500s whose understanding of scripture is still considered orthodox. Bates does an excellent job communicating this enhanced knowledge to those of us who care for the spiritual needs of lay people.
The subtitle of his book is “Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved.” Bates hasn’t convinced me that we “must” reimagine anything. Instead, he has offered an excellent analysis of scripture that leads to a novel way of understanding the Christ event. Whether that warrants the disruption of how many people, especially seniors, currently understand the faith is an open question. My mother is 94-years-old and she is still upset that we changed the words to “The Doxology”. If I tried to introduce these concepts to her, her head would explode.
For those of us who still have some flexibility in our belief systems, I will summarize some of Bates’ important points below.
The Gospel is the ten major aspects of the Christ event: preexistence, God’s sending of Christ, incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, post resurrection appearances, ascension (enthronement), Christ’s sending of the Spirit, Christ’s return as judge.
God’s grace is the fact that the Gospel occurred in history. It is not some extra power that God bestows on some humans to help them hear, understand and accept the Gospel, pledge allegiance to King Jesus, and live in the manner that he teaches.
The appropriate human response to experiencing grace, i.e. to hearing about the Christ-event, is “faith in Christ,” accurately understood as pledging and living out one’s allegiance to Christ.
If a person has pledged and is living out the allegiance at the moment of death, that person will experience salvation.
The Church is the collection of people who have pledged and are currently living out their allegiance to Christ plus all of those who have previously died in that state. (It likely also includes some people who lived before the incarnation but that isn’t that important to our life of faith.)
God has not predetermined who will and who will not be saved. God has predetermined that everyone who happens to have pledged and is living out their allegiance to Christ at the time of their death will be saved. Humans have at least enough free will to pledge our allegiance and to persevere in it until death.
There is a lot more information in the book including support for his theology from scripture and other early Christian sources and a bunch of implications for church practices. There are also many important questions that Bates doesn’t address, such as proper motivations for pledging our allegiance to Christ and the consequences of misunderstanding what allegiance entails. However, I have it on excellent authority that he addresses these and other issues in the prequel, Gospel Allegiance: What Faith in Jesus Misses for Salvation in Christ.
I’m going to spend a couple of days reading Calvin and Hobbs to clear my head before diving into that.