A Torat Edom Critique of the
“Allegiance Gospel” and Reformed Abstractions
Introduction: What Is at Stake?
A third way always sounds promising—especially when the two main camps have spent centuries in bitter disagreement. That’s what Matthew Bates offers in his recent book Beyond the Salvation Wars, a book that suggests Protestants and Catholics have both gotten the gospel wrong in different ways, and that the truth lies in a new synthesis: salvation not by faith alone, but by allegiance alone.
It’s not the first time such a reimagination has been tried. From Socinianism to Barthianism, from N.T. Wright to the emergent church, there’s a long tradition of attempting to rescue the gospel from “abstract theology” or “individualistic narcissism” and replace it with a more “kingdom-centered,” “culturally responsible” gospel. But what’s happening here is not just an interpretive tweak. It’s a displacement of the covenantal center of the gospel and a misdiagnosis of the disease the gospel cures.
Let’s be clear. Allegiance to Jesus matters. But allegiance is not the gospel. And to put it at the center—whether subtly or boldly—is to shift the good news from what Christ has done to what we must do.
This is not just a disagreement about language. It’s a disagreement about the very nature of grace, righteousness, and what kind of God we’re dealing with.
This essay is not a defense of Protestant slogans or a nostalgic Reformation echo, yet which was ‘justified’ and relevant today. This is a covenantal response rooted in what I call Torat Edom—the law or Torah of Edom, the theology of the outsider brother who sold his birthright, and the justice of God’s covenantal wound. It’s a lens that takes Scripture as a unified story and insists on one truth: there is no gospel without substitution. There is no kingdom without a covenant. There is no redemption without a wound.
In the words of J. Gresham Machen on his deathbed: “Thank God for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”
Matthew Bates has written a clear and compelling book—but in my view, it is clearly and compellingly wrong. I’ll explain why.
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Adding the Missing Chapters: Romans 9–11 as Theological Anchor
Much of the confusion in both Reformed and post-Reformed frameworks—whether from Schreiner, Hamilton, or Bates—stems from neglecting the role of Romans 9–11 as the linchpin for reading Romans, whether backward or forward. Scot McKnight rightly emphasizes that Paul’s vision is not a mere soteriological algorithm, but a defense of God’s covenantal fidelity—especially in regard to Israel and the nations.
This is not about ecclesiology abstracted from story, but about Christianity’s Edomite inheritance: a grafting-in of outsiders into the wound of Israel’s Messiah, not into a newly invented system of allegiance.
A Word About Method: Listening to the Living Oracle-Keepers
Before going further, we must situate ourselves theologically: the gospel cannot be abstracted from Israel’s story. Paul tells us that “the oracles of God were entrusted to them” (Rom. 3:2), and in that spirit, I invite readers to listen to the oracle-keepers—to hear Paul not merely as a Christian apostle, but as a Pharisaic Jew revealing the inclusion of the nations through a covenant already established in mercy.
This means recovering trust in the shalshelet—the generational chain of oral and written wisdom within Israel’s rabbinic tradition that guards the memory of covenantal reality, even amid exile and trauma. It is precisely this shalshelet that bore witness to the distortions introduced when Rome—under Herod’s patronage—co-opted messianic expectation for imperial ends. The rabbis did not simply reject Jesus; they perceived that the Christian project, as it aligned with Roman power, had begun to act out the pattern of Edom: the brother who turns covenant into conquest, who chooses dominance over reconciliation.
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I. The Gospel and the Grammar of Grace
Theological reformulations of the gospel have long attempted to correct perceived imbalances or shortcomings in historical paradigms. In recent years, Matthew Bates has proposed that salvation should be understood not as “faith alone” but as “allegiance alone.”
His work aims to synthesize Protestant and Catholic concerns and to redirect the gospel’s focus toward the kingship of Christ and the communal life of the church. While well-intentioned, this reframing marks not a correction but a displacement. By defining pistis as “allegiance,” Bates shifts the gospel from divine accomplishment to human loyalty. The effect is a subtle yet substantial realignment of grace, justification, and covenant.
Simultaneously, Reformed theologians like Thomas Schreiner and James Hamilton, while retaining forensic categories and a high view of substitutionary atonement, often construct grace within a narrow law-gospel binary that overlooks the covenantal faithfulness of God beyond Israel—including figures like Ishmael, Esau, and Cornelius. Their theological frameworks universalize Israel while erasing Edom, offering election without a coherent theology of the nations.
This paper argues that both systems—Bates’s allegiance model and the Reformed law-grace dichotomy—fail to account for the full biblical shape of the gospel as Torat Edom presents it: the law of the outsider, the wound of substitution, and the mercy of a covenant that transcends national or ecclesial borders. At the center of the gospel is not a demand for loyalty, but a bleeding Lamb. And the true obedience of faith is not imperial fealty but covenantal trust, as revealed in Abraham, Noah, Job, and Cornelius.
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II. Covenant Before Kingdom: Why Allegiance Cannot Be First
The foundational order of biblical revelation places covenant before kingship. In Exodus, Israel is redeemed through the blood of the lamb before it receives the Torah at Sinai. The structure of God’s redemptive plan moves from mercy to obedience, not the reverse. Allegiance, in biblical terms, is a response to covenantal deliverance, not its precondition.
Bates’s model reverses this order. By beginning with kingship rather than priesthood, he unwittingly reintroduces the very legalism he aims to avoid. A king without an altar is a tyrant. A gospel of allegiance without substitutionary atonement is, at best, moralism in ecclesial garb.
In the New Testament, Jesus first offers Himself as a covenantal sacrifice—“this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28)—before calling disciples to follow Him. The gospel does not begin with, “Bow to the King,” but with “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The good news is not first about our allegiance, but about His suffering.
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III. The Wound of the Covenant: Substitution as the Gospel’s Center
The essence of biblical covenant is not contract but cut. In Genesis 15, God seals His promise to Abram through a sacrificial ritual—passing alone between the slaughtered animals. This solemn act reveals that the covenant is upheld not by human allegiance but by divine self-binding. As the prophet Isaiah later reveals, this pattern culminates in the suffering servant: “He was pierced for our transgressions… and by His wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).
Bates’s framework acknowledges the crucifixion but minimizes its substitutionary character. He reinterprets the cross as a kingdom-declaring event that inaugurates communal allegiance. This reframing underplays the covenantal wound—the sacrificial center without which the gospel collapses into moral expectation.
Torat Edom insists: the gospel is a covenant cut in flesh. It is a wound that opens the way not just for Israel, but for Esau. It welcomes not just the covenantal insider, but the outsider brother.
The cross is not an emblem of allegiance; it is the mercy seat. To diminish substitution is to forfeit the priestly basis of salvation and to sever the gospel from its Jewish covenantal moorings.
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IV. Faith, Not Fealty: Misreading Pistis in a Post-Imperial Age
Bates’s attempt to redefine pistis as “allegiance” stems from Greco-Roman political usage, where loyalty to emperors was often termed pistis. But the New Testament authors are not writing imperial propaganda. They are interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures and their covenantal categories—especially emunah, the relational trust of Abraham, Noah, and the righteous Gentile.
Paul’s gospel in Romans does not call for allegiance to a new regime. It calls for the “obedience of faith” (hypakoē pisteōs, Rom. 1:5, 16:26)—a phrase that refers to covenantal trustfulness, not imperial submission. Schreiner and Hamilton attempt to defend a traditional “faith alone” paradigm, but often within a dichotomous framework that pits Torah against grace, forgetting that Abraham’s righteousness was credited not apart from covenant, but within the Genesis 15 promise that all nations would be blessed.
Torat Edom calls for a recovery of the Jewish covenantal context: the nations are grafted in not by allegiance but by the pierced covenant. Faith is not fealty. It is the cry of Cornelius, the lament of Job, the wounded trust of Edom. The one who says, “I believe—help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) is not performing allegiance; he is entering covenant through mercy.
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V. The Law and Grace Dichotomy: Reformed Theology and the Truncated Abrahamic and Noahide Covenant
Schreiner and Hamilton, in their respective biblical theologies, rightly defend penal substitution and forensic justification. But they do so within a rigid law-grace framework that misrepresents the deeper continuity of covenantal grace throughout Scripture.
By opposing law to grace, they obscure the relational nature of Torah as a covenant given after redemption. Worse, their theological systems tend to exclude Ishmael and Esau as representatives of non-election, flattening biblical history into categories of saved and reprobate, chosen and cast off. This is a misreading of Paul’s argument in Romans 9–11, where even Esau is part of the divine narrative of mercy and where God’s calling is not revoked (Rom. 11:29).
Torat Edom rejects the Reformed tendency to turn covenant into contract and election into exclusivity. Edom was not reprobated; he was wayward and sold his birthright. And even the “vessels of wrath” are part of the story God is telling—a story that culminates not in systematic order, but in the mercy shown to “all” (Rom. 11:32).
So to fully appreciate Paul’s argument in Romans—particularly in chapters 1 through 4—we must recover the Noahide dimension of the moral law. Romans 2:14–15 affirms that even Gentiles, “who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law,” thereby demonstrating that there is a moral knowledge rooted not in Sinai but in creation and covenantal memory.
This is not generic natural law—it is Noahide memory, embedded in the covenant God made with all flesh in Genesis 9. Paul’s declaration that “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Rom. 4:3) is not an isolated theological claim, but a continuation of the trust seen in Noah (Gen. 6:8), Job, and others who lived by covenantal response before Torah was given.
Thus, the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:26) is best understood not as abstract allegiance, but as covenantal fidelity—a response of emunah grounded in God’s mercy. It is this Noahide logic that allows Paul to claim that both Jew and Gentile stand on the same ground: “There is no distinction, for all have sinned…” (Rom. 3:22–23), and that the righteousness of God has been revealed “apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it” (Rom. 3:21).
By restoring this lens, we see Romans not as a repudiation of Jewish law nor a blueprint for ecclesial allegiance, but as a covenantal map guiding Gentiles—like Cornelius and Edom—back to the God of mercy through the pierced side of Israel’s Messiah.
This perspective is further enriched by examining historical theological interpretations. For instance, Augustine’s engagement with the Noahide Laws offers insight into early Christian understandings of universal moral obligations. In his work Contra Faustum, Augustine discusses how the Apostolic decrees aimed to unite Jews and Gentiles under common moral expectations, which some scholars associate with the Noahide Laws. For a deeper exploration of Augustine’s views on this topic, see my post: Augustine’s Engagement with Noahide Laws. ⸻
VI. The Church and the Question of Covenant Inclusion
Bates’s ecclesiology proposes a model of “corporate election” where individuals participate by maintaining allegiance. But this introduces instability: who is “in” the elect community? How much allegiance is enough? In trying to avoid the pitfalls of individualism, Bates has created a system with no assurance—what Schreiner once called “an empty set.”
Schreiner and Hamilton, by contrast, defend the perseverance of the saints, but again from within a system that cannot fully include Edom, Cornelius, or the righteous outsider. Both views struggle with the reality of covenantal adoption apart from tribal markers.
Torat Edom reframes the church not as a new tribe, but as the expansion of covenantal mercy to the outsider. The church is the edah—the witnessing assembly—not because it replaces Israel, but because it shares in the covenantal wound. The gospel is not “God chose a team; stay on it,” but “You are Mine; I have called you by name” (Isa. 43:1).
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VII. Recovering the True Grammar of the Gospel
What is at stake in these theological proposals is not merely emphasis but essence. The gospel cannot be defined by allegiance, nor can it be reduced to grace versus law. Again it is the revelation of God’s righteousness apart from the law but witnessed to by the Torah and Prophets (Rom. 3:21). It is covenant fulfilled, substitution offered, nations welcomed, and Edom remembered.
To reject imputed righteousness is to sever salvation from the wound. To treat faith as allegiance is to confuse the response with the root. The gospel is not a performance metric. It is the proclamation of a crucified Messiah whose blood secures a new covenant with Israel and the nations.
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Finally No Gospel Without the Wound
Whether allegiance or law-grace dichotomies, both Bates’s proposal and Reformed theology in its systematic forms risk distorting the gospel by abstracting it from covenantal mercy. The gospel is not a call to loyalty, nor a mere forensic declaration. It is a covenant cut in the body of Jesus—the wound that binds outsider and insider alike into one family.
Matthew Bates can be understood as an innovative but typical representative of the New Perspective on Paul. Like N.T. Wright and James Dunn, Bates seeks to correct what he sees as distortions in traditional Protestant soteriology—especially the emphasis on individual justification by faith detached from covenantal and communal contexts. His central move—redefining pistis as “allegiance”—follows the NPP trend of reframing Paul’s gospel not as an abstract legal transaction but as the announcement of Jesus’s kingship and the call to embodied faithfulness within God’s covenant community.
In doing so, Bates inherits the NPP suspicion of our Reformed brethren and categories like imputed righteousness and justification by faith alone. Yet he also pushes beyond Wright by attempting to distill this covenantal vision into a single unifying term—allegiance—effectively recasting faith as a performative loyalty rather than a trust rooted in divine mercy. This makes Bates a compelling, if problematic, heir of the NPP: faithful to its instincts, but even more radical in its redefinition of gospel grammar.
The obedience of faith is not allegiance. It is emunah—covenantal trust. It is the cry of the one who has no claim and yet was and is still called. It is the story of Edom—wounded, often foolish in his choices, yet not forgotten.
“Deliverers shall go up to Mount Zion to rule Mount Esau, and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.” —Obadiah 1:21
And that, not allegiance, is the prophetic grammar of grace.
