Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

by Matthew W. Bates

When the gospel and its proper response have been eroded, recarpeting the foyer, rearranging the pews, and reshingling the roof will not help.

King Jesus summons people into a kingdom where he alone is king, and kings expect one thing from their subjects: allegiance.

That is, English-speaking Christian leaders should entirely cease to speak of “salvation by faith” or of “faith in Jesus” or “believing in Christ” when summarizing Christian salvation. For the sake of the gospel we need to revise our vocabulary.

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.

But God’s love is so great that he sent his Son on our behalf even when our sins had made us his enemies (Rom. 5:6–10), showing that God’s ultimate desire is to see all saved and all come to a knowledge of the truth

Final salvation is not about attainment of heaven but about embodied participation in the new creation.

we should all agree that the “faith” God requires of us has nothing to do with ignoring relevant evidence that is easily available when adjudicating truth claims.

We are not to leap out in the dark at a whim, or simply to prove to ourselves, God, or others that we “have faith.” But the promise-keeping God might indeed call us to act on invisible realities of his heavenly kingdom.

Although not everything that happens in life reflects God’s desired will (most obviously our own sin or the sin of others is not what God would wish to occur), all that happens is allowed within God’s permissive will. And we also know that whatever God permits, even if evil is allowed to temporarily flourish, it can be turned to good by God for us and for others.

It is, in the final analysis, most succinctly good news about the enthronement of Jesus the atoning king as he brings these wider stories to a climax.

Even though he was under no compulsion, so Paul suggests, God chose to make himself beholden to his human creatures, and indeed to the whole creation, to accomplish a specific sort of good news in the future.

the gospel is not at its most basic level a tale about me and my quest for salvation (or even about “us” and “our” quest), but rather it is a grand, cosmic story about God’s Son and what he has done.