A Brief History of Antinomianism (Rewritten)

Theological errors tend to come around in cycles, sometimes after very long stretches of time. They are like comets with unknown orbits that suddenly sweep into our solar system—but unlike comets, they are not harmless. They often leave moral wreckage behind them. Because all Christian truth is practical and aims at the moral transformation of people, every denial of that truth is harmful. Such denials do more than cloud the truth or block its purifying power; they actively corrupt and destroy souls. This is especially true of errors that free people from obligation to the law of God. 

After St. Paul had shown that no one can be justified by works meant to compensate for sin, and after he had established justification through faith in Christ — a faith that works by love and purifies the heart—a class of teachers appeared who drew a false conclusion from Paul’s teaching. They claimed that God’s law is abolished for the believer, who is now released from its authority as the rule of life. For this reason they became what Luther first called Antinomians (Greek anti, against, and nomos, law). From Rom. 3:8, 31; 6:1; Eph. 5:6; 2 Peter 2:18, 19, and James 2:17-26 — passages that warn against twisting the truth into an excuse for loose living — we can infer that Antinomianism, at least in its cruder form, had a place in the primitive church.

Throughout Church history, whenever the central doctrine of justification by faith alone has been revived, Antinomianism has often risen again as well. Wesley defines it as "the doctrine which makes void the law through faith." Those who claim that ultra-Calvinism is always the source of Antinomianism would not want to accept the necessary implication that the apostle Paul was an ultra-Calvinist. Still, it is true that Calvinist doctrines can be pushed logically in that direction. It is also true that other forms of doctrine that emphasize faith in Jesus Christ as the sole ground of acceptance with God are, to varying degrees, also vulnerable to the tares of Antinomianism springing up in their field.

The root of this error is a false view of Christ’s mediatorial work. It assumes that Christ performs, on behalf of people, the obedience they themselves ought to perform, so that God can justly demand nothing more from those who have failed. According to this view, Christ’s perfect virtues are credited to the believer in such a way that the believer is excused for not possessing them. His chastity, for example, is treated as making up for the believer’s lack of that moral quality. In that way, David’s adultery and murder, supposedly compensated for by the purity and benevolence of Jesus imputed to him in the mind of God, did not damage David’s standing as righteous before God.

Theologians who explain the doctrine of the atonement with proper safeguards are careful to limit its vicarious power to the passive obedience of the Son of God — His sufferings and death. His active obedience is not part of His substitutionary work. The seed of Antinomianism appears when that active obedience is included in the atonement. It is true that Christ actively obeyed the Father’s will, but that obedience was personal, not mediatorial. Therefore everyone justified through faith in the shed blood of Christ remains obligated to give personal obedience to God’s law. In this respect, Jesus cannot serve as that person’s proxy or representative.

It should also be noted that the Gnostic sects were Antinomian for different reasons. They believed that their spiritual nature could not become morally polluted — no matter what their outward conduct was — because sin belonged only to matter. Just as a piece of gold remains pure even when surrounded by the filth of a pigsty, so, they thought, the soul remains pure in the midst of even the grossest sins. This kind of Antinomianism was not limited to people who professed faith in Christ. It was adopted by anyone who believed that all evil inheres in uncreated matter.

Modern Universalism is simply another form of Antinomianism. It expects salvation through Christ without obedience either to the law or to the Gospel.

Christianity was disfigured very early by antinomianism, a doctrinal and practical error that sets itself against God’s law even in the evangelical form in which Christ defined it: 

"Thou shalt love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." 

This had been the heart of Christ’s preaching. It is the indication that His own life would be given as a ransom for many and would secure grace enabling them to fulfill God’s law. 

The apostles powerfully reinforced their Lord’s teaching and example, both by what they said and by how they lived. Their lives truly matched their exhortations. It is hard to say which stirred people more to believe and obey: their seraphic sermons or their saintly lives. Their labors were successful. Both Judaism and paganism heard the thunder of their words of faith and fell prostrate under the lightning of their works of love. But before all was lost, Satan hurried to "transform himself into an angel of light." In that disguise he promoted

This was the distressing condition of the church when Martin Luther appeared. True faith had been dethroned by superstitious imagination, and works were nearly choked by the thorns of this destructive error. Luther swung the sharp scythe of reform across northern Europe, and he might have cut a broad swath through Italy and even Rome itself if, at the same time, he had not scattered the dragon’s teeth of antinomianism. Around his German home, those teeth sprang up into an army of armed men. The balance of evangelical teaching had not been preserved when the forgiveness of sins by faith alone was preached without adding that this faith is genuine only when it buds, blossoms, and bears the fruit of holy character.

Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount was explained away, and St. James’ Epistle was wished out of the Bible as an "epistle of straw," not as part of the precious stones of Gospel truth. The practicable law of Christ — called the law of liberty because a regenerate soul, entirely sanctified through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, can keep it with ease — was constantly confused with the impossible Christ-less law of Edenic innocence. The avoidable penalties of the former were unwisely treated as identical either with the dreadful curse of the latter or with the abolished ceremonies of Mosaism. Then the law of Christ, which demands purity and love, was publicly wedded to the devil, and poor bewildered Protestants were taught to defy and mock them both. 

From that kind of seed-sowing, a dreadful harvest spread across Germany. Lawless believers, under the name of Ana-Baptists, arose, imagining themselves to be God’s dear elect people and reasoning in this way: "First, the earth belongs to the saints, and, secondly, we are the saints." Therefore all things were theirs. They were complete in Christ and absolutely certain of salvation because of their standing in Him. They moved about in religious mobs to free people from legal bondage and bring them into Gospel liberty — a liberty to despise all laws, divine and human, and for everyone to do what was right in his own eyes.

Luther was alarmed and shocked. He hurried out of hiding in the castle of the Wartburg to stop a movement that was disgracing the Reformation. But the damage had already been done: the thistle-seed had been scattered widely across Germany. The only proper remedy he did not steadily apply was this: salvation is not by the merit of works, but by the works of faith as a condition and as proof of faith’s genuineness in the great day. People are now justified from the guilt of sin by a work-producing faith. They will be justified in the day of judgment only by the testimony of faith-produced works.

 Nevertheless, Luther learned enough wisdom to abandon the root of the mischief when he drew up — or, more precisely, endorsed — the Augsburg Confession, which contains these remarkable words: "We teach touching repentance, that those who have sinned after baptism may obtain the forgiveness of sins as often as they are converted," etc. Again: "We condemn the Anabaptists, who say that those who have been once justified can no more lose the Holy Spirit."

This antidote of Gospel truth, clearly and frequently enforced, might have stopped the spread of Antinomianism.

But Luther did not insist on it. He wavered and at times even seemed to contradict it. When Calvin appeared, although he rarely went as far as some of his followers in the next century in speculative Antinomianism, he nevertheless laid strong foundations for it in his unscriptural and unguarded doctrine of absolute decrees and the necessary final perseverance of backsliding believers.

We have already suggested that Antinomianism has moved in cycles throughout Church history. Its full development after the Reformation came through John Agricola (1492-1566), one of Luther’s early coworkers. Some of Luther’s statements about justification and the law, made in the heat of his great controversy with Rome, were hasty, excessive, and quite Antinomian. Agricola developed those statements into a system so extreme and so destructive of Christian morals that in 1537 he published these words: 

"Art thou steeped in sin — an adulterer or a thief? If thou believest, thou art in salvation. All who follow Moses must go to the devil; to the gallows with Moses." 

These were the tares sown in Luther’s field by someone who claimed to be a friend. Luther attacked him fiercely, calling him a fanatic and other severe names. After Agricola’s death, Amsdorf and Otto defended Agricola’s doctrines and argued that good works are an obstacle to salvation. Similar views were preached in England during the days of Oliver Cromwell. But it remained for Dr. Crisp (1600-1642), a rector in the Church of England, to develop this error fully in Anglican theology from the seed-corn of high Calvinism. His sermons are filled with statements like these: 

"The law is cruel and tyrannical, requiring what is naturally impossible." 

"The sins of the elect were so imputed to Christ, as that, though He did not commit them, yet they became actually His transgressions, and ceased to be theirs. The feelings of conscience which tell them that sin is theirs, arise from a want of knowing the truth. It is but the voice of a lying spirit in the hearts of believers that saith they have yet in wasting their conscience, and lying as a burden too heavy for them to bear. Christ's righteousness is so imputed to the elect, that they, ceasing to be sinners, are as righteous as He was, and all that He was. An elect person is not in a condemned state while an unbeliever; and should he happen to die before God calls him to believe, he would not be lost. Repentance and confession of sin are not necessary to forgiveness. A believer may certainly conclude before confession, yea, as soon as he hath committed sin, the interest he hath in Christ, and the love of Christ embracing him."

This doctrine completely destroys the distinction between right and wrong and removes every motive for avoiding sin. It boasts in the perseverance of the saints while believing in no saint but one — Jesus — and while neglecting perseverance itself. Several strong theologians opposed this harmful doctrine, especially Baxter and Williams, who, after heroic effort and considerable suffering, finally prevailed.

The next revival of Antinomianism in the Church of England and among dissenters came in the eighteenth century. It was met with great courage by John Wesley, the apostle of experimental godliness and Christian perfection, and by the seraphic John Fletcher, whose writings, says Dr. Dollinger, "are the most important theological productions which issued from Protestanism in the latter part of the eighteenth century." 

Fletcher’s reasoning is forceful, his imagination vivid, his style clear and sharp, and the momentum of his arguments so irresistible that he swept the field, driving Antinomianism out of England for at least two generations. His "Checks" remain unanswered and unanswerable. No one can read them fairly and still deny that believers are obligated to strict obedience to the law of God; that inward holiness is required by the Gospel; and that there is no sharp contrast between the Gospel and the law.

A thorough study of these "Checks" by ministers in our own time would greatly stimulate their spiritual life, strengthen their theology, and equip them with weapons for the conflict with the cycle of Antinomian error now facing the Church.

The means through which this heresy, once entombed by Fletcher, has risen again is the so-called Plymouth Brethren, whose distinctive teachings will be described in the next chapter.

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This is a revision of Chapter 2 of A Substitute for Holiness, or Antinomianism Revived (1887) by Daniel Steele, rewritten with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. Thee Fletcheer quote remains unchanged. The original essay can be found here: ANTINOMIANISM — HISTORICAL SKETCH.