A deep dive into the gospel, allegiance, and why understanding one Greek word resolves some of the New Testament’s most perplexing tensions.
Most of us think we know what faith is. You believe something. Maybe you trust it. It happens in your head, it’s invisible, and according to a lot of modern Christianity, that’s basically the whole thing — have the right belief in the right moment, and you’re in. But what if the word we translate as “faith” in the New Testament carries a far richer, more demanding, and ultimately more liberating meaning than that?
This post is inspired by two scholars who have done substantial work on this question: Matthew Bates, author of Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance, and Scot McKnight, author of The King Jesus Gospel. Their thesis — and I think it’s compelling — is that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood both what the gospel is and what faith means. And getting both of those things wrong has enormous consequences for how we live as Christians.
First Things First: What Is the Gospel?
Before we can talk about faith as a response to the gospel, we have to be clear on what the gospel actually is. Because there’s a good chance your picture of it is incomplete.
Both Bates and McKnight argue — and I think the early church would agree — that the gospel is the objective facts concerning the entire career of Jesus as Messiah. That includes:
- His pre-existence (he was with God in the beginning)
- His incarnation
- His death for sins
- His burial
- His resurrection
- His post-resurrection appearances
- His enthronement at the right hand of the Father
- The sending of the Holy Spirit
- His future return
This is why the four books are called Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — the whole story matters. Paul lays this out explicitly in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8:
“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
And in Romans 1:1-4:
“Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The gospel, in this framing, is the story of how Jesus became the Christ — the Anointed One, the Messiah, the King. If you think about it from the perspective of a first-century Jew, the whole point was convincing them that this man, Jesus, is the promised King. That’s why Matthew’s Gospel opens with a genealogy tracing Jesus back to David. It’s legal evidence for the throne. You’re not just announcing a theology — you’re announcing a coronation.
Yes, “he died for our sins” is in there. But notice what Paul does and doesn’t say in 1 Corinthians 15. He says Jesus died for our sins. He does not explain the mechanism of how that death accomplishes forgiveness — no atonement theory is named. What he does do is spend considerable time establishing the resurrection, the appearances, and the reality of the risen Christ. The death is one part of a larger royal story. You could say it’s roughly one-tenth of the total picture.
The gospel, then, is everything that convinces you that Jesus is the rightful King of the Universe — the King of Kings and Lord of Lords to whom all power and authority in heaven and earth have been given.
So What Does It Mean to Have “Faith” in That King?
Here’s where things get really interesting — and where a single Greek word becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for the entire New Testament.
The Greek word translated as “faith” or “believe” throughout the New Testament is πίστις (pistis). Its verbal form is πιστεύω (pisteuo). In modern English, we typically render these as “believe” or “trust” — mental states, things that happen inside your head. You assent to a proposition. You trust that something is true. That’s it.
But Matthew Bates argues — with considerable historical and linguistic evidence — that in its first-century context, especially when used in relation to kings and kingdoms, pistis carried a much richer meaning: faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, allegiance. Not a one-time mental event, but an active, ongoing state of being a faithful subject.
Bates puts it this way: pistis is better understood not as “faith” in the passive, intellectual sense, but as allegiance — the kind of sworn loyalty a subject owes to a king.
The Evidence: Josephus and the Language of Kings
One of the most illuminating pieces of evidence Bates presents comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in Greek roughly contemporaneously with the New Testament authors. In his autobiography, Josephus recounts a moment where he commands a rebel leader to “repent and believe in me” — using the very same Greek root (pistis).
The context makes clear that Josephus is not asking for a religious conversion or a change of mental propositions. He is commanding the rebel to turn away from his current course of action and become a loyal, obedient subject of Josephus as his military commander. The “belief” in question was a public declaration of loyalty expressed through obedience. That is what pistis meant in the real-world context of rulers and subjects.
When a king announced his reign, the required pistis from his subjects wasn’t merely believing that he was king. It was pledging allegiance to him and demonstrating that allegiance through obedience.
Bates also points to passages like Romans 1:5 and Romans 16:26, which use the phrase “the obedience of faith” (hypakoē pisteōs). This isn’t faith plus obedience as two separate things. It’s the obedience that flows from allegiance — the obedience that is inherent to what faithfulness means.
How This Resolves the New Testament’s “Contradictions”
This is the part I find most exciting, because it resolves what looks like a hopeless tangle of competing salvation requirements in the New Testament. Let me walk through it.
The “free grace” camp points to John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
And they say: all you have to do is believe. One mental act. Done.
But then the Church of Christ tradition points to Acts 2:38:
“Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”
And they say: you must be baptized. It’s right there.
And then there’s Luke 13:3, where Jesus says:
“I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
So now we need repentance.
And Romans 10:9:
“that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
So now we need public confession too.
And Matthew 24:13:
“But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.”
Endurance to the end.
And James 2:24:
“You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”
Works. Explicitly not faith alone.
And Romans 2:13:
“for it is not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified.”
Doers, not hearers.
So which is it? Believe? Repent? Be baptized? Confess publicly? Endure to the end? Do works?
The answer is: all of them, and they’re all the same thing.
When you understand pistis as allegiance, all of these passages snap into a unified picture. Bending the knee to Jesus as King — genuinely, not just intellectually — necessarily implies:
- Repentance (metanoia — literally “a change of mind/direction”): You turn 180 degrees away from your previous lord (yourself, sin, the world) and toward Jesus as your Lord. Repentance toward God simply means you’ve decided that He is now your King.
- Baptism: If you’ve just declared Jesus your Lord and he says “get baptized,” you get baptized. That’s what allegiance means. You do what the king says.
- Public confession: Pledging allegiance to a king was always a public act. You don’t whisper it privately. You declare it.
- Endurance: Allegiance is not a one-time event. A knight who pledged fealty to a king and then switched sides two years later wasn’t a faithful subject — he was a traitor. Enduring to the end is what faithfulness looks like over a lifetime.
- Works: If you call someone your Lord but never do anything he says, you don’t actually think he’s your Lord. Jesus makes this point with devastating clarity in Luke 6:46:
“Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?”
James is making the exact same point: works aren’t an addition to faith; they’re the evidence of it. Faith without works is dead because faithfulness without action isn’t faithfulness at all.
The Luther Problem
At this point, you might be wondering: why haven’t we always understood it this way? The answer involves one towering historical figure: Martin Luther.
Luther’s great contribution to Western Christianity — the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide) — was forged in polemical reaction to a corrupt Catholic system of indulgences and purchased merit. And in many ways, he was right to push back on that system. But in doing so, he overcorrected in a way that has shaped Protestant Christianity to this day.
Luther essentially taught that when Jesus gave his commands — love your enemies, sell what you have, keep my commandments — he was using them to show us how impossible obedience is, so that we’d give up on works altogether and rest in grace alone. It’s as if Jesus was winking at us when he said “do this” — what he really meant was “you can’t do this, so stop trying.”
Luther went so far as to say that even teaching that Jesus’s commandments need to be obeyed is itself a sin. His theology systematically disarmed the church from taking Jesus’s own words seriously as instructions for living.
This is not a small thing. If the King issues commands, and you tell people the King was winking when he gave them, you’ve fundamentally undermined the entire concept of allegiance. You’ve made the kingdom a fiction.
The deeper issue is free will. Luther followed Augustine (as an Augustinian monk), and Augustine taught that human beings don’t have genuine free will — a position that led directly to the doctrines of total depravity and unconditional election as systematized later by Calvin. If you don’t have free will, you can’t bend the knee on your own. God has to save you first, and then you can have faith. Salvation precedes faith, rather than faith being the moment of allegiance that initiates salvation.
This is why Calvinist and Reformed traditions tend to react so strongly against the allegiance framework: it requires free will. It requires that you can actually hear the gospel, decide that Jesus is Lord, and give your allegiance to him. The Reformed tradition says that’s structurally impossible without prior regeneration.
It’s also why “once saved, always saved” (or perseverance of the saints in its more technical form) feels necessary in that framework. If your salvation was entirely God’s unilateral act, it can’t be undone. But if salvation is covenantal allegiance — if it’s a real relationship involving real loyalty — then the possibility of breaking that covenant, of ceasing to be faithful, is built in.
And the New Testament is absolutely full of that possibility. You can be cut off (Romans 11:22). You can be spit out (Revelation 3:16). You can begin to grow and then wither (the parable of the soils in Matthew 13). You can be a branch that fails to abide and is gathered and burned (John 15:6). Jesus says in John 15:1-6:
“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit… If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.”
A Personal Note: Scales Falling from Eyes
This framework didn’t come to me through intellectual argument. It came through a crisis.
I had what I genuinely believe was a real salvation experience years ago. Then I learned about “once saved, always saved,” and — I won’t sugarcoat this — I went back to my sins for about ten years. I believed I was safe because I believed I had been saved, and I believed that couldn’t be undone. I had a theological permission slip for continuing in the very thing I needed to be freed from.
What broke the cycle wasn’t a Bible study or a debate about OSAS. It was an overwhelming conviction — I believe from the Holy Spirit — that I needed to stop drinking alcohol or I was going to hell. Not “it might not be ideal.” Not “consider whether this aligns with your values.” I was going to hell. And I couldn’t shake it. So I quit. For good.
And the morning after I did, I had the same experience I remembered from my original conversion — that same freedom, that same supernatural change of heart. It was like waking up.
My wife Connie had the same experience. We’ve talked about it. It was as if we both had scales over our eyes — we knew all the passages about losing salvation, we’d read them dozens of times, but somehow couldn’t see them. And then, suddenly, we could. Not because someone showed them to us for the first time. They were already there. The scales just fell.
I believe that’s what spiritual blindness looks like. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:4:
“in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
I think one of the ways we keep ourselves blind is by refusing to repent, because we know — somewhere deep down — that genuine allegiance to Jesus would require giving up the thing we love more than him. And so we find a theology that makes that unnecessary.
What Repentance Actually Does
This connects to one of the most practically important things I want to say: repentance comes before the refreshing.
Acts 3:19 puts it plainly:
“Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.”
The sequence matters. The freedom from sinful desire — the supernatural change of appetite that people call sanctification — does not come and then enable repentance. It comes after repentance. You turn first, and then the power to walk in the new direction is given.
This is crucial because a lot of people are waiting to feel ready to repent before they repent. They want the desire to sin to lessen before they commit to stopping. But it works the other way around. You commit to stopping — you draw the line — and then the burden lifts.
Start with the biggest one. Not the minor sins, not the gray areas. Start with the sin that has its hooks in you so deeply that you’d almost be willing to go to hell for it. That’s the one the allegiance decision actually costs you. And that’s the one that, when you give it up, opens the door.
Jesus says in Luke 9:62:
“No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Don’t start unless you’re willing to go all the way on that one. But when you do — when you make that decision with your whole will — you will find, as I did, that it’s not the burden people think it is.
Assurance Without OSAS
One thing I want to address directly: if this framework is true, does it mean you can never have assurance of salvation? Are you always white-knuckling it, terrified you might fall?
No. And this is important.
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 13:5:
“Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you — unless indeed you fail the test?”
Assurance comes not from a one-time event in the past — “I said a prayer in 1997” — but from being able to look at your present life and honestly say: yes, I am in the faith. The Holy Spirit is here. I am on the narrow road. I am His subject. I am doing what He says. There is grace for my failures, there is ongoing work to be done, but I am genuinely His.
That kind of assurance is actually more secure, not less. It doesn’t depend on correctly remembering a prayer. It depends on a living relationship with a living King.
David Bercot tells a story that I find helpful. When he was in college, he got a question right on a test but was marked wrong. He went to the professor, who admitted the answer key was wrong — but said he wasn’t going to change the grade because it would require changing everyone else’s too. Bercot protested. The professor looked at him and said: “Don’t sweat it, Bercot. You’re going to pass the class.”
That’s kind of how sanctification works. I’m not going to get every answer right. There are sins I’m still working on, areas where I’m not yet where I need to be. But I can examine myself and know: I’m in the faith. I’m on the road. And there is plenty of grace on this road for those who are genuinely walking it.
The King doesn’t present 50 failing grades all at once. He tends to point to the next big thing when you’re ready for it. That’s what sanctification looks like — not perfection, but progress under a patient King who is actually invested in your growth.
The Bottom Line
The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is the King of the Universe — the Messiah, the risen Lord, to whom all power and authority in heaven and earth have been given, and who is coming to judge the world.
Faith — pistis — is the appropriate response to that announcement: allegiance. Bending the knee. Agreeing that he is your King and that what he says goes. Not just once, not just in your head, but as an ongoing state of faithful obedience.
Repentance is what that looks like at the moment of entry — a 180-degree reorientation of your life toward a new Lord.
Baptism, confession, endurance, and works are all simply what genuine allegiance looks like from different angles.
And the gospel, understood this way, is not a burden. It’s the most liberating announcement in the history of the world: the King of Kings is standing with his arm outstretched, asking if you’ll follow him. Not just acknowledge him. Follow him. And he promises — through his blood, through the gift of his Spirit — to actually change you from the inside out so that you can.
As long as you have breath, that offer is open.
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