Theopedia

Gospel-Allegiance Model

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

— Ephesians 2:8-9 (ESV)

Definition

The gospel-allegiance model is New Testament scholar Matthew W. Bates’s proposal that pistis, when used of salvation in the New Testament, is better translated “allegiance” to the enthroned King Jesus than “faith,” “belief,” or “trust.” Developed across three books, Salvation by Allegiance Alone (2017), Gospel Allegiance (2019), and Beyond the Salvation Wars (2025), the model holds that “pistis is not the polar opposite of works; rather pistis as ongoing allegiance is the fundamental framework into which works must fit as part of our salvation.”1 Bates intends the proposal as a bridge toward Protestant and Roman Catholic agreement on salvation.2

Historical Origin

Matthew W. Bates, a New Testament scholar at Northern Seminary, introduced the model in Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker Academic, 2017). He developed it further in Gospel Allegiance: What Faith in Jesus Misses for Salvation in Christ (Brazos, 2019), and stated its aim most explicitly in Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved (Brazos, 2025), where he states the aim most plainly:

“the gospel is not individualized justification by faith. Rather, the gospel is the power of God for salvation, because it announces the reign of Jesus as king… He is the justified one who lives by allegiance so that we can be justified by allegiance too, and in so doing tap into his resurrection life.”2

Bates’s proposal shares affinities with the New Perspective on Paul and related scholarship (N. T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Michael Gorman, Michael Bird), whose adherents have generally received it favorably.3

Core Tenets

Bates argues that “the true climax of the gospel,” Jesus’s enthronement, has been deemphasized in favor of an individualized account of faith, so that pistis has been misaimed toward trust in Jesus’s righteousness or in his death covering personal sin, rather than toward sworn allegiance to Jesus as reigning king.4 He organizes the gospel narrative around an eight-part outline culminating in the enthronement, and finds three components within pistis: intellectual affirmation, professed loyalty, and embodied fidelity. He states plainly that traditional vocabulary should be retired:

“‘faith’ and ‘belief,’ insofar as they serve as overarching terms to describe what brings about eternal salvation, should be excised from Christian discourse… For the sake of the gospel we need to revise our vocabulary.”5

Four further claims recur across the trilogy. First, Bates holds to corporate rather than individual election, denying that “a single verse” supports the election of particular persons and arguing instead that God has predestined a class, those who swear allegiance, rather than named individuals.6 Second, he rejects the traditional order of salvation (election, calling, regeneration, justification, sanctification, glorification) as an artifact of systematic rather than biblical theology; by Beyond the Salvation Wars he denies that regeneration must precede faith, holding instead that regeneration follows a person’s free choice to believe, repent, and be baptized.7 Third, justification on his account is both forensic and transformative, involving both imputation and an instantaneous infusion of righteousness, and, in Salvation by Allegiance Alone, capable of being forfeited by a professing believer who fails to persevere in allegiance. Fourth, by Beyond the Salvation Wars Bates states that “allegiance-based good works performed with the assistance of the Spirit are part of the basis of our final justification,” and elsewhere that allegiance itself “is the sole instrument of justification.”8

Critical Reception

Reviewers sympathetic to New Perspective-adjacent scholarship have generally praised Bates’s exegetical range and his critique of “easy believism.”3 A narrative-historical review at postost.net calls the “allegiance” translation “a useful polemical and pedagogic device” that “shoves justification-by-faith off its pedestal,” while still disputing particular exegetical moves, such as Bates’s reading of Matthew 7:21-23.9

The most sustained objections come from reviewers writing within, or in direct conversation with, the confessional Reformed tradition.

The lexical case for “allegiance” does not reach the verb form Paul actually uses for believing. Tom Wenger argues the proposal depends on extending a rare “faithfulness” sense of the noun pistis, drawn chiefly from Second Temple and apocryphal literature, to govern the cognate verb pisteuō, which is nowhere lexically attested as “give allegiance”:

“What permits Bates, with the scantest of evidence that pistis in a few instances means ‘allegiance,’ to then bring that over into the definition of a verb that is nowhere defined as ‘giving allegiance’? The bald assertion strikes again.”10

Will Timmins, writing in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, reaches a similar verdict after the most technical treatment of the lexical and exegetical evidence: “major deficiencies are observed” in Bates’s argument, such that “the proposal is judged untenable.”11

The model does not engage Paul’s own texts excluding works from justification. Wenger observes that Bates does not address Romans 4:5, where Paul contrasts the one who “works” with the one who simply “believes” on God who justifies the ungodly, and that Bates comes close to, but stops short of, Ephesians 2:9 and Titus 3:5:

“He comes close, suggesting that Ephesians 2:8 should read, ‘It is by grace you have been saved through allegiance.’ But he then slams on the brakes and does not proceed one word further… Paul’s complete exclusion of works from this formula destroys Bates’ case that faith equals works.”12

Thomas Schreiner, granting Bates’s emphasis on submission to Christ as king, argues the same passage tells against “allegiance” as a rendering:

“‘allegiance’ puts the emphasis squarely on the human subject, on what we do, on our commitment… We see a contrast here between doing and believing, between achieving and receiving, between acting and resting.”13

Locating assurance in the believer’s own performance undercuts rather than restores confidence. Wenger identifies this as the model’s deepest pastoral flaw:

“When the Christian’s salvation depends on how well they have been faithful in their ‘pledge of allegiance to Jesus,’ they must obsess over their own performance. How can they afford not to? Eternity is on the line.”14

The proposal reproduces older positions without acknowledging them. Harrison Perkins, reviewing Beyond the Salvation Wars, argues that Bates’s corporate-election structure reflects an older, unacknowledged pattern:

“This structure of election… reflects a classic Arminian argument. It isn’t new, though it is selective… he’s rearticulating historically Arminian theological structures while claiming to argue for fresh, strictly exegetical positions that supposedly transcend any historical Protestant or Roman Catholic bounds.”15

Perkins traces the same pattern into Bates’s account of sin and regeneration, noting that Bates positions himself as “consciously anti-Augustinian,” and concludes that on Bates’s own terms Christ functions primarily as example rather than mediator:

“in Bates’s gospel, we receive justification by performing the same actions as Christ, stressing Christ as exemplar rather than Savior… Bates’s gospel amounts to us working our way into heaven, tinged with the prospect of forgiveness.”16

A review from Reformed Baptist Seminary of Gospel Allegiance makes a related point, that Bates’s “main critique of the ‘Protestant model’ is that faith is internalized and works are merely external evidences but are not the basis for salvation,” a framing the reviewer treats as a misdescription of the historic Protestant position, which has always treated works as faith’s necessary and inseparable fruit rather than something unrelated to it.17

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

Where Bates locates the ground of justification, at least in part, in the believer’s own allegiance, the 2LBCF confines faith strictly to the role of instrument, expressly excluding the act of believing itself from serving as the believer’s righteousness:

“Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God. Faith thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification; yet it is not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.”18

Charles Hodge summarizes the same conviction as “the common doctrine of Protestants”: “faith is merely the instrumental cause of justification.”19 Edward Leigh states the point even more sharply, denying that faith is reckoned a species of work in the act of justifying: “The instrumental cause is faith… not considered as a work, but as an act of the soul receiving and applying Christ to us… It is to be considered as alone in the act of Justification, but not alone in the person justified.”20 A. A. Hodge states the positive alternative: the believer’s standing rests on Christ’s own righteousness, credited rather than performed: “his perfect righteousness, as imputed to us, is the sole and strictly legal ground of our justification.”21 Herman Bavinck draws out what is at stake pastorally in relocating that ground to the believer’s own faith or fidelity:

“if faith itself is the ground of justification, God accepts a lesser righteousness than he demands in his law… Here believers are robbed of all consolation; if our weak faith is the ground of our justification, the Christian life is a life of continual fear and uncertainty; we look to ourselves rather than being fixed on Christ.”22

Against Bates’s claim that individual election lacks textual support, the 2LBCF states election as particular to named persons, not merely a class: “these angels and men thus predestinated and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed, and their number so certain and definite, that it cannot be either increased or diminished.”23 Bavinck makes the same point directly against a corporate-only reading: “such a restriction is a pure abstraction since humanity, people, family, and church always consist of particular persons. It is also contrary to Scripture, for Scripture teaches a personal election… and speaks of the names of the elect that are written in the Book of Life.”24

Bates’s claim that regeneration follows, rather than precedes, a person’s free choice to render allegiance likewise contradicts the Reformed doctrine of monergistic regeneration:

“man is not dead in his sins and trespasses, for if he is able to believe, he already has spiritual life… regeneration precedes and causes faith. Regeneration is necessary before a man can do a single thing that is spiritually good. In regeneration man is 100 percent passive, and the Holy Spirit is 100 percent active.”25

On this account, allegiance, understood as a free pledge of loyalty offered prior to any regenerating work of the Spirit, cannot function as the instrument of salvation, since a sinner “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) is incapable of rendering it prior to regeneration.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 109, quoted in Tom Wenger II, “Old and Bald: Responding to Salvation by Allegiance Alone by Matthew Bates,” The Heidelblog, May 19, 2022, https://heidelblog.net/2022/05/old-and-bald-responding-to-salvation-by-allegiance-alone-by-matthew-bates/. ↩

  2. Matthew W. Bates, Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2025), 47, quoted in Harrison Perkins, “Don’t Buy into a Revisionist Gospel: Review of Beyond the Salvation Wars by Matthew Bates,” The Gospel Coalition, March 11, 2025, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/beyond-salvation-wars/. ↩ ↩2

  3. Wenger, “Old and Bald.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Wenger, “Old and Bald.” ↩

  5. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, quoted in Wenger, “Old and Bald.” ↩

  6. Thomas Schreiner, “Saved by ‘Allegiance’ Alone? On a New Attempt to Revise the Reformation,” The Gospel Coalition, March 3, 2017, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/salvation-by-allegiance-alone/. ↩

  7. Perkins, “Don’t Buy into a Revisionist Gospel.” ↩

  8. Bates, Beyond the Salvation Wars, quoted in Perkins, “Don’t Buy into a Revisionist Gospel.” ↩

  9. “Salvation By Allegiance Alone (5): The Exegetical Evidence for Faith as Allegiance,” postost.net, https://www.postost.net/2017/05/salvation-allegiance-alone-5-exegetical-evidence-faith-allegiance. ↩

  10. Wenger, “Old and Bald.” ↩

  11. Will N. Timmins, “A Faith Unlike Abraham’s: Matthew Bates on Salvation by Allegiance Alone,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 61.3 (2018): 595-615. ↩

  12. Wenger, “Old and Bald.” ↩

  13. Schreiner, “Saved by ‘Allegiance’ Alone?” ↩

  14. Wenger, “Old and Bald.” ↩

  15. Perkins, “Don’t Buy into a Revisionist Gospel.” ↩

  16. Perkins, “Don’t Buy into a Revisionist Gospel.” ↩

  17. “A Dangerous Antidote: A Review of Bates’ Gospel Allegiance,” Reformed Baptist Seminary, December 12, 2025, https://rbs.org/blog/2025/12/12/a-dangerous-antidote-a-review-of-bates-gospel-allegiance. ↩

  18. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” paras. 1-2. ↩

  19. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVII. Justification,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 144. ↩

  20. Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London, 1654), bk. 7. ↩

  21. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 33, “Justification.” ↩

  22. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  23. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” paras. 3-4. ↩

  24. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩

  25. R. C. Sproul, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Tertium Quid: The Failure of Recent Attempts at a Via Media,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 356-389. ↩