"An Antinomian is a professor of Christianity, who is antinomos, against the law of Christ, as well as against the law of Moses. He allows Christ's law to be a rule of life, but not a rule of judgment for believers, and thus he destroys that law at a stroke, as a law; it being evident that a rule by the personal observance or non-observance of which Christ's subjects can never be acquitted or condemned, is not a law for them. Hence he asserts that Christians shall no more be justified before God by their personal obedience to the law of Christ, than by their personal obedience to the ceremonial law of Moses. Nay, he believes that the best of Christians perpetually break Christ's law; that nobody ever kept it but Christ Himself; and that we shall be justified or condemned before God, in the great day, not as we shall personally be found to have finally kept or broken Christ's law, but as God shall be found to have, before the foundation of the world, arbitrarily laid, or not laid, to our account, the merit of Christ's keeping His own law. Thus he hopes to stand in the great day, merely by what he calls 'Christ's imputed righteousness'; excluding with abhorrence, from our final justification, the evangelical worthiness of our own personal, sincere obedience of repentance and faith, -- a precious obedience this which he calls 'dung, dross, and filthy rags' just as if it were the insincere obedience of self-righteous pride, and Pharisaic hypocrisy. Nevertheless, though he thus excludes the evangelical, derived worthiness of the works of faith, from our eternal justification and salvation, he himself does good works, if he is in other respects a good man. Nay, in this case, he piques himself on doing them, thinking he is peculiarly obliged to make people believe that, immoral as his sentiments are, they draw after them the greatest benevolence and the strictest morality." This brings to mind the testimony of a Universalist woman: "That she had come three miles to attend this prayer-meeting, so as to show that the Universalists are as pious as the Orthodox."Yet, many people drift along with the current of selfish and corrupt human nature while complaining, not about the unholiness of their hearts, but about their supposed “legality” — the stubborn feeling that something must change “in order to attain eternal life.” They must repent and believe. But, rather, they criticize the kind of evangelical “legality” that every true Christian cherishes: clinging to Christ through the sort of faith that produces righteousness; following Him as He went about doing good; and showing, through the works described by St. James, that we truly have the faith described by St. Paul.
The consistent Antinomian — that is, the person whose conduct matches his theory — boldly announces a finished, eternal salvation. He says his sins, past, present, and future, were blotted out on the Cross eighteen hundred years ago, with no regard to his own conduct, character, or works. His salvation, in his view, is so completely completed that no sin can ever blot his name out of the Book of Life. He seems to think the Son of God honored the law so that we could dishonor it; made it honorable so that we could treat it with contempt; and came to fulfill it so that we would be released from fulfilling it according to our ability. He has no sympathy with David’s confession: "I love thy commandments above gold and precious stones: I will always keep Thy law, yea, forever and ever: I will walk at LIBERTY, for I seek Thy precepts." (Psalm 119:147, 44, 45.)
In short, the Antinomian creed amounts to this:
I was justified when Christ died, and my faith is only my awakening to the fact that I have always been saved — a realization of something completed before I even existed. A believer, then, is not required to mourn over sin, because sin was pardoned before it was committed, and pardoned sin is no sin at all. God does not see sin in believers, no matter how serious the sins they commit. By laying our iniquities on Christ, God made Him as completely sinful as I am, and made me as completely righteous as Christ. Beyond that, no sin can ultimately harm a believer, though it may temporarily interrupt communion with God. I must not perform any duty for the sake of my own salvation. That salvation is included in the new covenant, which is entirely a promise and has no condition on my part. It is a fully paid, non-forfeitable, eternal-life insurance policy. Since the new covenant is not properly made with us, but with Christ on our behalf, the conditions — repentance, faith, and obedience — do not fall on our side, but on Christ’s side. He repented, believed, and obeyed in such a way as to spare us from those unpleasant acts. Therefore, it is foolish to look for inward signs of grace, and it is a fundamental error to make sanctification an indispensable evidence of justification — an error that dampens the joy of the person who takes Christ as his sanctification and throws him into unnecessary fears and distress.
This is the creed I oppose!
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