Theopedia

Antinomianism

“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!”

— Romans 6:1-2

Definition

Antinomianism (from the Greek for “lawless”) names the teaching, or more often the charge brought against a teaching, that those united to Christ by faith have no continuing obligation to obey the moral law of God. Few groups have ever adopted the label for themselves; it is almost always leveled by one side of a controversy at another, typically in disputes over how justification by faith relates to a believer’s ongoing duty to obey. Antinomianism is usually treated as the opposite extreme from legalism, which makes obedience to the law a condition of standing with God.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 confession devotes a full chapter, “Of the Law of God,” to the question antinomianism denies. Its fifth paragraph states the moral law’s perpetual claim on believers directly:

“The moral Law doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof, and that not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it: Neither doth Christ in the Gospel any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.”1

The following paragraph holds that claim together with the doctrine of grace rather than against it. True believers are “not under the Law, as a Covenant of Works, to be thereby Justified or condemned,” yet the law remains “of great use to them as well as to others” as “a Rule of Life”: it informs them of God’s will, exposes “the sinfull pollutions of their Natures,” drives them back to a clearer sight of their need of Christ, restrains their remaining corruption, and shows them what blessings attend obedience, all without their obedience becoming the ground of their acceptance with God.2 The confession’s answer to antinomianism’s core claim turns on that distinction: Christ’s fulfillment of the law’s precept and penalty ends the law’s role as the ground of justification without ending its role as the believer’s rule of life.

Biblical Basis

Paul faced the antinomian inference directly, and more than once. Having argued in Romans 5 that grace abounded all the more where sin increased, he immediately raises and rejects the conclusion an antinomian reading would draw: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” (Rom. 6:1-2). Fifteen verses later he puts the same question under a different frame: “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” (Rom. 6:15). Earlier in the letter he had already anticipated the mirror-image charge, that justification by faith apart from works of the law empties the law of its force, and answered it the same way: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Rom. 3:31).

A. A. Hodge reads Paul’s repeated denial as more than a rhetorical flourish. The charge that free grace licenses sin was, in his words, “charged as a legitimate consequent upon [Paul’s] doctrine in that day.” Paul “not only repudiates the charge, but, on the contrary, affirms that free justification through an imputed righteousness, without the merits of works, is the only possible condition in which the sinner can learn to bring forth holy works as the fruits of filial love.”3 On this reading, the freedom from the law’s condemnation that justification brings is not a step toward lawlessness but the very thing that makes obedience possible: Christ “redeem[s] to himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works,” by delivering them “from the federal bondage of the law, in order to render them capable as the Lord’s freed men of moral conformity to it.”3

Historical Development

Antinomianism has taken different forms across church history rather than naming one fixed movement. Herman Bavinck traces a version of it to the earliest centuries, in gnostic and Manichean teaching that treated the material world, and so also its moral law, as beneath the concern of the truly spiritual; medieval Europe saw “numerous libertinistic sects” carry the same logic forward.4 At the Reformation, the charge attached to the Anabaptists and to the sect known as the Libertines, and Bavinck records that “all the Reformers rejected all antinomianism as resolutely as possible.”4 He dates a further episode precisely: the charge revived “in the independentistic disturbances in England around the middle of the seventeenth century.”4

A related but distinct pattern appears in the same period on the Catholic side. Charles Hodge traces how the Quietist teaching of Michael Molinos, Madame Guyon, and Archbishop Fénélon, that a soul wholly surrendered in love to God reaches a state in which “sin is not in, but outside of him,” gave their opponents grounds to charge them with antinomianism as well, even though the Quietists themselves did not draw that conclusion. Hodge generalizes from the episode: “It is an instructive psychological fact that when men attempt or pretend to rise above the law of God, they sink below it; that Perfectionism has so generally led to Antinomianism.”5

Two later, dated controversies show the charge landing within Reformed and Baptist circles specifically. In 1720, the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly condemned Edward Fisher’s republished Marrow of Modern Divinity for “allegedly favoring antinomianism,” touching off what became known as the Marrow Controversy.6 A decade later, the Particular Baptist theologian John Gill faced the same charge from Abraham Taylor after publishing The Doctrines of God’s Everlasting Love to His Elect (1732) and a treatise on justification. Taylor pressed the accusation in print, including in an Address to Young Students in Divinity (1739) warning readers against “Paradoxes, Which Lead to Doctrinal Antinomianism” and pointing at Gill by name. Gill answered with The Necessity of Good Works Unto Salvation Considered (1739), reportedly telling friends who warned him the dispute would cost him Taylor’s circle’s support, “I have nothing in comparison to gospel-truths. I am not afraid to be poor.”7

Objections and Responses

Objection: Christ has already fulfilled the law’s precept and penalty in the believer’s place, so no obligation to the law remains. A. A. Hodge answers by distinguishing two roles the law plays. As a covenant of works, the ground on which acceptance with God is either earned or forfeited, Christ’s fulfillment does end the law’s claim on believers. As a rule of life, the pattern of what a redeemed person’s obedience looks like, it does not: “the question of perfection… is one which relates to our personal character, not to our relations; it is moral and inherent, and not forensic.”3 The same distinction underlies the confession’s own language: believers are not under the law “as a Covenant of Works,” yet the law still functions for them “as a Rule of Life.”2

Objection: telling a Christian to obey is legalism, since all that remains after Christ’s finished work is to believe. Bavinck states this as the antinomian position’s own logic before rejecting it: “Any talk of ‘doing’ is legalism; all we have to ‘do’ is believe.”4 His reply targets what antinomianism and its opposite error, nomism, share: both “forget that the law of God is rich and full and cannot be reduced to ‘precept upon precept, line upon line.’”8 Reducing obedience to a checklist is what makes it feel opposed to grace; a law understood, as the confession puts it, as a rule that “sweetly compl[ies]” with the gospel rather than competing with it does not carry that danger.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 5, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 6, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩ ↩2

  3. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 35, “Sanctification,” 526-27. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 4, “Mysticism,” 85-86. ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology,” ed. note 27. ↩

  7. Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 68-69. ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  9. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 7, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩