Matthew W. Bates > Quotes

“The purpose of the gospel proclamation is to cultivate obedient allegiance to Jesus the king among the nations (cf. Rom. 15:18).”
― Matthew W Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“the gospel is the power-releasing story of how Jesus became king and the only adequate response is allegiance alone.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“In short, for many today faith is defined as the opposite of evidence-based truth. This is neither a biblical nor a Christian understanding of faith. In”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“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 W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“Final salvation is not about the individual soul going to heaven after death; it is about resurrection into new creation.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“The gospel has been entrusted to the whole church for the sake of the entire world.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“Some still need to be convinced that enacted obedience is essential to salvation. Those who are already persuaded need a more robust theological grammar to help articulate this truth.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“The key point is that true pistis is not an irrational launching into the void but a reasonable, action-oriented response grounded in the conviction that God’s invisible underlying realities are more certain than any apparent realities.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“With regard to eternal salvation, rather than speaking of belief, trust, or faith in Jesus, we should speak instead of fidelity to Jesus as cosmic Lord or allegiance to Jesus the king.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“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 W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“Properly speaking, pistis is not part of the gospel but the fitting response to the gospel. Moreover,”
― Matthew W Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“Human salvation is directed toward God's intention to restore individuals, communities, and the world as the kingdom of God continues to break into history. When we give allegiance [to the Lord Jesus Christ], we become new creatures set free from the enslaving power of sin. As we worship the Son of God, who is the authentic, original image of God, our own distorted Adamic image is transformed, so that we are personally renewed. As we are transformed into the image of Jesus the Christ, we bring God's wise service, stewardship, and rule to one another and to the remainder of creation.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone

“Jesus proclaimed the one gospel by announcing the inauguration of the kingdom of God as well as its anticipated culmination”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“In short, we cannot say in an unqualified fashion that final salvation is by grace and by faith apart from embodied obedience, for this misunderstands the nature of both charis (“grace”) and pistis (“faith”) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters. We”
― Matthew W Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“gift-giving, or grace, in the ancient world always required reciprocation.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“God’s superabundant, prior gift is granted without regard to our relative worth, but the reception of God’s gift demands a return gift from us, a response of grateful discipleship marked by allegiance to King Jesus. Allegiance,”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“the words are not David’s alone, but the words of the preexistent Christ as the preexistent Christ reports an earlier conversation that he had with God the Father about his begottenness and Sonship.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“in Isaiah 49: 1–12, early Christians would, of course, ultimately identify this servant as Jesus, the Christ, the Son. The triune implications are startling: Through the Spirit via Isaiah, God the Father spoke to Jesus the Son giving him in advance Israel’s vocation—”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“this righteousness becomes ours through our allegiance to Jesus”
― Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

“Nor is a total lack of doubt pertinent. When a doubter has become convinced that salvation depends upon the ability to truly trust, anxiety builds. The purportedly good news that the only needful thing is really to trust becomes a devastating word of condemnation. The faulty God-only-accepts-my-genuine-trust gospel puts doubters in a tailspin, but the true gospel of Jesus’s kingship gives a clear answer regarding salvation’s boundary: if a doubter continues to give allegiance to Jesus—the King revealed in the gospel—then that person is saved despite whatever doubts they harbor. Even on his or her most doubt-filled days, the doubter can still choose to give loyalty to King Jesus and his ways.”
― Matthew W. Bates, Why the Gospel?: Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose

“Yet for Augustine, in terms of those who err regarding the Trinity, there is a third category of people—perhaps the most pernicious—those who “strive to climb above the created universe,” which is “so ineluctably subject to change” in hope that they can entirely escape their creaturely limitations, gain a transcendent vantage point on the unchangeable God, and from that lofty height, then speak about God apart from any creaturely analogy.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“The irony is that in spinning stories of Christian dogmatic development, scholarship has by and large significantly overvalued the evidence of the hypothetical pre-history and redactional layers that we do not actually possess (and about which there is lack of scholarly agreement), but has undervalued the non-hypothetical coeval and subsequent Christian texts that we do actually have.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Sit at my right hand” were not appropriate to David, implying that although they were uttered by David, David was speaking prosopologically as a prophet in the guise of God the Father to Jesus at his ascension long before the earthly Jesus of Nazareth was born (Acts 2: 33–5).41”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“other words, prosopological exegesis affirms and further develops the notion that for the earliest Christians the God of Israel had revealed himself as a personal God.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“I am grateful that we live in an era in which it is increasingly recognized that there is no neutral, objective, independent ground that is unsullied by prior commitments and worldviews upon which any historian might stand when examining these matters.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Indeed, in whatever guise they might appear, misguided rationalism and inappropriate means of scriptural interpretation can truly result in faulty assessments of God.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“The Apostle Paul will later term all of this the great cosmic mystery—that the Gentiles are to be fully welcomed by the Father through the Son into the one people of God via a new covenant (see Rom. 11: 25–7; cf. Eph. 3: 1–6; Gal. 4: 24–7; 1 Cor. 11: 25; 2 Cor. 3: 6).”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Paul’s use is vital because it locates the prosopological method in the very earliest stratum of Christian literature that we possess.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“the inclusion of the Lord Jesus Christ on the divine side of the equation in citations of the Old Testament is inordinately common in earliest Christianity.36 For example, with regard to this very text, Isaiah 42: 1–9, Justin Martyr heavily underscores the theme of Gentile inclusion in his interpretation,37 while noticing that Isaiah 49: 8–9 indicates that God is not ultimately willing to share his glory with any other but nonetheless that this divine conversation implies that the Servant must be construed as sharing in that glory (see Dial. 65)”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“In sum, Mark and the other synoptic writers portray Jesus as engaging in a startling prosopological reading of Psalm 110 (Ps. 109 LXX), indicating that Jesus, at least as he is described by the Evangelists, believed that the preexistent Christ—of whom Jesus himself was the human embodiment—was begotten by God and brought forth from the womb before the dawn of the first morning, also telling of his eternal priesthood and his future role as a powerful ruler.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament