As a Baptist preacher’s kid, I never gave any serious thought to the question of whether Roman Catholics could be saved until I was 19 years old.
I was sitting with my parents at a diner booth in Santa Cruz, California, where we were vacationing. A few tables away, I overheard a man talking—no, preaching—about the Holy Spirit. I couldn’t help eavesdropping on what sounded like a deep theological conversation. This man spoke with evangelical fervor about the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s transformative work in his life: a renewed passion for Scripture, an unrelenting love for Christ, and a zeal for leading others through the Bible.
Encouraged—and a little nosy—I found a flimsy excuse to pass by his table and ask what church he attended. I expected him to mention a Baptist church like mine, or perhaps one of those big nondenominational churches in Northern California.
“I’m Roman Catholic,” he said, somewhat confused by my question.
I was stunned. I had never thought about the possibility that some Roman Catholics might believe the gospel and have a meaningful relationship with Jesus. To this point, everything I had absorbed about Roman Catholicism could have come from a fundamentalist tract. As it turned out, I had a lot to unlearn.
Over the years, I have thought and written a lot, in books like When Doctrine Divides the People of God, about unity in the body of Christ. But the issue of evangelical unity with Roman Catholics has always bothered me. We hold significant differences regarding Scripture, tradition, ecclesial authority, and salvation.
The phrase “salvation wars” captures the intense nature of these disagreements. During the Reformation, disagreements over salvation didn’t stay in the pulpit; they spilled onto battlefields, leaving thousands dead and Europe in turmoil. Thankfully, today’s salvation wars are fought with words, not weapons. But the doctrinal differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics remain a significant source of division.
In a provocative new book, Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved, Matthew W. Bates takes up the ambitious task of reconciling Protestant and Catholic Christians by helping them rethink their own respective doctrines of salvation. As a Protestant New Testament scholar who spent years teaching at a Catholic university, Bates brings a fresh perspective to the differences between these broader traditions.
Roman Catholics connect salvation to participation in church sacraments such as baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. Protestant evangelicals, by contrast, emphasize personal faith in Jesus, teaching that we are justified—or made right with God—through belief in the gospel.
Bates argues that both approaches distort biblical teaching on salvation. In the book, he invites readers to explore a different framework: what he calls a “gospel-allegiance model.” The language reflects his own Arminian perspective (challenging Reformed accounts of predestination by emphasizing a believer’s obligation to willingly receive the gift of grace).
As evangelicals, we often associate the concept of sharing the gospel with telling people what they must believe for salvation. But as Bates rightly points out, the New Testament never really uses the term gospel in that way. The word’s original, secular meaning (taken from the Greek word euangelion) was more political than theological. It referred to the “good news” delivered to loyal subjects of a king, such as Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, proclaiming their ruler’s victory over enemies or their conquest of new lands. Only against this backdrop, argues Bates, can we fully appreciate the New Testament gospel as “first and above all the claim that Jesus is now the Messiah or King.”
Furthermore, the core gospel message is descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature. In making this case, Bates points to passages like Mark 1:14–15, Luke 4:18–19, Romans 1:2–4, and 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. For the most part, these biblical expressions of the gospel don’t tell readers or hearers what actions they need to take. Instead, they proclaim who Jesus is as the eternal Son of God and what God has done to save us through the work of King Jesus.
Drawing from these passages, Bates summarizes the “raw content” of the gospel in ten statements:
- Jesus has always been God’s Son.
- He was sent by the Father, as promised.
- He took on human flesh in fulfillment of God’s promises to David.
- He died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.
- He was buried.
- He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
- He appeared to many witnesses.
- He is enthroned at the right hand of God as the ruling Christ.
- He has sent the Holy Spirit to his people to effect his rule.
- He will come again to judge the world and rule eternally.
Bates observes that Protestants and Catholics generally agree on the content of this gospel outline. However, there are crucial disagreements about how we should express the gospel and how it relates to our salvation. Even as we share the same good news about Jesus, we demand different responses and expect different benefits.
Bates accuses Protestants of reducing the gospel to instructions for salvation, to the degree of conflating it with the doctrine of justification by faith. But he faults Roman Catholics for burying the gospel under the weight of a sacramental system and making minimal efforts to define it within the church’s formal catechism.
What alternative does Bates offer to traditional Protestant and Catholic models? It revolves around a redefinition of the Greek term pistis, traditionally translated as faith. Bates contends that pistis is better understood as fidelity, loyalty, or allegiance. He explains that New Testament writers sought more than mere intellectual agreement with gospel proclamations, though such agreement was essential. They also wanted followers of Jesus to pledge loyalty through their confession and demonstrate faithfulness through obedient living. In this, they echoed Jesus’ own example, as set forth in the Sermon on the Mount.
Evangelicals who stress the lordship of Christ will find common ground with much of this model. They might question, however, the extent to which Bates is really proposing an understanding of the gospel that differs from their own.
When the Bible proclaims the good news about King Jesus, it consistently invites a response of both belief and repentance in exchange for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:15; Acts 2:37–38; Rom. 10:9–10). Even though the gospel has broader implications for faith communities and even entire nations, the Philippian jailer’s pointed question recorded in Acts 16:30–31 —“What must I do to be saved?”—indicates that individuals still need to hear the gospel, believe it, and experience forgiveness.
The idea of allegiance to Christ has ramifications for other topics related to the doctrine of salvation. Bates observes that if Roman Catholics take his proposal seriously, they will need to reconsider their views on baptism. Specifically, they may need to rethink the belief that baptism saves “from the work worked” (ex opere operato), which suggests that baptismal waters can have saving effects apart from faith.
As Bates observes, in the first two centuries of Christianity, baptism was a personal and voluntary act stemming from obedience to Jesus’ command. Neither the water nor the faith of the baptizer were thought to hold saving power. As he sees it, genuine repentance initiates salvation. Baptism is the ordinary oath of allegiance one makes to Christ, but it has no saving power in and of itself. To illustrate the Catholic error in connecting baptism and salvation, Bates points to Simon the magician in Acts 8, who underwent baptism without genuine repentance or transformation.
But the book balances its critiques of Catholicism with others aimed at tenets of Reformed theology like the doctrines of election, regeneration, eternal security, and justification by faith. Many of these arguments echo Bates’s earlier works, including Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance. He views biblical election as God choosing a corporate group in Christ to share his purposes and mission rather than predestining specific individuals for salvation.
Reformed Christians often speak of the “perseverance of the saints,” which affirms that true believers cannot lose their salvation. Bates rejects this doctrine, arguing that the warning passages in Hebrews are not hypothetical. Here, he chiefly targets “easy-believism,” the idea that embracing Jesus at one moment guarantees salvation regardless of one’s life thereafter.
However, this characterization oversimplifies the Reformers’ doctrine of perseverance, which affirms that those united to Christ by grace will remain steadfast in their loyalty to him. Accordingly, those who are not loyal to Christ until the end were never truly born again or justified.
In Beyond the Salvation Wars, Bates presents a compelling vision of postdenominational Christianity, in which Catholics and Protestants are unified through a deeper understanding of the gospel and salvation. He is commendably invested in seeing the fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer for all believers to “be one” (John 17:21). Instead of sacrificing truth, Bates calls for gospel-centered “truth-based unity.” On this point, no follower of Jesus should raise any objection.
That said, many readers will likely take issue with Bates’s vision of achieving unity. Essentially, he argues that both Protestants and Roman Catholics understand the content of the gospel while failing to apply it correctly. And he asks both sides to adopt his gospel-allegiance model. However, I suspect that both Protestant and Catholic interpreters might respond with a similar solution. Like Bates, they presumably believe we could all achieve unity by simply adopting their original preferred perspective.
Unfortunately, efforts at interpreting Scripture often involve confirmation bias—affirming positions because they align with the theological tradition we call home. Too often, we approach the Bible looking to confirm what we already believe rather than to evaluate whether our beliefs align with Scripture.
This is why Bates’s call for fresh exegetical assessments is so valuable. Even if we disagree with his conclusions (as I do in many areas), we can still appreciate his challenge to return to Scripture and let it govern our efforts at reform. For Protestants especially, Scripture is the ultimate and unrivaled authority, the standard of all theological truth. When our traditions conflict with Scripture, we should allow it to correct our course.
Another challenge in navigating the kind of theological disagreements raised by Bates is that we reason differently about Scripture’s meaning. The Bible wasn’t written as a systematic theology textbook. Instead, its authors wrote in a range of genres, including occasional theology, to address the needs of God’s people in specific times and places. While authors like Paul used terms like election or predestination, they left no theological dictionary to define them. Bible interpreters often need to make educated guesses.
We build frameworks of understanding from the Bible and test them against the text to see if they match. This process is somewhat like assembling a puzzle without the picture on the box. It requires creativity, some guesswork, and a willingness to hold some of our conclusions more tentatively than others. Books like Beyond the Salvation Wars are valuable because they challenge us to rethink our theological assumptions. Even if we don’t fully adopt the new models they recommend, we gain new insight into the strengths and weaknesses of our own perspectives.
Does Bates achieve his goal of fostering unity? His distinction between gospel content and application is a helpful step. Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians generally agree on the gospel’s core content and affirm shared truths in the church’s historic creeds.
But other foundational differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics lie outside the realm of gospel expression. There are questions about Scripture and tradition, the nature of the church, and the relationship between nature and grace (wherein Catholics locate the metaphysical grounds for their sacramental theology).
We hope and pray that many of these differences can be resolved over time. Purposeful conversations with our Catholic friends and neighbors remain essential. While books like Beyond the Salvation Wars may not offer a one-size-fits-all solution, they provide valuable insights to guide the way forward.
Rhyne Putman is professor of theology and culture at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology.
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