Other discussion of Bates, “Salvation by allegiance”

In commenting about theLAB’s interview with Matthew Bates, I overlooked having saved a couple other recent interactions with his Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker, 2017):

  • Nijay Gupta provides a friendly, largely affirmative, and probing set of thoughts.
  • Thomas Schreiner expresses his appreciation for some of the volume’s core impulses but suggests that the proposals gains fail to outweigh the corresponding deficiencies that it creates.

For additional, related discussion, see Bates interview at theLAB and Bates, “Salvation by allegiance alone” and some theological forebears.

Bates interview at theLAB

At the Logos Academic Blog,  Tavis Bohlinger has the first part of an interview series with Matthew Bates. This first entry takes its main impetus from Bates’s Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker, 2017) but also ranges into other areas of personal background, research productivity, and spiritual formation.

For prior further discussion, see also Bates, “Salvation by allegiance alone” and some theological forebears.

Bates, “Salvation by allegiance alone” and some theological forebears

Bates, "Salvation by allegiance alone" coverOne of the new titles in the recent Baker catalog (due for release this month) is Matthew Bates’s Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King. According to Michael Bird’s blurb,

Matthew Bates argues that faith or believing is not mere assent, not easy believism, but covenantal loyalty to the God who saves his people through the Lord Jesus Christ. Bates forces us to rethink the meaning of faith, the gospel, and works with a view to demonstrating their significance for true Christian discipleship. This will be a controversial book, but perhaps it is the controversy we need!

I haven’t read the volume yet, and the book’s apparent thesis will doubtless be controversial in some quarters as Bird suggests. But, this thesis is also something that definitely resembles prior thinking.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the formulation “only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes”—because believing is a response to an announcement that has the nature of a command (Cost of Discipleship, 69–70). Or,  as Augustine suggested, the notion of faith may have two aspects:

We use the word in one sense when we say, “He had no faith in me,” and in another sense when we say, “He did not keep faith with me.” The one phrase means, “He did not believe what I said;” the other, “He did not do what he promised.” (On the Spirit and the Letter 31.54)

Or, indeed, in Romans, as sometimes is bypassed all too easily, part of Paul’s portrait of Abraham is precisely that his faith was also obedient: Abraham becomes the father not only of individuals within the scope of his biological descendants, but to all “those follow in the footsteps of the faith our father Abraham had while he was uncircumcised” (Rom 4:12; τοῖς στοιχοῦσιν τοῖς ἴχνεσιν τῆς ἐν ἀκροβυστίᾳ πίστεως τοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν Ἀβραάμ; cf. Rom 1:5, 3:31; Dunn, Romans, 211–12).

Nation on Bonhoeffer

The Baker YouTube Channel has a series of clips where Mark Thiessen Nation digest some of the main lines of the volume on Dietrich Bonhoeffer that Nation co-authored with Anthony Siegrist and Daniel Umbel. The individual clips are combined in the playlist below:

For more information about the volume (Bonhoeffer the Assassin?: Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking, 2013), please see the Baker website (HT: Mason Slater).

Vanhoozer, ed., Theological Interpretation of the New Testament

Kevin Vanhoozer, ed.,
Kevin Vanhoozer, ed.

For this week, Kevin Vanhoozer’s edited volume on the Theological Interpretation of the New Testament is free from Logos Bible Software when users join a Baker-related email list (HT: Tayler Beede). The volume provides a focused selection of the book-specific entries from the larger Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible.

Schreiner, The King in His Beauty

Thomas Schreiner

Baker and the Stone-Campbell Journal were kind enough to provide a copy of Tom Schreiner’s The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. According to the publisher’s description, Schreiner:

offers a substantial and accessibly written overview of the whole Bible. He traces the storyline of the scriptures from the standpoint of biblical theology, examining the overarching message that is conveyed throughout. Schreiner emphasizes three interrelated and unified themes that stand out in the biblical narrative: God as Lord, human beings as those who are made in God’s image, and the land or place in which God’s rule is exercised. The goal of God’s kingdom is to see the king in his beauty and to be enraptured in his glory.

The text’s page on Baker’s website also provides a PDF of the front matter and first chapter. The text is currently also available for order from AmazonLogos Bible Software, and other booksellers.