Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1051: Salvation by Allegiacne Alone: Dr. Matthew Bates

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Matthew W. Bates (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) argues that the Greek word pistis often translated as “faith” is better understood as “allegiance.” Therefore, we are justified by allegiance to Christ alone, not simply by an intellectual assent to the facts about Jesus. This, of course, raises deep theological questions about the role of human action in justification and salvation and whether the Reformers understood things correctly when they talked about justification by faith alone. Matthew is a Professor of Theology at Quincy University. His main teaching area is the Bible and early Christian literature. He also teaches courses in Western Religion, Church History, and Christian Spirituality. Dr. Bates is an award-winning author. His popular and influential books include Gospel Allegiance (Brazos, 2019), Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Baker Academic, 2017), and The Birth of the Trinity (Oxford University Press, 2015). Current book projects on salvation and christology are underway. Dr. Bates also co-hosts OnScript, a Bible and theology podcast. He enjoys family life, hiking, baseball, and good conversation. More info on Dr. Bates, his publications, and his availability for speaking can be found at MatthewWBates.com.

Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in a Row. My guest today is Dr. Matthew Bates. Matthew received his PhD from Notre Dame University and has a master's degree from Regent University over in Vancouver, BC. He has written several books, including Gospel Allegiance, The Birth of the Trinity, and Salvation by Allegiance Alone. And he is a professor of theology at Quincy University. His book, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, and he is a professor of theology at Quincy University. His book, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, raised a lot of conversations when it first came out. I remember when it first came out, a lot of people were writing about it. So I'm really excited to get to know Matthew and hear about his definition of faith as allegiance. So please welcome to

the show for the first time, the wonder only, Matthew Bates. All right. Hey, Matt. Thanks for coming on Theology in the Raw. I've been wanting to talk to you for quite some time now, actually. I know we've never even, we've maybe corresponded on social media. That's about it. But yeah, I've been wanting to talk to you about your stuff on the gospel. Hey, thanks, Preston. Yeah. And same to you. I've admired your work from afar and it's great to meet you in person. Great. So your book, Salvation by Allegiance Alone,

I remember when that book came out because Scott McKnight was blogging about it back when... Is he still blogging? I don't know. But yeah, I remember, I'm like, well, that title alone is obviously starting to send a message, Salvation by Allegiance alone. And then, you know, yeah, just kind of looking at it. And I've done a lot of work on the Greek word pistis, pistou and others. I'm like, huh. And immediately I was like, I think he might be on to something without even knowing what your thesis is. So why don't you give us the backstory? What led to writing that book?

What was stirring in your thinking about the idea of faith? And then I would love to have you unpack how you translate faith as allegiance. Yeah. So it's sort of funny because that book did come out in the year that the Protestant Reformation was celebrated as its 500th anniversary. And so a lot of people thought I had like deliberately planned it and had been, you know, trying to coordinate my, my effort to compliment the, you know, the 500th anniversary of the Protestant reformation with this clever challenge. Uh, you know, as of course, you know,

Luther, uh, the salvation by faith alone or saved by faith alone is a Reformation era slogan. And, you know, there I am tweaking it to say allegiance alone. And yeah, of course, there is that deliberate conversation, right, with the ongoing Protestant heritage. But yeah, it was not intended as a poke in the eye in that way, or even coordinated with the 500 that just happened to be, that's what I was writing. That's what just happened to come out. But yeah, the backstory behind it is I first got interested in what does faith mean in a more serious way? Actually, back when I was doing graduate work at Regent College, and this would have been, oh, like 2001 to 2003, I was doing a master's degree in biblical studies there. And as part

of that, we were just reading a variety of things, but I had a course that allowed me to pick a book and I picked, and he writes the challenge of Jesus. We'd like 50 different books we could choose. And out of those, that was one of the, I think we had to choose seven of them or I don't remember, but I chose his and that kind of grabbed my eye. And as part of that, he has an intriguing passage where he talks about Josephus, who was a general in the Jewish war against Rome, who had called some of those who were, you know, his allies and troops that were working with him to repent and to show pistis toward him. And he uses not the, he doesn't use the noun form pistis, he uses actually the adjective form of pistis. But that really caught my attention as Wright, you know, says like, look at how close this is to what Jesus is calling people to do. And it really made me think a lot about like, what does this word, you know, faith mean that we translate?

So right away, and this is such a large part of our salvation discourse. And it really just got the wheels spinning. And yeah, from there, I had many, many other occasions and opportunities to think through dimensions of this conversation, but that's maybe enough for a beginning backstory for you. Well, is there more? Because just the other day, I was doing some writing and research on the Greco-Roman imperial cult as a background, especially in terms of the language of the first century and everything. And obviously, pistis too can be used as a way of expressing your allegiance to the Roman emperor and the empire. Are there a lot of other references like

that? Like the Josephus one where it has what seems is very Christian almost flavor to it or using common language? Is that fairly common or is that one just stand out above all else? Well, you know, that's the one that comes to my mind. But certainly pistis as loyalty is not uncommon in Josephus. In fact, there was a major study done on Josephus's faith language. I'm trying to remember the name of the study, but it was one of the categories he looked at, you know, was loyalty, like categories. So there's, yeah, it's a well-known thing. And the best resource that would kind of bring together like a comprehensive look at pistis in the Greco-Roman world is Teresa Morgan's book, and that's called Roman Faith and Christian Faith. And she looks like, she spends like a good chunk of the book just

looking at Greco-Roman resources and showing the breadth of how the word pistis was used. But then going beyond that, she actually looks at the Septuagint and then looks like exhaustively through the New Testament and moves through it, looking at pretty much every use of the word pistis, if I remember right. At least it's fairly comprehensive. And she wants to develop a full taxonomy of the meaning of this word. But she would demonstrate that it frequently means loyalty or allegiance. And this is not something that anybody would... I don't think there's anyone who would dispute that claim. Can you... Okay. So can you unpack the difference between the English word faith and the English word allegiance,

because these are two kind of competing, or are they competing, or is there an overlap here? Yeah, there's an overlap. And I think that's part of the issue is that probably, you know, back in the day when, you know, Wycliffe, Tyndale, you know, Miles Coverdale, people were doing early work on English translations of the Bible, yeah, words like trust and like they're connected to truth or like ideas of, you know, of faith, like we're connected to certain kinds of social constructs and contracts that just are not as large today, but we still use them sometimes. You know, like we might think of a trust like in a financial institution, like, you know, whenever someone establishes a trust, right? Or like we might say that that person

broke faith if they violated paying back a contract, right? They agreed to pay back a certain amount and then they broke faith by not following through. That's the kind of place where we might see a lot of overlap between faith and loyalty, right? I mean, as you need to follow through with what you're doing. And so, or faithfulness, right, would be a very common word that we would use today. But there's a lot of disconnect too. And that's part of why I think we need to re, we need to mobilize this allegiance and loyalty language and kind of bring it back to the foreground because words shift meaning over time. And I think our English word faith has come increasingly to mean like believing

things without evidence, right? And you would see people like Richard Dawkins, like, you know, a prominent atheist critic of Christianity who would criticize Christians for just believing things even though there's no evidence, right? And he seems to think that's what the word faith basically means. And so, or it can be reduced just to intellectual assent, right? Where we have like, you know, especially the Gospel of John, which uses the word faith a lot. People like sometimes have drawn on the Gospel of John to say that, oh, really all you need to do is believe that Jesus is the Savior. Yeah, okay, he's the Lord too, but that's not really pertinent for your salvation. All you need to do is assent that he's died for your sins. That's called the Free Grace Movement, right?

That was a major movement in the 1980s, I guess. And so we do have people who have used the word faith or belief in ways that, yeah, that are just not really well connected with the ancient word pistis, right? Which is what we're trying to get at. So it does make me think of Romans 10, 9, and 10, which has become one of the more well-known memorized passages when people think about faith and what's the basic commitment that a Christian needs to have.

Confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you'll be saved. That does seem to have that flavor of kind of just assent, just confess, just say it. And you have to actually believe it too. But so how would you understand that passage? Yeah. Well, the word confess there in Greek is homologeo, which actually has to do with a public proclamation. So it's like we tend to like the word maybe profess would be a better translation, like it means like to vocally profess. And so it's not something that's just a private like assent.

So even the idea that if you confess Jesus as Lord, that would you, the most natural way to construe that in the Greek would be to publicly proclaim it like something you would do as part of your baptism. Like if in an ancient baptism, I think we have evidence that would suggest that you probably swore loyalty to Jesus. Uh, that's probably what it means to be baptized into his name was connected to taking an oath of allegiance to him. So that oath of allegiance would be to say, Jesus is Lord. That's what you were doing. Jesus is King, right? Jesus is the Christ. All those things would have been ways in which you're affirming, like he's the King of my life. Um, and so then, and if you believe in the heart, like, yeah, certainly that, any time we see the word pistou, right, the verb followed by hati, right, which is a Greek word that means that in these constructions, it's

usually going to be involving an intellectual assent idea. If you believe that, a man went to the moon, right? We're asking, do you agree that that happened? Do you intellectually assent to that? And in ancient Greek, it's no different. So we do see that pisteo is used sometimes just for intellectual assent. And in that passage, that would be one case where it is more in that direction. It's the use of pisteo in that particular passage is not in the allegiance direction. But the idea of confessing Jesus as Lord, right, is more in the allegiance direction. But the idea of confessing Jesus as Lord, right, is more in the allegiance direction than that particular passage. Well, especially, I mean, he's writing to Roman Christians at the heart of the empire,

and he's saying publicly profess that Jesus is kurios, Lord. And of all the emperors, Caesar Nero, who was a Caesar at at that time claimed to be lord kurios more more often than any other emperor um so that to publicly say jesus is lord is could be kind of a politically dangerous thing to say you know like it's not just this and i and i just wonder even that like that aside from just the linguistics of pistis, confess, allegiance, faith, whatever, just saying Jesus is Lord out loud, that is a sign of allegiance, right? I mean, aside from the linguistic debate. Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree with that. And I think that we don't want to get too narrowly focused on a specific word group, right?

Yeah, the concept is broader than that. And we could see, yeah, multiple signs of evidence that, yeah, that allegiance is involved. And we either have like lots of passages that speak about, you know, obeying the gospel, for instance, right? And what does that mean, right? Well, I think you can, by careful analysis, you can show in passages like, I like in the Thessalonian correspondence in the first chapter, right? In verse four, right, you have a passage where it talks about showing faith or loyalty through persevering through trials. And then later we find out, just several verses later, that those who obey the gospel are those who are going to make it

through these trials, who are going to experience vindication when the Lord Jesus brings judgment. So we're invited to see a tight link between, you know, loyalty to King Jesus and obeying the gospel, and that this is what results in salvation or vindication when the Lord Jesus brings his judgment. So that would be, you know, where on the one hand, we're paying attention to the word pistis, right, and how it's used as it refers to faithfulness, right? But on the other hand, we see that it's closely related to other constructions like obeying the gospel and that it seems to be synonymous with obeying the gospel. Romans 1.5, the obedience of faith, is that, that'd be another. Yeah, that's a passage I spend a lot of time with, yes. And yeah, it's interesting because right before that, right,

you have an articulation of the gospel as, you know, Paul begins Romans by saying who he is, right? A servant, you know, an apostle of this, you know, this king, right? But then he begins to talk about how the gospel was promised in advance, you know, and that this gospel actually is connected to the promises that God made to David, right? And Paul's language is kind of precise in that passage, right? As he actually says that there was this son of God, right? That he came into being by means of the seed of David. If we look at his language really exactly, Paul uses the verb, instead of the genot over for begetting, he uses genomai, to be or to become.

And so there's this idea that he came into being by means of the seed of David. But then Paul qualifies it and says that's only according to his flesh, katasarka, just talking about his flesh. And so it's a statement about Jesus' incarnation. And so Paul says the gospel is promised in advance and that the gospel is about the Son becoming incarnate into the line of David. And then he goes on and says that he actually was raised from among the dead ones, and that what triggered his resurrection from the dead ones, or this resurrection from among the dead, like, led to him being installed as the Son of God in power, right? So he uses very specific language that Jesus is now the Son of God in power. I would understand that to be a statement of Jesus's enthronement. He's now been installed at the right hand of God. So when Paul talks about the gospel in Romans 1, 2, 3, and 4,

right, it's about the promises of God being fulfilled, the Old Testament promises about the incarnation, about Jesus becoming enthroned at the right hand, him assuming a station of power. And then in Romans 1,5, right, the passage you just mentioned, Paul talks about Jesus Christ, our Lord, you know, through whom we receive grace and apostleship for the obedience of pistis among all the nations, right? And this obedience of pistis means that, like, it's loyal obedience or allegiant obedience. We're, like, that's the purpose of the gospel is so that all nations will become allegiant to King Jesus. So yeah,

I would, I would see that all as very intimately related to the gospel. That's, that's a perfect passage. So it's, I mean, if to put it in different terms, like faith as it's traditionally understood,

does feel kind of a little passive, whereas allegiance seems a little more active. Would that be a broad kind of distinguish between the two? I think that is a fair way to describe it. And when we pay attention to how the New Testament speaks about faith, it's a human-initiated action. It's something that humans do. And there are some theological traditions that want to make it a purely received action. They want to say like, no, actually, you can't originate anything yourself. God has to originate anything good that you happen to do so that God has to originate the faith before you could do it or something along those lines. But the New Testament just doesn't prefer to speak

that way. That's a theological overlay beyond the New Testament. The New Testament just doesn't prefer to speak about faith that way. It is an active idea, and it's an active idea that humans originate. So we want to be careful, I just think, to just respect the New Testament witness. That's how the New Testament prefers to speak. So yes, that's part of what I'm doing is seeking to recover that more active dimension of how faith is described in the New Testament, that it's not something that's purely receptive. faith is described in the New Testament, that it's not something that's purely receptive. So I guess that, so that, I mean, I wanted to wait to get here because I wanted to unpack what you mean by, but I could totally understand, or I could totally hear people, especially in a very Reformed or especially a Lutheran tradition say, whoa, whoa, whoa,

this sounds like works righteousness. If we're justified by allegiance and if allegiance is a human action, human initiated action, if it has to do with even obedience, then what in the world? We just undercut the entire reformation. Have you gotten that critique yet? Yeah, sure. I've heard things in that direction. Yeah. I think that the reality is... 500 years ago, you could find yourself on a stake somewhere with fire being lit. Yeah, well, the reality is we just need to deal seriously with what the New Testament teaches, right? And the New Testament presents faith in this way. So there's different ways of thinking about how all that works.

My claim would be that we should understand faith as something more like loyalty or obedience, and that is an embodied thing. Like, the idea that pistis is purely mental is something that just cannot be substantiated on the basis of a careful reading of our ancient texts, the Bible and outside the Bible. That pistis was primarily externalized and relational would be the way I would summarize it. And there I'm again drawing primarily from Teresa Morgan's work, where she, I think, shows that exhaustively in her kind of comprehensive book on faith in the Roman world and in the Christian, you know, in the New Testament. So what she tries to demonstrate is, what I mean by that is that faith is externalized, meaning that when people talked about faith, it was mainly about observing somebody's faithful behavior. Like, so, um, when, when somebody is doing something that is described

as faithful, like, or pistis, or they're demonstrating their trust in some way, but it's demonstrated, or it's a shown trust, uh, or they're behaving in a way that shows that they are a reliable person. They're, they're, they're, they're performing in a faithful way or a loyal way. Um, and so it was something that was externalized primarily as people conceptualize it. That doesn't mean it didn't have an internal dimension. It doesn't mean that there wasn't something mental going on in people's minds, but it just wasn't foregrounded. People were more interested in observable pistis. That was what, when people thought about what does pistis mean, it was primarily activity that they had in view and a virtue that was connected

to that activity. So that's what I, when I say it was externalized, that's what I mean. And then it was relational. It was primarily something that had to be performed with respect to someone else. That like you're, you're, you're being faithful with respect to this or that person or that situation or this office or this duty. Right. And so that's a mainly a relational idea as well. So yeah, so that one way then of putting the pieces together then would be to understand works as being something that are not completely the opposite of faith, right? But actually can be understood in a way that they fold within allegiance. So that allegiance is the larger category and that good deeds might be part

of allegiance would be how you can make sense of that without falling into a works righteousness. Well, and also like even the term works, and this is – I'm glad you went there because I was going to go there. Like, you know, for – where do we want to start? I mean, for our audience, they may not be familiar with the debate. I mean, even the phrase works of the law in Romans and Galatians and other passages, and sometimes even the shorthand works. Sometimes, I think a lot of Christians will read that and just in their mind, they think works as obedience. And that's a possible way to interpret that.

But there's another reading of that that says, no, works is not like Christian obedience. It's not the good stuff. It's actually, in some views, works of the law could be these, you know, Jewish distinctives that were kind of designed to keep Gentiles out. So it has almost a sociological dimension to it. It's not just, it's not just abstract human obedience to God and God, you know, and Paul's saying, no, that you're not, that has nothing to do with your salvation or whatever. So can you, you, I was so knee deep in this stuff, I mean, for years. And I don't think I've touched it since maybe 2012.

So it's not fresh in my mind. Can you maybe help us understand just that dimension, just when it says justification by faith, not by works or not by works of the law? What are some different ways we can understand that contrast? Yeah. works of the law. What are some different ways we can understand that contrast? Yeah, well, I think you've already, you know, pointed up like the key difference, right? That we have the question does like anytime we see the word works, like our knee jerk reaction to that might be to think about any human deed, right? Any doing whatsoever. And that's partly because that's the legacy of the early Protestant Reformation, right? Would be to construct it that way. But, you know, in light of larger conversations that have been happening in the last 50 years,

especially in New Testament studies, there were conversations before that, but really with E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977, we began to go through a whole era of reassessment of all of that for the last 50 years, right? And the upshot of that is that I think the biblical studies community would by and large see that works of law does not mean the same thing as works. And that whenever we see that phrase, even Paul, whenever Paul uses the bear word works, sometimes he clearly intends works of law. So Paul even shorthanded sometimes works, and he actually means works of law, and we can actually prove this in certain passages. I don't have one off the top of my head. I want to say it's Romans 9.33, but without us actually flipping around and

looking through passages. But there are a number of passages where we have abbreviations where Paul uses the word works, but you can prove in context because of how he uses the phrase and qualifies it immediately afterwards. He means works of Torah. So yeah, anyway, yeah, as we think through this larger issue, then yes, I think that Paul is not against good works, like he obviously wants us to do good works. And he even says that we'll be judged on the basis of our works. And he even says this is part of the gospel. As we have, this would be in Romans 2, right? As we have the passage where he speaks positively about judgment according to the works and says this is actually part of his gospel ultimately. So there are passages, and I was thinking like James 2. Could this be, you know, there's a notorious issue with Romans 3 and James 2, Romans 3 saying, you know, we're justified by faith, not by works.

And then James seems to say the exact opposite, like, nope, we're justified by works, not just by faith. I mean, it looks like a blatant contradiction, but could one of the solutions be, I mean, of course, this is what several already proposed. I'm not coming up with it, but the kind of works that James was talking about is different than the kind of works that Paul's talking about. And there in James 2, I mean, there he is talking. When he says works there, he doesn't say works of the law. I don't think. Yeah, I'm almost positive he doesn't. He says works. And there he is talking about the positive kind of actions from Rahab and Abraham and others, that their belief in God, their allegiance to God led to radical acts of obedience. Would that be right? Like works and... Yeah, I think there's room to see

that James is speaking about works in general and that Paul has in view more works of Torah, right? And that those are the same thing. And also I think that the allegiance proposal might potentially help with some of this, right? Seeing that like, that what is meant by faith, right? Is maybe not so different between Paul and James. Sometimes people have also said, well, the solution is Paul and James just means something different by faith too.

But as they both mean something more like faithfulness or loyalty, right? Then I think there's more room to see why James would say faith without works is dead, right? As he's wanting to say, like, you know, our loyalty towards Jesus, right, is a dead thing unless it's actually actualized by works. But Paul can speak negatively about works sometimes because he has in view works of

the law, but positively about works in other places because because he has in view that works are part of how we embody our allegiance. And so that it's not just about any human doing, but our actions actually can positively contribute to our salvation as part of an overall allegiance. We're not saved by doing good deeds. We're saved by our allegiance to Jesus. But nevertheless, the allegiance is manifested through our bodily activities. So just when you say it like that, that sounds almost the same as... So I grew up in the whole lordship, salvation, free grace debates in the 80s and 90s. And I was on the MacArthur side of things, and that made perfect sense when he was addressing... When he was

talking about lordship, salvation is how it was framed against the free grace movement. I was really persuaded of that kind of side of things, which is funny because then years later, N.T. Wright comes on the scene, starts talking about what sounds like a sneeze away from lordship salvation, but everybody got all over him. I'm like, this doesn't sound... There might be some wording that's a little different, but it didn't sound a whole lot different than what MacArthur and others were arguing for back in the 80s. But your last phrase sounds almost exactly what MacArthur would say, that a true faith commitment will lead to or issue in an obedient response.

I mean, do you see... Are you familiar with that i mean that's that's kind of i mean it's not really i don't know if it's around anymore and it's really really what's happening in certain evangelical circles i don't know if you you were yeah in it at all but um yeah do you see what you're saying is terribly different than what the lordship people were saying yeah i would say it's very much similar to what the lordship people were saying and clearly macarthur was right in that debate the debate was primarily with, what's his name, Zane Hodges, right? Was the free grace guy and some other people. But yeah, and MacArthur, I think put a pretty serious beat down on all of

that correctly. And, you know, and what Hodges was saying completely doesn't align with any classical Protestantism at all. Like the idea that like somehow our works are completely irrelevant, right? The traditional Protestant position coming in from Luther, Calvin, the Protestant Reformation, right, is that our works are evidence of faith, right? And so that, like, first we are justified and that we get right with God, and that that happens by faith alone, and that the works are a confirmation of that secondarily. And so that's what I think MacArthur would argue, if I understand him right, today would be something along those lines, and that our lordship then is partly, or the lordship of Jesus is relevant, obviously, to an ongoing, you know,

faith commitment and to the outworking of that salvation as part of our, you know, our good works will come as confirmation. But I would not phrase it quite that way because it's almost like there's a cause and effect relationship that's being articulated there. That like it's the idea seems to be first you have to have like real faith. And then once you do, then you have this transaction of justification and then you get right with God. And then only then can you then proceed to do good works and that those good works then are evidence that your faith was genuine. I just don't see the Bible supporting that kind of articulation. I don't see the Bible as supporting a distinction between

justification and sanctification in that way. So the traditional idea that you get justified and then that sanctification comes with it and flows out of the same union with Christ and is the outworking or the flip side of justification. I think that's all – that business about the sanctification business is essentially made up as a philosophical position really by John Calvin. We're kind of getting really into the weeds here with some of that, but the upshot is I would articulate it just slightly differently. I would say that what it means to have faith is simply something embodied from the get-go. So there's not something that's a cause and effect relationship between it and our body activity. So first we have to do something mental would be almost what MacArthur might would argue, I would imagine. And then after we do the mental thing, then good works can follow with our bodies.

I think that misunderstands what pistis means from the get-go. Pistis is an embodied thing from the start. So there's no such thing as first like doing the mental thing right and then somehow then your body follows suit. This is fundamentally to misunderstand what pistis means because it's externalized and relational from the beginning. So you would want – so that makes sense. So like slicing and dicing it all apart, making sure we keep justification in a different category like this is a hard line between justification and sanctification. What I hear you saying is that just the concept of allegiance, which is a better rendering of pistis, faith, I don't want to say confuses the two, because even that phrase says that the two are different. It combines those two into one kind of response. Is that what you say?

Yeah, no, that's fair. I think that it's fair to say that certain kinds of works are not antithetical to faith or the opposite of them, right? Certain things we do with our bodies are an outworking of our loyalty or even just an embodiment of our loyalty from the get-go, right? Like what if I confess with my mouth, Jesus is Lord, right? I'm doing something with my body right from the beginning. That's an externalization of my faith, right?

Like my faith was something that was embodied from the very beginning. And so I guess I would articulate it that way. And yeah, the justification, sanctification thing, I don't want to confuse our listeners in any way. That's a big argument that I can't get into, but fully, at least in this space, I do write on this in Salvation by Allegiance alone a bit. I have a forthcoming book that will deal with it eventually more. But the reality is Paul's own categories would be just justification. He doesn't really have a category that's a separate category for personal sanctification. Like Paul believes in a present, a past, a present, and a future dimension of justification, and he doesn't use sanctification to describe the outworking of salvation personally.

That's essentially a made-up category to deal with the idea that we need to have an initial justification that is by faith alone and was a philosophical category that was really invented by, truthfully, mostly by John Calvin as a way of articulating his position. So I just don't think it's precise enough in dealing with the Bible's own categories. So, wow, that's interesting. Do you think your view puts you at odds with traditional Lutheran and then later Reformed framing of justification by faith? I mean, it's a huge part of Protestantism. Would you say that, yes, the way I read the scriptures does put me at odds with that aspect of that tradition? I just think they're getting the Bible kind of wrong, or at least not interpreting it fully correct. Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's a new scholarly proposal that needs to be assessed

by other scholars to see what they think. But I would say that the Protestant Reformation is a large thing. And you have the Magisterial Reformation, of course, like with Calvin, with Luther, with Zwingli and others, those Protestants who believe that the Protestant Reformation needed to march hand in hand with the magistrates or the rulers or the authorities or the government, right? And that you needed to, if you wanted to make any changes theologically, that needed to be approved by the government, right? And then on the other hand, you have the Anabaptist tradition, right? That does not see things that way. And they want to move more quickly than the Zwingli wants to move and that Calvin wants to move, right? And they end up heading off on their own. And so certainly within more of the Anabaptist expressions, I think that

there are things more like what I'm saying. And so I would say that it fits within traditional Protestantism in that sense. But certainly I would say it is at odds with portions of the Magisterial Reformation. Or it's just a different way of expressing it. It's a small tweak, right? But yeah, some of these things were fought through on the Magisterial side of the Protestant Reformation a bit. And yeah, I find myself in disagreement with wings of the magisterial Reformation. What would you find when you read like N.T. Wright on justification and final

justification? Do you find yourself in very close agreement with how he frames it? Mostly. Yeah, I would say that there's a fairly subtle point on which I think that probably the reform tradition is correct and right is wrong. I think that has to do with the phrase, the righteousness of God, which Wright understands to be just covenant faithfulness. So he understands that to be like covenant promises. And the Protestant Reformation was fueled by an understanding that this somehow or another, we get the righteousness of God, that it becomes our own possession in some way so that we are right with God whenever we have right standing with

God, that is the righteousness of God. And so anyway, Paul only uses this phrase, the righteousness of God, 10 times. But I think in four of the passages, I think it's more probable that it is something that we receive and that it is a right standing that we have. So I think it actually means both covenant faithfulness and it means a right standing that we receive. And yeah, I kind of worked through the details of that in chapter eight of Salvation by Allegiance alone, where I have a proposal for exactly what the righteousness of God means and defend the idea that it does involve, on the one hand, God's faithfulness to his promises, but those promises find their fulfillment as Jesus himself proves to be the righteous one and that we have the

opportunity to participate in his righteousness. So I do think that we do have a right standing with God. So I do think that, on the one hand, I would agree with Wright's articulation of justification in the sense that it does have a past, present, and future dimension. But his choice to restrict the righteousness of God purely to God's covenant faithfulness and not see it as shared with us would be something I disagree with and would agree with more of the Lutheran Reformed wing. This episode is sponsored by Abide. Okay, so do you have trouble sleeping or do you battle anxiety and stress? Here's a little secret. I battle all these things. In fact, I've had a hard time sleeping like most of my life. Abide is the number one Christian meditation app. Health benefits reported by Abide users include less stress, lower depression,

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premium subscription by texting the promo code THEOLOGY to 22433. Okay. So text 22433, type in theology and get 25% off your first year. So sleep better, pray more and meditate on God's life-changing word with Abide. Let's shift gears just slightly. I want to talk about Pistis Christus. I don't even know if my audience... I would say 90% of more than that listening probably don't even know that way back when I really started getting into scholarship, I spent about maybe three years just fascinated with this debate about the meaning of pistis christu faith

and then of christ um and it's it occurred i'm it's been so long since i even it was like it was my world for like a few years and then i moved on to other things so um but yeah like romans 3 22 i believe 326 galatians 3 is it 22 i think philippians Galatians 3. Is it 22, I think? Philippians. Is it Philippians 3.9? Am I getting those right? You got most of them right. I'm not sure about Philippians 3.9 off the top of my head. As you know, yeah, I'm not fully immersed right now myself in that conversation.

So it's an interesting construction because it's almost always translated you know by faith in christ meaning human faith in christ but the word christ is in the genitive which kind of and genitive is kind of a va it's kind of capable of doing lots of stuff in a syntactical destruction construction not destruction um but i mean the the textbook translation of a generative is of so wait so faith of Christ is it Christ's own faithfulness whereby we are justified or is it our faith in Christ whereby we're justified is the debate that's been raging on and I kind of wanted to explore in the work that I did a you know a possible third option seeing faith as this you know, a possible third option, seeing faith as this, you know, like when Paul talks about the coming of faith, like this Christ, that the event of the Christ event, you know, it's where

it's a more objective theological event rather than a subject of either our individual faith in Jesus or his individual faithfulness toward the Father. Wow. I can't believe I, that's a, I think that's a pretty good summary of something I haven't thought about in 15 years, but I'm curious what your, I mean, ever since I saw your, the title of your book, I'm like, Oh, I wonder what this would do to the Pistis Christi debate. So how do you understand that debated phrase? Do you have a, yeah, kind of an alternative view rather than the subjective or objective? Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm also assessing that myself and, and trying to think through what I, what I, partly because there's actually a very disruptive and interesting piece of scholarship that's been produced recently. I'll give a shout out to Kevin Grosso, who wrote an article that was published in Journal for the Study of the New Testament, I guess is what JSNT is, a major New Testament

journal, peer-reviewed. And anyway, in it, Grasso, I think, gives definitive evidence that in fact it cannot be an objective genitive, so that the translation faith in Christ is wrong. of genitive. So the translation faith in Christ is wrong. And obviously it's the traditional view. And I think he shows that it's not just a case of probability. He shows that it's actually grammatically disallowed. So it's not just like, okay, here's another piece of evidence to assess. He shows evidence that on a syntactical level, that that construction is flat out disallowed. So it's a complete game changer if he's right. And it's a technical article that I don't want to try to fully explain for your audience, but he shows evidence that pistis is a specific kind of noun in relationship to its verb, what's called a de-verbal noun. And in light of that, the arguments that the verb takes,

like the objects that it's allowed to take, has to mirror the objects that it takes as a noun if it's being used as a noun in a verbal way, which is what the argument is in the Pistis Christi debate. Anyway, it's a fascinating article, but he argues against both the subjective and the objective ultimately and favors a third way. So you may actually find that his view is quite close to your view, your third way view. I myself have leaned toward the subjective genitive. I think that the faithfulness of Christ is the stronger reading. And so that's what I argue in my current books. But Grosso has made me rethink and think more seriously about the third way.

Grosso's case, I think, is a knockout case against the objective genitive. I think he's proven it does not mean faith in Christ. And that's actually an impossible understanding. And I think that that view is going to collapse in the next 30 years. It's going to take a while for it to trickle through all our translations. But eventually, I think all of our English translations will be changed. It will not be translated that way. They'll probably just go to faith of Christ just to keep it safe. But I think it cannot mean faith in Christ, which is interesting if he's right. But I don't think he doesn't offer the

same knockout blow to the subjective genitive. He argues against it, but I think that his argument is not fully convincing against it. And it's a debate, I think, between the third way and the subjective at this point. Theologically, the Bardian in me likes the subjective genitive reading. I was always attracted to that theologically i just i did feel like it was felt a little forced sometimes when i was interacting with like like doug campbell and others who like i don't i don't know like i agree with i like your theological framework i'm just it's just not as linguistically satisfying as i want it to be um but has there been so mike bird and i co-edited this book called The Faith of Christ, a series of articles that address this. I think – when was that?

2009 maybe? Yeah, around then. What's the scholarship been – and so I haven't even looked at that. Has there been still – is this still been – Oh, yeah. There's still stuff coming out. Yeah. Yeah.

Magrasso's is the – I mean it's the coup de grace. I mean it's like really – I mean it's the piece that everyone's going to have to respond to now. Um, so it's, it's a major, um, it's the first thing that's come out in, in, you know, 20 plus years on it that really decisively, you know, um, gives not just probabilistic evidence, but like maybe a knockout blow. So you got to read it. Yeah. Yeah. I'll check it out. Not up to speed on it.'ve got to go back and read Grasso. Yeah, it's worthwhile. So yeah, publishing on that topic continues to go. And I've partly favored the subjective genitive for a variety of reasons. But I think it's interesting, for instance, in Romans 1.16 and 17 when Paul talks about the gospel.

In the gospel, righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness. And then he uses the phrase, And that phrase is an interesting phrase, but I think it's best understood like something like, by faithfulness for faithfulness or by loyalty for loyalty. And I think that first part actually is where he's talking about the loyalty of Jesus, right? That he was the faithful one, that he won salvation for us. And then he did that for the sake of our loyalty so that we could then give loyalty in response to his action. And so that we could then render loyalty to him because he's the king.

And I think we see that mapped onto, for instance, the Pistis-Christi debate in Romans 3, 21 through 22, where again, Paul talks about the faithfulness of the Christ, but then it's for our faith, right? Is how the construction goes. So, or for those who believe, I'd have to get out my Bible and look. But anyway, yeah, I think there's good reasons why we could see a split between the faithfulness of Christ and him being the initiator. And then that being for the sake of our response that we can respond to him as the faithful one, right? So we can have an allegiance response to him. So that's part of

the reason I think the subjective is theologically stronger. I think it fits well into certain aspects of Paul's argument. Man, you're getting me excited about that again. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things where you're so absorbed in it that you just need to like, ugh, I just need to get away from it just because like my, you know, I'm going to bed at night thinking about, you know, this argument that are just like, yeah,

kind of OCD when I get into a topic, but yeah. And so circling back in three 22, yeah. What Paul says in Romans three 22, he says, uh, the righteousness of God through the faith of Christ for all who perform the

faith action for all who believe is how it's traditionally translated, but it's the verb. So it's the faithfulness of the Christ, right? For all then who then perform the faith action in response, right? I think would be one way of putting it together. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, because even that phrase there, if it's by faith in Christ, for all who have faith in Christ, that seems a little, kind of like a little tautologist, tautologist, like a tautologist saying the same thing. Yeah. And that's, that's part of the argument against the objective genitive. Yeah. But, but I think Grasso smashed that argument. So it'll be interesting to see how those who, you know, who favored the traditional view,

people like Doug Moo and Thomas Schreiner, who have argued for years for the traditional view, it'll be interesting to see how they respond, if they do respond, right? As I think their argument has been shattered by Grasso. Yeah, interesting. Shifting gears slightly again, how much of your work has kind of the imperial cult as a background? Or is that not really what you were doing?

Yeah, I mean, it's all in the background in the sense that I, yeah, I mean, I'm a new Testament scholar. I'm familiar with like patron client relationships and you know, the whole Imperial cult and you know, I mean, I've taken coursework on that. And, um, but the reality is, is like to understand the basic idea, like most readers don't need all of that. I would say as I'm making the case that pistis means allegiance, it just strengthens the view, right? So mostly what I do, I occasionally would assert that this is part of the background. There's not really a need to deeply explore that to substantiate my case. As long as the imperial background is genuinely a background view, then it's not that I need to trot everyone through all the evidence for that. So I would say my studies rely on that as a basic truth about the world around Jesus

that everyone would, I think, more or less agree to. And so, yeah, I didn't belabor it in my books. It certainly stands as background. Do you think that when Paul says, confess Jesus as Lord, everybody would have heard that kind of like that silent, and therefore Caesar is not, you know, like how people often say. When he's using faith, does he have an eye on the empire, do you think? Or do you think maybe it's passage to passage, depends?

Because he's clear. No, I think he is. Because faith is language used widely in the political era of the day, right? And Caesar is not. But I don't think that it's always cosmic in purview when we think about Caesar's lordship or anyone's lordship. To call somebody master or sir or lord, there's an appropriate sphere of domain, a sphere of influence or domain that people might have sovereignty over that is not necessarily always in competition with Jesus's sovereignty. And so if I'm Lord of a household, right, that doesn't, like, just because Jesus is Lord doesn't mean I'm not Lord of a household, right? Like, those are not necessarily in competition. It means that Jesus is the greatest Lord, right, beyond that, right? So in the Greco-Roman world, like, as that language of

Lord was used, so to the degree that Caesar was Lord, I think, like, Paul would have acknowledged, yeah, he's the master of the Roman empire, right? That's the reality. Um, I think he would have been saying, yes, Jesus is the greater cosmic Lord and he subverts Caesar's Lordship in many ways, but I don't think that it would have been a full blown. Therefore Caesar is not right. I think that's probably too simple. I think it would, there would have been nested ideas of Lordship, um, that would have helped

nuance these kinds of things, right? That there was an awareness that lordship is not always competitive. But let's be honest. I mean, a lot of dimensions of Caesar's lordship wasn't directly in conflict with Jesus's way of being lord. So people would have heard that for sure, right? And would have realized, like, a lot of what we're saying about Jesus, that he's the one who brings true peace, right? We realize the Roman Empire claims it, but it's not bringing true peace, right? It's peace that's built on imperial power and on, you know, like, you know, essentially subjugated foreign empires that were on the

fringe of the Roman Empire and then enslaving a lot of them. Like, that's how the peace was built. What kind of peace is that, right? Yeah, yeah, totally i but going back to the i'm sorry i want to tease out i guess the you know that caesar can't still have his kind of caesar ish lordship and that doesn't necessarily nullify christ lordship but in in the roman conception though right i mean and you would know more more about this than i would you know the the lordship of caesar was derived from you know the gods of r Rome saying, no, you are your extension of the lordship of Rome or whoever over Jupiter, over the world. So to say, no, there's another Jewish God whose son was crucified by Roman power. No, he's actually Lord.

actually, Lord, even if you say, well, just in the divine ultimate sense, I think even if you say that, that still would be a slight on the origins even of Caesar's claim to lordship. Sure. Yeah, because the Caesars are increasingly making claims to being like, not just Lord, but God, right? And in an ultimate sense, right? Yeah. So I do, to the degree that an ultimate claim is being made, you know being made by Caesar for lordship. I think, yes, that Jesus is Lord claim, right? As that's packaged with the idea that Jesus is the incarnate, like that he's God incarnate, right? That he's taken on human flesh for our sake, all those kinds of claims that are part of the gospel.

Yeah, certainly they subvert like any claims to Caesar's ultimate godhood or lordship in that kind of divine sense, right? That we see a push in that direction. And some of the Caesars resist it, right? And they don't really actually want divine accolades or are reticent about it. Others are like, give me more. Kind of like Nero. You know, yeah.

Even when they resist it, I was reading Bruce Winter's work, and he has a great section on on you know when they're resisting it people not watching won't get this but it's kind of like no no but they're like yeah no don't build a temple for me you know but if you do here's how to play it you know like yeah yeah well i mean the cities were in competition to offer divine honors and to have the opportunity to build temples for the caesars right and so i mean even the fact like, there was that kind of patron-client dimension to things, like that, you know, they wanted to, like, appropriately honor, like, the one who had brought salvation to the Roman world by building a temple to honor him, and that cities would have competed for the privilege of doing that, shows us a lot about what the true landscape was like on the ground level, especially in Asia Minor,

right? As those who have done careful studies of this work say, like the imperial cult was really strong in certain areas, like, especially like, you know, where we find, you know, the seven letters of revelation, like Asia Minor was a hotbed, you know, of the imperial cult. And so is it any surprise, right, that that's where we find the greatest conflict between Jesus's style of kingship and a great call to show pistis to him. We see passages like Revelation 2.13 where it really clearly affirms the need to show pistis to Jesus and is being connected to ultimate salvation. And we can't just capitulate before the imperial cold. Interesting.

Tell us about your – well, you haven't... So the book we've been really kind of talking about is Salvation by Allegiance Alone. You also have another one, Gospel Allegiance. Is that extending your work? Or is that like a kind of a more popular version of the older one? And then you have another one coming out, Why the Gospel in May. Yeah, tell us about this. You seem to be really fast... For a guy who isn't Protestant... Just kidding. You seem to be really fast for a guy who, you know, isn't Protestant. Just kidding. He seemed to like this gospel stuff. So, yeah, I do like the gospel.

Yeah. Salvation by Allegiance alone was the initial work and, you know, was published under an academic imprint. So it was Baker Academic, but I try to make it as popular as I could, like within an academic imprint. But Gospel Allegiance then is both a deepening and a popularization, which sounds contradictory. But what I did is I went more narrow. Like I kind of looked at just the core model. So salvation by allegiance alone is kind of a wide ranging kind of piece. Like it deals with a lot of aspects of salvation. And so in gospel allegiance, I said, let's just look at

the core. Like what is the gospel? What is faith? What is grace? What are works? And how do they all interrelate? Okay. Like, so it's really just dealing with the core. And that's why I was able to go deeper was because I just kind of narrowed my focus and went more deeply on each one and added some specificity. So I actually think it's a more authoritative articulation even of my model than Salvation by Allegiance alone offered. So I do some things to clarify some things in Salvation by Allegiance alone offered. So I do some things to clarify some things in Salvation by Allegiance alone, but I actually just, you know, more do a deeper dive. And then the Why the Gospel book that's in May, I'm super excited about it. I haven't been as

excited about a book for quite a while. But yeah, that is actually looking at not what is the gospel, but like, why did God give the gospel and why is it still compelling today? So there's been so many books that have written like answering the question, what is the gospel? I've even written one. I wrote a little book called The Gospel Precisely. And it's a super important question. We all want to know what the gospel is as we need to share it with other people, but maybe the more important question is why did God give it, right? And surprisingly, nobody has written a book that has dealt at least explicitly with that theme. I mean, obviously, there are books that touch on aspects of that. But yeah, I'm excited about what that book might offer the church.

So on the one hand, like, looks at Scripture, like, why did God give the Gospel from a scriptural standpoint? What's its purpose, right? Or its multiple purposes as we dive in deeply, right? But on the other hand, like, why is it still good news today, especially for the nuns and dones, right? People who are, you know, just leaving the church, not interested, they don't think that the church has anything to offer them today. Why is this still the best possible news, right? So it's really working on those two fronts. Oh, so does it have an eye on the nuns and the dones, the people that are- It does. Yeah, I have a chapter, a chapter that's explicitly aimed in that direction, but really more than one chapter does lend itself toward that conversation. Okay.

Did you ever go through any kind of deconstructive journey or, I mean, that's a broad, imprecise word. Yeah. You know, I would say not really. say not really. You know, it's more been a slow growth for me of learning and like, you know, casting away some things that I, you know, like could no longer hold. But that was partly because I grew up in a really conservative fundamentalist church, like King James only, and love the people there. They're great people. And so I've never felt bitter about that heritage or anything like that. I mean, I still admire the people who are involved. They love Jesus. They love me. Right. And that's the most important thing in the world. Right. I wouldn't be a

Christian today without them. So how could I ever be bitter about that? So that's what always made it hard for me to deconstruct. Right. I had like such a great experience within even a fundamentalist, you know, kind of experience that I had that was intellectually like non-adventurous, like, and, you know, like we should only read the Bible kind of thing, you know, was maybe the mindset within that, um, that camp. Uh, then, you know, as I, as I went to college and the more I learned, the more I realized I probably couldn't, you know, maybe I should read the Bible and not just the King James version. I had to give that up. Right. You know, um, some things like that, that, you know, were part of my growth process.

And you just learn more and you slowly refine your views. But yeah, it's more been a deepening for me and my love for the Lord and joy in serving him more than a deconstruction, I would say. That's good. I'm going to reuse that phrase. I'll give you credit. Intellectually non-adventurous. I'll let you go.

But tell us really quick about your podcast because you have a podcast. It's very similar to this one in many ways and that you're an academic biblical scholar, but you're talking about all kinds of different things. Yeah. Yeah. Our niche on script is the name of our podcast. It was started by myself and my friend Matt Lynch. And we were friends from way back in Regent College. So anyway, he's a professor at Regent now. Regent was smart enough to rehire him, and he teaches Old Testament there.

But we primarily interview around new academic work in biblical studies or theology, so we're definitely on the academic end of the spectrum. I think you're broader. You do academic stuff and you do real pop stuff. Um, we tend to, we occasionally do more popular stuff, but we mostly land on the academic end. So a new book that maybe advances the conversation in biblical studies or theology in some important way. Uh, we try to read the book and snag that person and bring them on and, uh, and chat about their book. So it, it mostly focuses on author interviews

around new titles in biblical studies and theology. But we've loved it. It's been a blast. Who are some of your favorite people you've had on? Oh, well, Mike Bird, as we already mentioned. He's been a frequent guest. Scott McKnight. We had John Barclay.

I talked about his Paul and the Gift. That was one of our first interviews we did. I loved getting to talk about Paul and the Gift. It's a super important book on grace that's come out. Gosh, like choosing favorites is like, you know, naming your favorite children. It just, it just seems mean, you know, but no, there's been lots of fun interviews over the years. I'll say a personal favorite for me was Richard Hayes because he was one of my most admired scholars when I was doing graduate work. I did my PhD on Paul in the Old Testament.

scholars when I was doing graduate work. I did my PhD on Paul in the Old Testament. And so he's like, Richard Hayes is like the definitive figure in that conversation on how did Paul use the Old Testament, right? So I loved getting to interview Hayes. That was a real blast for me. Have you interviewed Bauckham? No, we have not had Bauckham, which is probably an oversight on our part. I think he's getting pretty old. So I don't know if he's into podcast interviews or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how much he does that. But yeah, it would be great to get Bauckham at some point.

Obviously, I've read lots of his work and interacted with it some as a scholar. And I do deeply admire his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses book, his book on the theology of Revelation. I mean, he's also written Bible commentaries has been helpful to me. Um, but, uh, yeah. And then, um, of course he has that, that book, God crucified, right? Is that the name of it? I think that's the name of it. Either God crucified of the crucified God. He's playing off of Mulan's earlier work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's whatever that was that, but that short little book on Christology is very thoughtful. Um, and on the divine identity, the Christology of divine identity, which I don't really like that language.

But nevertheless, his proposal is super interesting and worth discussing and thinking through. Well, he shows in that book – I mean, gosh, it's been probably 20 years since I read it. But that there was historic Jewish credibility to a concept of a, of a, what do you say? Like, I mean the Trinity, but just broadly speaking, like kind of multiple divine figures within one God or however he worded it. And he showed from Judaism that the Christian claim of a triune God would not be historically out of step. Like it was, it was. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's been hugely influential. I, I did work along those lines. and so I wrote a book called The Birth of the Trinity that does some stuff that looks at the Old Testament. It's actually basically on how early Christians, New Testament authors and beyond, were reading the Old Testament and how that contributed to the idea that there are multiple divine persons. work directly on that and engage Bauckham's proposal there. And so, yeah, it's been important work for me and I love Bauckham. I don't like that language of divine identity and I want to

press him a little bit more there as to what exactly that means as I prefer the idea of divine persons. That's the traditional way of speaking. I don't sure I like the idea of divine identity as a way of talking about unity. But yeah, anyway, good stuff. He's got to be my, I mean, it's hard to pick a favorite, like you said. I like different scholars for different things, but he's got to be my number one. Just because, well, for two reasons. One, he spans so many different disciplines, and yet everything he touches touches it's like a game changer i was doing

research and for i mean so he's a he's primarily a jesus guy but you know revelation kind of the general epistles but then um he's got a book on politics that i picked up that's incredible um he is brilliant then i was doing i have a whole chapter in my dissertation on a first century Jewish work called Pseudophylo. Or sometimes it's the Latin lab, Liber Antiquatum Biblicarum or something like that. It's kind of an obscure. It's a little niche thing. And then I'm doing research on it. I'm like, oh, I discovered Richard Bauckham has done the most definitive work on Pseudophilos interpretation of the Old Testament.

I'm like, everywhere I run in the biblical studies area, he's just there. It's kind of like, oh, he wrote this game-changing article, this game-changing book. Yeah. His range is incredible. Oh, yeah. It's so good. Anyway, dude, thanks so much for coming on the show. You've given us a lot to think about.

I know that this is more on the heady academic uh kind of interview but my my audience dude they're um whether or not they're professional academics i think they love this stuff so thanks so much for giving us yeah a lot to think about man hey well yeah thanks and thanks to all your listeners too for for hearing me out great conversation preston i enjoyed it this show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. to a diverse group of Jesus followers who are committed to thinking deeply, loving widely, and having curious conversations with thoughtful people. We have several membership tiers where you can receive premium content. For instance,

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