The Gospel Coalition Misrepresents Matthew Bates on the Gospel?! (What Your Pastor Didn’t Tell You)
This interview of Anthony Delgado regarding the Gospel Coalition’s critique of Matthew Bates’ book Beyond the Salvation Wars, hosted on the YouTube channel What Your Pastor Didn’t Tell You, offers an extended theological response to claims made against Bates’ gospel-allegiance model. The discussion centers on whether Bates has presented a revisionist gospel or deviated from orthodoxy, particularly in doctrines such as original sin, justification, and the bondage of the will. Delgado argues that Bates’ model does not deny salvation by grace through faith, but rather positions justification as an effect of the gospel, rather than the content of the gospel itself. He maintains that allegiance, properly understood, is not a “works-based” approach but a holistic response of loyalty and trust. Throughout, Delgado defends Bates’ use of biblical and early Christian sources, critiques the Gospel Coalition article's lack of scriptural grounding, and challenges the assumption that confessional Reformed positions are the singular standard of orthodoxy. He also emphasizes the importance of cross-tradition dialogue, the diversity of theological perspectives in the early church, and the need for humility and clarity when defining doctrines such as original sin and salvation. You can read the written critique here.
TRANSCRIPT:
ZACH MILLER: Hello everyone. This is What Your Pastor Didn't Tell You. I am on with Anthony Delgado. We are talking about Matthew Bates’ new book on the Gospel and a lot of other different things—specifically, the Gospel Coalition. They made a response to Matthew Bates, and they said some interesting stuff that we think merits a response.
Anthony actually made a response on his own website, and we're turning that into a video format. We’ll also add in some extra content for Anthony’s fans. How are you doing today?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Doing great, man. It’s good to see you, and I appreciate you having me on.
ZACH MILLER: Awesome. My pleasure. So, I think you've got the book there?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah, there we go.
ZACH MILLER: So, you know he knows what he's talking about—he's got the book. You actually do a lot of work on the Bible, on Enoch, and other related topics. Could you just quickly tell people where they can find more about your work?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Anthony Delgado. I’m the lead pastor at Palmdale Church in Southern California. When I do these interviews, a lot of people reach out asking where they can find my sermons because they like some of the things I talk about. If you just Google Palmdale Church, you’ll find our church and all that content.
I host a podcast called The Biblical Re-Enchantment Podcast, which you can find anywhere podcasts are available. As you mentioned, I’ve done some work in Enoch. I published a book in 2023 called The Watchers and the Holy Ones. It's a primer on the Book of Enoch for an evangelical audience, especially for those who may be hesitant about engaging with that kind of material.
Then last year, I published another book called The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think. Both of those are available on Amazon or on my website. Pretty much everything I do—articles, podcast, mailing list—is available at anthonydelgado.net. So that’s where you can find me.
ZACH MILLER: Much appreciated. So people might be curious—why exactly are you wanting to come out and respond to Matthew Bates' book in the context of the Gospel Coalition? Could you talk about your goals and motivations?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah. I kind of have a similar story to a lot of other pastors. I grew up in the evangelical world, in an independent Bible church type of environment. It fit a niche that’s pretty common.
But when I entered ministry—I’m just old enough that there weren’t a lot of online options at the time—so I ended up attending a seminary that was Reformed and Presbyterian-founded. That was quite a shift. I also grew up with family and friends who were Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, so I’ve been exposed to a number of different traditions through those connections.
I’ve always had a skepticism that any single tradition has the whole truth. As I studied in seminary and began evaluating various Reformed positions, I branched out into Anglicanism and Methodism, and developed an interest in multiple traditions. One thing I’ve talked with Dr. Bates about is our mutual desire to help people find unity in essential doctrines. I would call myself a soft ecumenist. I don’t think everyone has to believe the exact same thing, but we should at least be able to have healthy, respectful conversations across traditions—and learn from one another.
That’s what really bothered me about the Gospel Coalition article. It came from a particular camp and carried this attitude that, “Our way is the only way.” It felt angry and cynical. That’s why I wanted to respond. I know you had Taylor Turik on to talk about the SBTS group—I’m actually a pastor in a Southern Baptist Church, believe it or not—so I’m very familiar with those guys.
But in their case, I didn’t think they were nearly as harsh. They were mocking and misrepresented Bates’ work, but not as harshly as the Gospel Coalition article. That’s what pushed me to speak up. I wanted people who are asking, “Is this really accurate?” to be able to go online and find a better representation of what Bates is actually saying.
And honestly, I don’t think most of the Reformed community agrees with Harrison Perkins’ take. I don’t think his views represent the majority, and I want to highlight that too. I’d also like to challenge some of the critics of Reformed theology as we go—poke at both sides a little.
ZACH MILLER: Fascinating. That’s really interesting that you mention being Southern Baptist. In that Al Mohler video we did—and people can check that out in the description—one of the guys in the video basically said he didn’t know if Matthew Bates could even be a member of his church. That’s pretty wild, considering you like the book and you’re part of that group.
ANTHONY DELGADO: And I like a lot of their books, too. It’s weird. In fact—his name just escaped me—but I believe the guy who said that, if it’s who I think it is, he's the head of the Biblical Theology department at SBTS. He wrote a great book on typology that you and I would both read and say, "Yes, this is so right." But then we swing over to that statement-of-faith, systematic theology perspective, and suddenly the whole paradigm shifts. So yeah, it's weird. It's hard to dance that line between those different worlds.
Maybe we just can't belong exactly anywhere. But that’s the hope—that we can still get along, I think.
ZACH MILLER: Well, whatever his name is, everybody can watch this video to see if Anthony Delgado will be allowed in that guy’s church.
ANTHONY DELGADO: I’m probably going to have an opportunity to see him in a couple of weeks. I’ll have to see what he says about it.
ZACH MILLER: There you go. Alrighty, so if people are maybe out of the loop here—Matthew Bates wrote a book on a number of different, really interesting topics. What’s the full title again?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah. Why Both Catholics and Protestants Must Reimagine How We Are Saved—that’s part of it.
ZACH MILLER: Right. It touches on a number of important questions—like, is baptism saving? What about the faith versus works debate? And even just the idea of the gospel itself, which might sound crazy to some people, but he’s made some really interesting arguments about how we should actually understand the gospel. Maybe we’ve misunderstood what the biblical writers were saying. Could you give us a general summary? What are the main positions you’d highlight from Matthew Bates’ book?
ANTHONY DELGADO: I think the big thing—the central thesis—is that he wants us to, and I don’t love this word, but I get what he means, to reimagine salvation. Not through a new model, because that wouldn’t be historically grounded, but through a model that should be friendly to both Catholic and Protestant theology.
He’s saying, “Here’s a way both sides can think about this and perhaps find some agreement.” There’s definitely an ecumenical purpose behind the book—trying to bridge divides between different theological camps.
It’s all founded on his gospel-allegiance model. The first book I read by Dr. Bates was Salvation by Allegiance Alone. My wife and I read it out loud together, discussed it, and really digested it. We walked away with a deep understanding of his work.
Some of the criticism focuses on the claim that salvation is by grace through faith—not through allegiance. Bates is taking some liberty, at least on the English-language side, with how we interpret “faith.” He’s not arguing for a translation change as much as he’s urging a deeper understanding of the word. That leads into comparisons—how do Catholics view faith? How might allegiance help Protestants better grasp what’s being communicated in Scripture?
As the book develops, he gets into baptism, election, regeneration—especially how regeneration fits into the ordo salutis, which I think is at the core of the Gospel Coalition’s critique. He also discusses assurance, perseverance, and justification. And yeah, he definitely talks about justification in a way that most Protestants might find unfamiliar.
Protestants have a very defined and delicate doctrine of justification. Even small changes in wording or framing can raise alarms. But I think Bates does a good job engaging that doctrine without discarding its heart. He’s repackaging it to help us understand it within a broader historical perspective.
In the conclusion, he talks about the potential for church unity through some kind of theological synthesis. As I said earlier, I don’t think we’ll see the Church fully reunified anytime soon. But I do think we could reach a point where Protestants recognize Catholics the same way they recognize other Protestants—as orthodox, even with differences. That seems to be the deeper goal of the book.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah, yeah. Another big part of it was how he kind of pushes back against the Reformed or Calvinist-specific view of salvation, and I think that’s why this has stirred up a lot of pushback. We’ll get into that more as we look at the review. I think that’d be really interesting to get into.
So one thing that they—he basically—the article writer is Harrison Perkins, that’s his name. I don’t really honestly know much about him, but we’ll get into what his thoughts are here. So he basically says throughout this work, Bates says the primary reason someone would reject his new articulation of the gospel is out of blind commitment to prior conventional traditions. So basically Bates is like, yeah, a big reason you’re gonna reject what I’m gonna say is because of things you’ve already accepted or whatever.
And I just found the response really interesting because Perkins says the trouble is that Bates doesn’t escape his own prior theological commitments. He says, “But as the endnotes show, he relies prominently on a certain strand of revisionist New Testament scholarship.” At least since E.P. Sanders, there’s been a revisionist trend among New Testament scholars such as James Dunn, N.T. Wright, David deSilva, John Barclay, and Scott McKnight to claim new insight that freshly demonstrates how the church has been seriously mistaken.
And then, if it wasn’t already clear, the title of the article is Don’t Buy into a Revisionist Gospel. So my question for you is, you know, they’re framing it like this Bates guy is just getting this, you know, basically a new thing. He’s embracing the arguments of a particular New Testament guild as the new standard of orthodoxy, and it’s a revisionist gospel. So I’m really curious—what do you think about that? One, what does he mean by revisionist, is that a bad thing? And then two, is that what he’s actually doing?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah, so I mean, first I would say it reminds me of when, you know, somebody turns to somebody who subscribes to covenant theology—which, whether you do or you don’t isn’t the point—but somebody turns to them and says, “Well, that’s replacement theology.” And it’s like, okay, but giving it a name doesn’t make it good or bad. Like, you gotta take apart the construct. And that’s what’s happening here. He’s just toying with people’s emotions, and he wants people to go, “Revisionism, that’s wrong. So this Bates guy’s a heretic.” Like, that’s what he wants people to feel—not that he ever called him a heretic, I don’t want to misrepresent—but that’s what he wants people to feel when he says “revisionist gospel.”
I mean, I think it’s a clear term. What does it mean to revise something? It means to take it and to update it, really. And that’s what he is accusing Bates of doing—coming up with something new. And I mean, I guess the short answer to that is no, I don’t think Bates is coming up with anything new.
If you understand the way that theology progresses—like there’s a reason that we don’t have a systematic theology from the first century of the church. Theology is something that builds and progresses. And so Harrison Perkins, for example, he’s a minister in the OPC tradition, Orthodox Presbyterian Church of America. And he’s a scholar also. And he’s written lots of books, and he’s a really smart guy and highly respected in a lot of different circles. And I haven’t read any of his books, but from what I’ve seen of him, normally I appreciate his thoughtfulness, you know.
But in this case, what’s kind of happening is he’s saying, “Well, we believe this gospel that’s developed over,” you know, “let’s say that the gospel of the OPC—which I believe they subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith—so let’s just say the gospel of the Westminster Confession of Faith is indeed the orthodox gospel.” What we have to understand is that that gospel is a product of the Reformation.
So even if they’re completely right about it, that doesn’t negate Bates wanting to go back throughout history and say, “But let’s understand from the first-century perspective and from the early church, and how this developed in the early church—let’s understand it from that perspective.” Because honestly, the furthest you can try to go back is Augustine, and that’s fourth and fifth century. So we’re still not getting back to the biblical authors there. We’re still talking about development. And I’ll bring this up in a minute—there’s problems with trying to treat Augustine even as Scripture. And so we really have to always be checking our doctrine back to the beginning. And that’s what Bates is trying to do. He’s trying to really understand within the context of the New Testament—what is it?
So if anything’s rev—like, you can’t call it revisionism unless you’re coming up with something new. I guess that’s my point. And so for example, they tell him in the—hang on, I was going to pull it up right here real quick—so the real revisionism that he’s getting at, and I don’t remember if he said this in the article, but he is talking about New Perspective on Paul when he talks about E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright and McKnight and all these guys.
And first of all, New Perspective on Paul is not actually a helpful term for two different reasons. One, not everybody who subscribes to something like NPP actually believes the same thing as each other. It takes a lot of different expressions.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah.
ANTHONY DELGADO: And so what N.T. Wright says about it is pretty dramatically different than what E.P. Sanders first said about it when he introduced it back in the—I think—the sixties. And so it's really not fair to say, well, that's new perspective on Paul, that's revisionism, and say that it's wrong.
But the other thing is that there's a tradition to how different doctrines came about, even within Judaism. And we can see it in the New Testament, that the Sadducees and the Pharisees, for example, don't believe all the same doctrine. And then we've now discovered all the Dead Sea Scroll stuff, and it doesn't appear that the Essenes—or at least the Qumran Jews—didn't have all the same exact doctrine as the Pharisees or the Sadducees for that matter. And then we can see some things in the Zealots that lead us to at least some different orthopraxy, even if it's not a different level of orthodoxy than the Pharisees.
And so we've got these different traditions. And one of the things we've also discovered is that there are also different text traditions—that the Bible they were using in that day takes a couple of different forms. And again, we know this because we've uncovered the Dead Sea Scrolls and all the different Qumran documents. And so, you know, the "Sons of God"/"Sons of Israel" issue in Deuteronomy 32, for example, right? We find out in John 10 that the Pharisees were "Sons of Israel" people, and the Greeks—the Greek Jews, the Hellenized Jews—were "Sons of God" people. So, like, different traditions.
And so you have a different text, and it leads to a little different theology based on which translation you're working with. And if that doesn’t sound like today, I don’t know what is. So you can’t really say this is in the camp of New Perspective on Paul and we are traditionalists following the Old Perspective on Paul. Because what I think is happening—and even this is a bit reductionist—what I really think is happening is that sort of the traditionalists, the Old Perspective on Paul, are following something closer to the tradition of the Pharisees.
Which is kind of right, and it makes sense, because all the other sects died out, and what is today Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism has developed out of the religion of the Pharisees. So it sort of makes sense that our tradition would follow that. But New Perspective on Paul is saying, actually, as we've uncovered these Dead Sea Scrolls, and we've learned some more about these other sects that were in that world, and we've got these different histories—hey, there's other ways to think about this.
And I will sympathize a little bit, because I do think some authors are saying, this is a new perspective and the old perspective is out. I would just like to recognize that actually there are many perspectives, and this is far more complicated to parse than anybody is making it. It's not new or old. And so you can’t say that the New Perspective is revisionism. The New Perspective needs to be evaluated, yeah, it needs to be evaluated critically against early church thinking, about the scriptures and all of that. But it's not to be utterly rejected.
Neither is the Old Perspective—the Pharisaical tradition—neither is that to be embraced blindly. It's just one of those things where, why can't it be both/and? And to take everything for what it's worth. So that's my answer there. That’s what I think Bates is doing, by the way, because he doesn't reject the doctrine of justification. He takes exception with how it's articulated. And I see him doing a both/and when he refers to some of these New Perspective authors and not rejecting entirely the Old Perspective.
ZACH MILLER: That’s a very helpful nuance. I did find that really interesting as well, because as you said, Dunn and N.T. Wright, all these guys, they believe a lot of different things. And E.P. Sanders—the guy who supposedly came up with the New Perspective—when I was reading, I was just like, “Hey, what’s going on here? Are we even talking about the same thing?”
And of course, he didn’t even explain what those specific beliefs are that the New Perspective people hold. So I was just a little confused—why it was bad to begin with? But I think that Bates does something that a lot of people really don’t—or a lot of scholars really don’t do a good job doing—is he points out that we have documents that the Reformers didn’t have, that people a hundred years ago didn’t have, fifty years ago. Even in the last twenty years, we’ve gotten a lot of extra documents. We know more—that’s just an objective fact. We know more than pretty much Christians for the last two thousand years. Maybe eighteen hundred years or so—whatever. The early church might have known some stuff we don’t know, but realistically speaking, we know a lot more.
So why is it so crazy to think that we should update some of our views on things? Or why is it so crazy to think that the Reformers of the 1600s got something wrong? Like, what’s so great about this tradition? It seems like he’s basically like, “Hey, you’re rejecting tradition, therefore you’re wrong.”
ANTHONY DELGADO: Well, and there’s something sort of—like perhaps in their ecclesiology—that suggests, “Hey, we’re not going to consider...” And this happens, by the way, that there are things that challenge our discovery because of our ecclesiology. And I think that happens on the Catholic side as much as on the Protestant side, to be honest. But I think what Bates is doing is he is saying, if it's true, it's true. And he wants to flesh it out. And I appreciate that. I think he does a great job at it.
ZACH MILLER: Right. Yeah. Alright, so we can keep going here. So—oh, actually, I just want to read what you said in your article real quick. Actually no, this was Perkins. Okay. So this was also really interesting because he switches things right after this. He’s first talking about how Bates is basically throwing out traditions—like, “No, no, no, we can’t do that.”
And then in the very next paragraph, he starts talking about how Bates is re-articulating classical Arminian arguments. So it’s almost like—he’s giving a bunch of new stuff, and then he’s also giving a bunch of old stuff, and both are wrong because he’s doing that, or something. I don’t know.
But yeah—so, question for you: does Bates re-articulate classical Arminian arguments, or is he truly reflecting a historical soteriological structure?
ANTHONY DELGADO: You know, the mistake I think Perkins makes here is that he doesn’t often have conversations outside his tradition. That’s what I actually think is happening here. Because it is absurd, sort of in my theological circles, to think that the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism is settled. You know what I mean? But that’s what he’s doing—you can see the eye roll in his words, like, “Oh, are we doing this old thing again?” Like, most Protestant Christians are something like Arminian.
You know what I mean? Like, he must not be getting out of his OPC circles or something like that if he thinks that. And so I think maybe I can sympathize with him because of that, you know, because sometimes I’m around my tribe so much that it makes it harder to see outside. But also I think that would be a warning to all of us to make sure that we’re thinking more broadly than just our traditions.
But like, I think the bigger concern—well, I mean, so the question, I’m going to re-articulate it. So, does Bates re-articulate classic Arminian arguments, or is he truly reflecting a historical soteriological structure? Calvinism is a new doctrine. I just think you can’t get away from that. Arminianism and Calvinism are called such because of John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius, who are both Reformation preachers and teachers—Arminius being a student of Calvin, by the way, in case anybody didn’t know that. And they did not fight in life. They didn’t agree on everything, but they weren’t fighting against each other.
And so I just think it’s really interesting. I’ll let Bates speak for it, though. On page 140, he says, “This doesn’t mean that personal salvation begins within God’s eternal decree. On the contrary, if we are to respect what scripture teaches about salvation, we actually cannot begin with an eternal decree in seeking to understand an individual’s salvation.” In other words, both those in favor of the Synod of Dort’s 1618–19 conclusions—which are the Calvinists—and those against Dort, which are the Arminians or the Remonstrants, start in dubious places.
I just think that’s such an awesome observation—that when we’re talking about personal salvation, it’s really just not helpful to start from the perspective of God’s eternal decree. Because then what do you say to somebody who’s doubting, who has questions about Christ and his kingdom, you know what I mean? They’re on their inroad to the kingdom of God. They’re considering joining a church and being baptized, and then you’re coming at it from the perspective of, “Are you or aren’t you elect?”
And I think there are great ways—especially philosophically—but actually some ways systematically to get to something like Calvinism, to determinism. But really, I think what Bates is getting at is sort of—we might call it the pastoral concern—that nobody is trying to bring people into the kingdom of God by testing them to see if they are or are not elect. Like, that’s just not even what anybody’s doing. And I know a lot of Calvinists—it’s not what they’re doing.
And so he’s actually kind of critical of both ways—Calvinists and Arminians. He says they start in dubious places. Because if you’re starting from the perspective of free will or God’s sovereignty, you are going to neglect some things about the gospel and what God is calling you to do.
And Perkins—he just can’t seem to think in other categories besides Arminian and Calvinist. Like, if you’re going to say something about the gospel, for him it seems to funnel straight into Arminianism or Calvinism. Which really, if anything, those are sort of systematic perspectives on how the gospel functions within the biblical theology. And they don’t really affect whether somebody is saved or whether somebody belongs to Christ or not. And that’s why I think he talks about them being a dubious starting place to have the conversation in the first place.
And so I think Bates is arguing for what he believes is a historic structure of soteriology—a structure of how people are saved. I’m not sure the book seals the deal on that, by the way. I don’t think it was even Bates’ point to present a new, systematic soteriology that works and functions within its system. I think a lot more work would need to be done there, especially in the study of the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest church fathers, and engaging some of the historical progression of these doctrines—like where do we see Arminianism developing in, let’s say, medieval Catholic theology, and things like that.
We’ve got to find it earlier than the Reformation if we’re going to create a system that really works. And so I don’t think that’s what he’s after. I really don’t think it is. I think he’s really trying to point us back to the early way of thinking about this and ask us to now evaluate our systems and our traditions of doctrine within that.
And so I do think that fundamentally the primary objective here is to ask Catholics and Protestants to sort of filter their salvation experience—their salvation paradigm—through this idea of allegiance, as it’s been historically represented.
Yeah, I mean, I would’ve thought that we were beyond that kind of mud-slinging. I just thought—I was baffled when I read that. That to him, it seems like “Arminian” is so anti-intellectual. And I’m probably—just to be transparent here—on the spectrum, if I’m going to do systematic theology, I probably lean heavier toward Calvin than I do toward Arminius. But those aren’t the only categories to think in, even remotely. And they’re not even the only categories people do think in.
Many Calvinists—kind of the angry ones, like in this case—many Calvinists are just calling anything that’s not Calvinism, as they articulate it, they’re just calling it Arminianism, or Pelagianism for that matter. But they’re not giving any credence to where it makes sense, or doesn’t, or is biblical, or anything like that. They’re just rejecting it as “not what I believe, therefore wrong.” I just think that’s a big problem.
I don’t think we can do theology that way and then turn around and say, “But we should get along as Christians.” Like, I just don’t think you can have it both ways. There’s a whole lot more to either system than just trying to settle this election debate.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah, that’s a really, really good catch there—about kind of assuming that, you know, he’s not Calvinist, so he must be Arminian, kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, he certainly does use some Arminian—Arminian, whatever that means—arguments, but there’s just a lot more in the book than just that.
ANTHONY DELGADO: And it’s, it’s very few at the least, but yeah, either way. So what he talks about—he talks about, for example, the bondage of the will. And it’s like, let’s remember that that is, you know, that’s an Arminian doctrine in the bondage of the will. Like, Arminius agreed with Calvin on that. So then it’s really funny that Perkins kind of attacks Bates for that—for not believing in the bondage of the will.
And, you know, people can read the article, I don’t need to re-articulate it all here, but that’s another thing. Like, Bates does agree with the bondage of the will. He literally talked about it. It’s what inspired me to suggest in the article that maybe Perkins didn’t actually read the whole book.
ZACH MILLER: Oh dang. Oh, big words. All right, let’s keep going here.
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah, let’s do it.
ZACH MILLER: So, he said—Perkins says, “Yet Bates diverges from the entire Western Christian tradition in its Protestant and Catholic understandings by positioning himself as consciously and anti-Augustinian.” For example, he affirms—uh, summarizes—Justin Martyr as he rejects the idea that we have inherited a sin nature from our parents that leaves us in total bondage. Thus, he discards the doctrine of original sin.
So this is fun, because—I’ll just be honest—if someone uses an earlier Church Father to say, “Hey, the guy writing later is wrong,” then I’m going to be like, well, you know, usually earlier is better. So that’s an interesting argument right there, right?
But no, he says, “No, this Augustinian guy—you gotta have this Augustinian guy.” So I’m just really curious what your thoughts are—that he’s throwing out original sin. So question for you: is that what Bates is doing? Is he throwing out the doctrine of original sin?
ANTHONY DELGADO: The short answer to that is: it depends on what you mean by original sin. Okay? Because this is a move that a lot of theologians make.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah.
ANTHONY DELGADO: They take a leap, and they will see a shadow of a contemporary dogma—like original sin, for example—and they’ll see a shadow of that in one of the Church Fathers, and then interpret that to mean that the early church—all of them—believed exactly what we believe about that doctrine. And that’s just a huge mistake. It’s just not right. It’s sort of unethical to make that type of argument. And like I said, watch your theology books when you’re reading—they will often do this. I’ve read some great authors, who I agree with, and they do this sort of thing. They just make these leaps.
And the reality is, we don’t have most of what was written by the early church. And what we do have doesn’t agree on this doctrine. And we see little bits and pieces of this doctrine throughout. Now Augustine of Hippo—that Augustine—probably does articulate the doctrine of original sin most like what is called original sin in most evangelical doctrine today.
Just think of the characters and how you’ve heard it in church—people talking about how there’s a “sin gene” and stuff like that. The doctrine is really not clearly articulated as well as we think it is—not even within Reformed theology. And so it takes on a lot of forms.
Now, something to remember—again, Augustine first articulated this doctrine in the fifth century. And he did so not in order to teach dogma, but in order to condemn the teachings of Pelagius—or at least allegedly. There’s a lot of people who are saying Pelagius wasn’t a Pelagian. But anyway, he was condemning a doctrine that he was ascribing to Pelagius that basically said that humans are born sort of all moral, and they have to choose their path toward good or evil.
And that way of thinking really does lead to a very works-based salvation. And it’s not even synergistic—it’s monistic, on the side of “humans have to be good people to reach God.” And so, if that’s what Pelagius was teaching—which maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t—that’s a bad doctrine. I think it is.
But we can’t go to Augustine and extract this doctrine of original sin from the context of the argument. Here’s part of the problem: four centuries passed before Augustine taught this. Augustine taught this around the year 400. That’s longer than any of us are going to live. That is a long time. And there’s no evidence that it was considered universally orthodox or held ubiquitously either before or even really within the years after.
And certainly, this didn’t become a normative doctrine in the Catholic Church until later centuries. And so we do have to ask the question: just because Augustine was teaching this, to what degree was this really considered an orthodox doctrine?
And I think the question sort of idolizes the “what” of the doctrine instead of the “why” of the doctrine. I think this is a huge issue in his sort of accusation. The purpose of the doctrine of original sin in its original context is to emphasize the preeminence of the salvific work of Christ. It’s not to force a particular articulation, as if the works of Christ are diminished by a person’s lack of understanding of that doctrine.
And that’s what a lot of—not just Perkins—but that’s something I see in a lot of this conservative evangelical doctrine. Which—I do consider myself at least a conservative Protestant—but I see it in a lot of it. That, like, if you don’t believe this, then you’re some kind of liberal who might not even be saved. And I’m sorry, but that’s not using your rationale to argue your point. That’s fearmongering. And so I don’t like that way of articulating it.
Now, to the latter part of your question—you asked, “Does the doctrine of original sin in Reformed theology reflect the historical expression of the doctrine?” Yeah, I mean, I believe the doctrine of original sin does progress from the logic of Augustine. Although I would say it progresses from it—we wouldn’t have it articulated differently in the Westminster Confession if Augustine had said it the exact same way.
So it is a doctrine that has progressed. But again, that’s not to say Augustine was even right in the first place. Like, we can’t just say—and that’s what Perkins is doing—he’s jumping from Calvinism, which is Reformed theology, to Augustinianism, which is what he calls it here, in order to appeal to the early church. But that’s not the way to argue, because we don’t actually know if that’s what Augustine believed.
And so that’s kind of where it gets complicated. And I have a bone to pick here, because Augustine’s doctrine wasn’t canonized at an ecumenical council. And we actually know that he taught this. And as a bishop, he was widely influential, I’m sure. But this was not canonized in an ecumenical council.
Where it does show up at the councils is that some canons of the councils—some of the doctrines they published after the council—engaged his work. And so, for example, it happens a couple of times. But Canon 2 from the Council of Carthage in 418 AD, titled On Infant Baptism and Original Sin—here’s what it says:
“If anyone denies that infants, newly born from their mother’s wombs, should be baptized—or says that they are baptized for the remission of sins but derive nothing of original sin from Adam that needs to be washed away by the bath of regeneration—let him be anathema.”
This is really interesting because the canon anathematizes credo-baptists. Which, by the way, is me. I believe in baptism as a response to profession of faith. And so it anathematizes credo-baptists—which is fine for Perkins, because he’s Presbyterian, so they’re paedo-baptists; they baptize infants.
But it also articulates baptismal regeneration within the argument. And this is what you can’t do—you can’t say that the doctrine is right, that we’re going to take the infant baptism, that we’re going to anathematize credo-baptism, but we’re not going to take the baptismal regeneration of the Catholic Church. I mean, it’s just not a way that we should articulate this thing.
The OPC and the Westminster Confession vehemently deny this claim to baptismal regeneration. And so the canon doesn’t define what it meant here by original sin anyway. You know, I can—for an example of that, like, if you asked me if I believed in original sin, I would point you to our church’s website, where we list our different—our different—we have three different documents that we affirm as a church.
One of them is the Baptist Faith and Message. That does have a brief articulation of the doctrine of original sin. And so I would say, in a sense, yes, I do. I don’t think that original sin is some sort of—I definitely don’t think it’s a sin gene. You know, that seems nonsense to me. Definitely not a biblical thing.
Doctrine of original sin—I don’t see any teaching in the Scriptures that the doctrine of original sin—that something in the fall of Adam metaphysically changed within Adam so that his offspring would have it. I don’t see any teaching on that, like a metaphysical, spiritual change. What I actually see is Adam leaving God’s presence and, you know, exiting the mountain of God—of Eden—into the wilderness, where he’s now going to struggle to carry out God’s mandate for him as humankind.
And so I would say that this doctrine of original sin points to the reality that living in the wilderness, apart from God’s presence, means that we will all inevitably sin. But that’s not a metaphysical reality in any way. It’s a location issue.
And so Perkins can’t build his argument on the early church’s articulation of one argument, one idea surrounding original sin, and then neglect all of the other options—all of the other ideas that have actually been canonized by the early church that they disagree with—and all of the other ways to articulate original sin. Because we don’t even know what the early church meant by these things. We don’t even know what Augustine exactly meant by it.
And so I think that’s the problem. And so again, it’s an example of how—when you get in your own—you know, we all believe what we believe because we believe it. You know? Like, I don’t know any other way to say that. And so I just think it’s a constant—we need a constant reminder to take a step back and always be checking ourselves and trying to have good conversations with other traditions to know where we’re at.
ZACH MILLER: Appreciate those thoughts. So just real short—so does Dr. Bates believe in original sin?
ANTHONY DELGADO: No. Not as Perkins would articulate it.
ZACH MILLER: Okay.
ANTHONY DELGADO: But yes—but he does believe in the bondage of the will.
ZACH MILLER: Okay. Can you just really explicitly clarify what this bondage of the will is?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Okay. So Bates definitely teaches in the book that the will of the human is bound to sin in some way. But I don’t think he clearly articulates in what way that is. And if he does, I don’t remember. So I’ll just apologize for that—like, I don’t have every word of the book up here in my head right now.
But I don’t think that he clearly articulated in what way the will is bound, but he definitely believes that every human being—because their will is bound toward sin—that we will. You know—which I just think is basic. Like, it’s Romans 3. We all believe that as Christians. I think most Christians believe that.
ZACH MILLER: Mm-hmm.
ANTHONY DELGADO: You know, and so he’s not unorthodox on that point. And that’s what’s at stake in the conversation anyway.
ZACH MILLER: Right.
ANTHONY DELGADO: That’s what’s at stake—is like, you don’t want somebody saying, “Oh no, actually I’ve never sinned, and I’m leading a great life,” because then what does that mean for the gospel? And what does that mean about a number of doctrines that logically flow from the New Testament teaching? You know, it doesn't make sense to our faith.
So, you know, every orthodox Christian believes in the bondage of the will because that’s what’s at stake—it’s the gospel itself. And so yes, Bates absolutely does agree with that. But I just don't think he agrees with this traditional articulation of original sin.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah. Yeah. I think what Perkins is doing is essentially saying, “Hey, this guy doesn’t believe in original sin, so he’s bad or he’s wrong because of that.” But if you look at a lot of his readers—at least maybe not the Calvinist ones, or, you know, there’s probably different Calvinists that agree or disagree on how to formulate that—but the non-Calvinists, at least those reading it, most of them would probably say that they don’t believe in original sin as defined by Perkins.
And I know for sure that there are a lot of very conservative—very, very conservative—evangelical Christians, like people online, very easy to find, that would say, “Hey, I don’t believe in original sin.” So it’s very much like: “You don’t believe in original sin, therefore you’re wrong.”
ANTHONY DELGADO: Well, I don’t like making it a black-and-white issue and a test of orthodoxy either. Again, the bondage of the will is a better test of orthodoxy because, well frankly, it’s sort of language that’s been used for a lot longer. And it has practical problems—if you don’t believe that, like, there are practical theological issues with not believing in the bondage of the will. But how you articulate that the will is bound is far less important.
ZACH MILLER: Hmm.
ANTHONY DELGADO: And it’s been debated for the last 2,000 years.
ZACH MILLER: Right, right, right. That’s a very good point. Okay, so let’s keep going here.
Sure. Perkins says, “Bates’ gospel amounts to us working our way into heaven, tinged”—or tinged, I don’t even know how to pronounce that—“with the prospect of forgiveness. He announces the gospel is not individualized justification by faith. Rather, the gospel is the power of God for salvation because it announces the reign of Jesus as King. He is the justified one who lives by allegiance so that we can be justified by allegiance too, and in so doing tap into his resurrection life.”
Then he says, “Notably, in Bates’ gospel, we receive justification by performing the same actions as Christ, stretching Christ as exemplar rather than Savior. If faith is justifying for Christ and for us in the same way, Bates’ model of salvation diminishes, if not displaces, Christ’s role as the mediator who saves his people.”
So, big question for you here—do you think Bates’ gospel requires that we work our way to heaven?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah, so, uh, yeah. No, I don’t. Not even remotely.
It's so hard. You know, I’ve read everything except Bates’ first book that he has written, starting with Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance and all those other books. So maybe it's just because I’m steeped in it, I don’t remember how clearly he has articulated this difference in Beyond the Salvation Wars. But as I understand Bates—and a number of other authors and speakers articulate similar things, I just heard the same thing from Ron Johnson recently—Bates isn’t saying that justification doesn’t happen. That quote is completely out of context.
What Bates is explaining is that there is a gospel proper—that is, the message of Christ. What did he do? Gospel is euangelion. It’s the good news. It’s a good message. And so in a sense, the Gospels are the gospel. But you notice that the Gospels—at least the Synoptic Gospels—they don’t really tell you how to be saved. They don’t give you any of that doctrine of soteriology. That comes later in Paul and actually in John, which is written much later than the other three Gospels.
But the story of Jesus—that’s the gospel. And as you read the Gospels, especially in the context of the Old Testament, you read this story of Jesus conquering the powers and principalities, and you see this cosmic war play out where Satan, the dragon, comes into heaven and he’s warring with Michael the Archangel. He’s finally defeated and cast out. And then Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, disciple the nations.” So his response is, “The powers are gone now. Go take my people from the kings of this earth,” right?
So it's this: all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go to the nations—get my people. That’s the Great Commission. And that’s the response to the gospel. Because Jesus is King, we want to bring people under his kingship. It’s the allegiance model.
Okay, where does justification fit into that? Well, it fits into it in this way: because you are allegiant to Jesus, therefore you are justified. And that’s justification by faith, as Luther emphasized in the Reformation—that salvation is by grace through faith. We are justified by our faith. And Bates believes that. But he sees it not as the gospel itself, but as a response to the gospel.
In my book, The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think, that’s how I’ve arranged the book as well. It’s sort of the gospel of the Kingdom—the story of the Kingdom of God. That’s the gospel proper. And then, when you give your life to Christ, you become loyal to him. Then here’s all the outpouring. And the second part of the book is the outpouring—it’s the justification, it’s the sanctification, it’s the glorification, it’s the deification. It’s all the spiritual result of being a citizen of God’s Kingdom instead of being a citizen of the city of man.
So that’s what I think is happening here. And I think that’s what Perkins doesn’t understand. Perkins is making things the gospel that are not the gospel. It’s a famous Spurgeon quote—Spurgeon famously said, “Calvinism is the gospel.” And I’m sorry to argue with Spurgeon, but Calvinism is not the gospel. Calvinism is how one branch of Reformed theology thinks about the effects of the gospel—especially when we’re talking about justification.
So I don’t know. Hopefully that answers that question there.
ZACH MILLER: Appreciate that. Alrighty, so to continue here—he talks about some other stuff that’s just kind of irrelevant, honestly, but later he says, “In contrast, Bates seems not to have a clear outline for how grace comes to sinners. He also seems to reject the idea that one can even know which good works we need to do for final salvation. Accordingly, he claims we cannot develop a list of universally binding commands that God expects of us.”
So I’m really curious what you think about this. Do we need a clear outline for how grace comes to sinners, and do we need to know which specific good works give us final salvation?
ANTHONY DELGADO: That’s a good question. I wanted to pull up a verse real quick. In John 6:28–29, in this question, I can’t help but hear Jesus’ words here. His followers ask, “What must we do to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God—that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
And if we take that word pisteuō, that’s translated there as “believe,” as something like allegiance or loyalty—which I think is the historic inference—then Jesus is basically saying there is a work you do to be saved. That work is loyalty.
I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make who are critics of this idea—and it's not just Bates who talks about this, by the way—people don’t like Michael Heiser’s idea of “believing loyalty.” The Eastern Orthodox Church, when they articulate it in English, tends to use the term “faithfulness.” And they say those terms imply works. But I don’t understand—how does the term “allegiance” or “loyalty” imply any activity as part of the heart condition of it? The activity is what happens because I’m loyal.
Many of the Reformers were fond of the word “trust.” You have to trust in Jesus to be saved because they wanted to say it’s more than just intellectual assent. It’s not just this lofty, “Well, I think Jesus is God,” or “I claim that he’s saved me from my sins, and therefore I’m saved.” No, it’s something more robust than that.
But how is trust any different than loyal or allegiance? You know what I mean? So I think the problem is that Jesus is saying, “Look, you don’t just get to think I’m the savior and be saved. Something has to change in the heart.” And when that changes, then the effect of that—we would say properly speaking within theology—the effect of that regeneration is good works. It’s now going to be to obey Jesus according to the function of his Kingdom.
So I think that’s the mistake Perkins is making here. He’s so afraid that the terminology could imply works that he reads works into terminology when it’s not even present.
I hope that makes sense there. I encounter this problem a lot—even among Arminians or the plethora of other groups that don’t necessarily agree with even Arminians. A lot of people have something like a free grace soteriology that says, “Well, as long as you believe—even if you never do anything for Christ—you’re saved.” Because there’s so much fear that one of these words might imply any kind of working. And salvation is by grace through faith, that no man may boast—that’s Ephesians 2:8–9.
So they’re so afraid of that that they don’t want to suggest anything should actually change in your life as a response to the gospel. But that’s just not biblical Christianity. The gospel radically changes us, and it redefines who we are. And the call of the gospel is faithfulness—it’s allegiance, it’s loyalty to Jesus Christ.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah, so just for some clarification here—so, in the original article here… oh, wrong one there. That's not it. That's not it. Okay.
So yeah, as I said before, he says Bates seems not to have a clear outline for how grace comes to sinners. Okay, fair. I mean, maybe not true, but that’s what he thinks. He also seems to reject the idea that one can even know which good works we need to do for final salvation.
So I’m a little confused by this because of course, Perkins thinks that our works are not the things that save us.
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah.
ZACH MILLER: So why would he seem to be critiquing Bates for not explicitly saying what good works give us that salvation?
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah, I was kind of hung up on that a little bit too. I think what he’s saying is, “Bates, since you believe you have to work your way to heaven, what are the works you have to do?” Because he doesn’t really say that—because Bates doesn’t believe you work your way to heaven.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah.
ANTHONY DELGADO: So I mean, I think it’s just a cheap shot. Perkins definitely doesn’t think that you work your way into God’s presence—or however you want to say that—but like that you work for salvation.
ZACH MILLER: Mm-hmm.
ANTHONY DELGADO: But, quite ironically, Perkins does believe that pragmatically the same thing is supposed to happen. He does believe that the gospel should produce good works—and that’s actually what Bates also believes. Perkins is just caught up on the word “allegiance.”
ZACH MILLER: Hmm.
ANTHONY DELGADO: And he’s caricaturizing Bates’ work now by saying, “Well, okay, if you need works to be saved, what are they? Because you didn’t even tell us.” I think he’s just kind of making a mockery of it.
ZACH MILLER: I see. Alright, so maybe there’s a little sarcasm in there.
ANTHONY DELGADO: Mm-hmm.
ZACH MILLER: Oh, interesting. Sneaky. Alright. So, as I was reading this—and somebody else pointed it out in the comments—Benjamin Handelman says, “This article cites no scripture despite its criticism of Bates,” which I found really interesting. I wrote that in your notes, and I was going to ask you this.
So it seems to me like this whole article is basically: “You believe this, therefore you’re bad, therefore you’re wrong.”
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah.
ZACH MILLER: But there’s just pretty much zero justification for any of his claims. It’s like, “Everybody knows you’re wrong because you believe this, therefore you’re wrong.” I don’t know what to do with that. What do you think about that?
ANTHONY DELGADO: It’s kind of an age-old debate: Do I have to—if I’m doing theology—do I have to cite Scripture? And I think technically Perkins is not doing theology. He’s referring to theology that has been done.
I laugh at that too, because I consider myself Reformed but non-confessional, which means to a lot of people I’m not Reformed because I’m non-confessional. But I’m non-confessional for exactly this reason: I’m not about to articulate a doctrine according to my tradition—I need that doctrine to be convincing.
Now, a lot of my doctrine lines up with Reformed theology—which is far broader, by the way. For anybody listening, Reformed theology, Calvinism, and “Reformed theology” are talked about as if they’re the same thing, and they’re not.
Reformed theology is built on biblical covenant theology. It produces, in some expressions—primarily Lutheran and Calvinistic—something like Calvinism. But those are a product of Reformed theology properly speaking; they are not Reformed theology itself. So you don’t have to be a five-point Calvinist, for example, to be Reformed. That’s a soapbox of mine.
So again, I’m not going to appeal to a creed or a council or a confession to say that’s dogma. But that is what Perkins is doing. And again, I think ecclesiastically, if that’s how you’re thinking about the church and theology and how the church operates, then I think I’m willing to respect not citing Scripture when you’re rearticulating your church’s dogma.
But I also sympathize with Benjamin’s question. I really would prefer he had used more Scripture. Although he might go read my response and say, “Well, you didn’t use a whole lot of Scripture either,” although I did several times. But there definitely could have been more in my response too. So I don’t know.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah, so maybe it’s just a review—he’s not trying to critique it. But as you say, that’s really interesting. Because if he’s looking at it like, “Hey, you know, what I think is traditional, or my creeds or my traditions that I believe I think are trustworthy, therefore I’m just going to refer to them…”
Kind of like a Catholic would say, “Well, that’s what the Pope said, so there we go.”
ANTHONY DELGADO: Yeah. Well, I think a Catholic might even more specifically refer to canons and councils and creeds—maybe even more than the Pope himself. Although the Pope, I won’t pretend to be an expert there, but he does have authority to dictate things.
But yeah, I think that’s kind of what it is. It’s referring to the tradition of the Church rather than the Scripture.
But if you’re going to have an ecumenical conversation, you kind of have to figure out: can we agree on what Scripture is? And then can we have the conversation from the perspective of Scripture?
Because if you’re a Presbyterian and a Catholic, for example, and you’re going to argue with each other according to your own confessions, you’re never going to agree. You’re not going to learn anything if you’re not going to at least go—get it back to apostolic authority on some level. So I think that’s the value there.
ZACH MILLER: Yeah, that’s really, really interesting. I appreciate that perspective a lot. That’s extremely helpful. Alright, well thank you so much for coming on here. That’s all the questions I have for you. Did you have any last thoughts—anything else you wanted to add?
ANTHONY DELGADO: I would just encourage anybody listening not to let this conversation push you towards your tradition or push you towards even another tradition, but from the perspective of what you currently believe, to let this conversation do exactly what Matthew Bates—in my own heart—is about: to open up conversations with people you know you disagree with.
I don’t really think we’re going to see the Church healed in the sense that there will someday be one Church again like in the first generation. But I do think we can have unity in our theology—moving closer to a biblical center.
So how we approach these conversations—graciously, gently, charitably—I think is everything.
ZACH MILLER: Much appreciated. Agreed.
So if people can check out my review that I did with Taylor last week—it’ll be in the description—where we go over the video from Al Mohler and other scholars. Somewhat similar here, but also a lot of different arguments that we’re critiquing Matthew Bates on.
You can check out Anthony’s website and his church videos and podcasts. All that stuff will be in the description after this is posted. And otherwise, you should also check out his books too—one on the gospel, one on Enoch. Really, really interesting stuff. If you’re a fan of Michael Heiser, you’ll like what he’s writing.
But otherwise, thank you so much for coming on here. It’s been a pleasure, and I hope you have a good rest of your night.
ANTHONY DELGADO: God bless you guys.
