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

by Matthew W. Bates

Faith or belief was being put forward as the opposite of reasoned judgment in consideration of the evidence.

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.

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.

the enthroned and actively ruling Son of God, the cosmic Lord. Given the emphasis in both of these texts on Jesus’s exercised sovereignty, it is safe to conclude that this new super-exalted status as cosmic Lord is not peripheral to the good news about Jesus. It is at the very heart and center—the climax of the gospel. Jesus has been enthroned as the king. To him allegiance is owed.

the gospel proper is not so much a story focused on “believing that Jesus died for my sins” or “trusting in Jesus’s righteousness alone” as it is a power-releasing story about Jesus, the one who is now ruling as the allegiance-demanding Lord of heaven and earth.

It is the story of how Jesus the Son, who was chosen far in advance by God as the appointed Messiah, was anointed by God at his baptism as the designated Messiah, and then came to be the enthroned Messiah after his resurrection from the dead—the

The cross and resurrection get central billing, but Jesus’s kingship is tucked away offstage.29 We need to recover Jesus’s kingship as a central, nonnegotiable constituent of the gospel. Jesus’s reign as Lord of heaven and earth fundamentally determines the meaning of “faith” (pistis) as “allegiance” in relation to salvation. Jesus as king is the primary object toward which our saving “faith”—that is, our saving allegiance—is directed.

Paul’s point is not that once we have a preestablished trust in Jesus’s power to forgive our sins, then we are set free to do good works; rather it is that the gospel is that Jesus has been enthroned, so the only proper response is obedient allegiance to him as the king.

This is not an attempt to establish self-righteousness but a posture of servant-minded loyalty.

The “law of the Christ” (and the like) is spoken of in a positive fashion because pistis is not fundamentally opposed to all law but involves enacted obedience to the wise rule that Jesus the king both embodies and institutes.

I submit that our English term allegiance is a larger category capable of subsuming the notion of mental assent to the reliability of God’s testimony (belief) or of God’s promises (trust), while also foregrounding the idea that genuine mental assent goes hand in hand with an allegiant or faithful (pistis-full) living out of that assent.

and subsumed within the richer category of allegiance. Consistent trust in situations of duress over a lengthy period of time is allegiance.

If we synthesize the biblical data, we discover that saving allegiance includes three basic dimensions: mental affirmation that the gospel is true, professed fealty to Jesus alone as the cosmic Lord, and enacted loyalty through obedience to Jesus as the king.

we must be intellectually certain enough that we are willing to give our allegiance (pistis) to Jesus as our true king.

In other words, Barclay has convincingly demonstrated that it is a misunderstanding of grace (gift) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters to suggest that grace could not truly be grace if it requires obedience as an obligatory return.

Contemporary Christian notions of grace also frequently fail to take into account the effective nature of grace. That is, the aim of God’s gift of the Christ is to set us free from our slavery to sin, the law, and evil powers and to transform us so that we become new creatures, righteous in the Messiah

what Paul does adamantly oppose is works as a system of salvation predicated on successful performance of rules, rather than works as the embodiment of pistis (fidelity) to Jesus the king.

At the final judgment, we will not be evaluated on the basis of whether we kept a list of rules such as the Ten Commandments, except inasmuch as genuine fidelity to Jesus the king demanded it.

We truly are saved by allegiance alone, but perfect allegiance is neither demanded for salvation in this earthly life nor is it possible any more than is perfect faith (or zero doubt) as traditionally understood.

To seek to quantify or develop a set of hard and fast rules by which one could measure sufficient loyalty is antithetical to the gospel—indeed, it is precisely this rule-based approach that causes Paul so much consternation in his polemic against works of law.

does the Bible stress an individual-first sequence of salvation, but a community-first sequence. The Bible is not really interested in telling a story about God’s predestining election of individuals, even if such a view is compatible with the biblical witness.