Antinomianism

Reformed Theology's Unwelcome Guest?

Mark Jones

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781596388161
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Antinomianism has a long and complicated history, but help is here! This book is the first to examine antinomian theology from a historical, exegetical, and systematic perspective—with a key emphasis on Christology.

1

Lessons from History

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

The First Antinomians

Adam was the first antinomian (Rom. 5). In the garden, he was against (anti) God’s law (nomos) when he transgressed by failing to guard the garden and to forbid his wife to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve’s own doctrinal antinomianism (Gen. 3:2–3) led to practical antinomianism (3:6). Thus, antinomianism was birthed by our original parents. Interestingly, though, their antinomianism was in response to Satan’s legalism, for it was he who had (willfully) misconstrued God’s gracious loving-kindness to Adam and Eve and made God out to be a legalist, reflecting his own heart (3:1–5).

The Scottish theologian John “Rabbi” Duncan (1796–1870) has rightly argued that “there is only one heresy, and that is Antinomianism,” for all sin, including heresy, is against God’s law.4 The apostle John essentially makes this point when he says that sin is lawlessness (anomia) (1 John 3:4). A history of antinomianism, when defined this way, could easily be derived from the Bible. Similarly, antinomianism, viewed either as breaking or opposing God’s law, is the picture of society at large and regrettably even the church. Nonetheless, the theological concept of antinomianism is a lot more complex than simply being against God’s law, either doctrinally or practically.5

Most people assume that the Pharisees were the preeminent legalists—that is, those who are generally considered to be the opposite of antinomians—trusting in their own obedience more than God’s grace. Some modern scholars, however, have tried to play down the legalistic elements in Second Temple Judaism. In their view, Paul was not concerned so much with self-righteousness as with Jewish nationalism in the form of certain boundary markers (e.g., circumcision, dietary laws, and the Sabbath). While there is some truth in these reassessments, the fundamental problem was still self-righteousness and legalism. Those boundary markers were symptoms of a larger problem: a legalistic heart. But the problem was at the same time antinomianism. Christ makes this clear in Matthew 23:23, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” The Pharisees did not actually keep the law (Mark 7:8); their Talmudic legalism actually made them practical antinomians insofar as they “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.” They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God (John 12:43); they were self-seeking, dishonest, murderous hypocrites (Matt. 23). Far from keeping the law, they were lawbreakers, and this culminated in what would be the greatest crime in history, the killing of the only completely innocent man ever to live—Jesus of Nazareth (Acts 2:23).

In reality, legalists are not much different from antinomians, if indeed they are different at all. Pharisaic selective obedience is disobedience. Oliver O’Donovan perceptively notes that legalism and antinomianism are in fact two sides of the same coin because they are “fleshly” ways of living life. Christian ethics is not a matter of finding a middle ground between legalism and license. Rather, as O’Donovan notes, “such an approach could end up by being only what it was from the start, an oscillation between two sub-Christian forms of life. A consistent Christianity must take a different path altogether, the path of an integrally evangelical ethics which rejoices the heart and gives light to the eyes because it springs from God’s gift to mankind in Jesus Christ.”6 According to O’Donovan, then, not only are legalism and antinomianism “fleshly” ways of approaching ethics, but also there can be no middle ground between these two realms since they are fundamentally the same error, albeit dressed up differently from case to case.7 The grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ, properly understood, is the only solution to these twin heresies. In essence, the mistakes of legalism and antinomianism are Christological errors.

The following will be a brief survey of antinomian debates in the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, ending with the Marrow Controversy in the early eighteenth century. Many of the theological issues debated in these centuries are only given a cursory glance in this chapter. Subsequent chapters will give more detailed consideration to various questions that arise here. This chapter merely sets the stage for the rest of the book.

Luther and the Lutherans

During the Reformation, the doctrine of justification by faith alone was rediscovered. With its rediscovery, Protestantism emerged. Reformation and post-Reformation theologians held that there could never be union with Rome so long as she insisted, as she still does today, that justification is not by faith alone. Historically, when a glorious truth is discovered, or even rediscovered, a number of half-truths or complete untruths are also birthed along with it. Not long after Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) teaching on justification by faith alone had become public, one of his zealous disciples, Johann Agricola (c. 1494–1566), began to quarrel during the late 1520s with another one of Luther’s disciples, the learned Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), over questions relating to the law and the gospel.8 At first, the principal issue between Melanchthon and Agricola was whether the preaching of the law was required for repentance and salvation. Agricola believed that the preaching of the gospel (and not the law) produced repentance, and that Melanchthon held an essentially Roman Catholic view. Luther would himself become embroiled in the controversy with Agricola, which resulted in Luther writing Against the Antinomians (1539).9

Luther was a colorful figure and had a penchant for hyperbole. His rhetoric is something to be admired, but not necessarily copied. He lived in remarkable times, when the theological landscape was constantly changing. So while his early enemies were the “papists,” and they would remain so until he died, later he had to contend with the “false brethren” and various radical Protestants, including Agricola. His disputations with the latter caused him some grief, but Luther was never one to allow friendship to supersede the truth of God’s Word. He coined the term “antinomian” in response to the excessive rhetoric against the law coming from those who supposedly belonged in his camp. Of course, the “softly singing Antinomians” (to use Luther’s words) were a little bemused by his response to them. After all, Luther could be guilty of antinomian-sounding rhetoric himself. In fact, the hero of the English antinomian theologians in the seventeenth century was not Calvin, though he was cited by them (not infrequently out of context), but Luther. The seventeenth-century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford noted “how vainly Antinomians of our time boast that Luther is for them.”10

David Como makes a telling statement in connection with this: “Luther confessed that some of his early writings had indeed stressed the notion that believers were free from the Law, but claimed that such excessive rhetoric had been necessary to deliver men from the bondage of papal works righteousness. ‘Now, however, when the times are very dissimilar from those under the pope,’ such rhetoric was no longer necessary, and if misunderstood, could lead men to an amoral, fleshly security that threatened . . . moral and social order.”11 Luther was not only a man of his times, but a man who understood his times. Just as Paul’s negative statements on the law typically arose from his conflict with Judaizers, so Luther’s negative statements on the law must be understood in relation to his sixteenth-century opponents. His writings, even more so perhaps than the writings of any other figure in church history, must be historically located.12 Context, in the case of statements made by Luther, is half the interpretation!

Interestingly, it seems that Luther would not have been surprised by his heroic status among later antinomian theologians. In his treatise Against the Antinomians, Luther comments that if he had died at Smalcald, he would have “forever been called the patron saint of such spirits [i.e., the antinomians], since they appeal to my books.”13 But Luther was no “antinomian”; that is, he was not against God’s law—specifically, the Ten Commandments. Luther expounded the Ten Commandments in various places, sang them, and prayed them as well. In fact, he writes: “I know of no manner in which we do not use them, unless it be that we unfortunately do not practice and paint them with our deeds and our life as we should. I myself, as old and as learned as I am, recite the commandments daily word for word like a child.”14 As David Steinmetz acutely observes, Luther “does not reject good works except as the basis for justification. On the contrary, Luther wishes to stress as much as possible the importance of good works in the life of faith.”15 Likewise, Mark Edwards captures well Luther’s objection to the antinomian preachers of his day, who were “fine Easter preachers but disgraceful Pentecost preachers, for they taught only redemption through Christ and not the sanctification through the Holy Spirit.”16 This particular criticism would resurface again, roughly a century later in Puritan England.

Antinomian debates among Lutheran theologians did not end with Luther’s death in 1546. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, there were a number of tensions among Lutheran theologians relating to the law and the gospel.17 Melanchthon, in fact, changed his view on repentance and agreed that the gospel was alone able to produce evangelical repentance. Perhaps even more controversially, he held to a “Reformed” view of the gospel, which included the whole doctrine of Christ, including repentance. The Gnesio-Lutherans disagreed with Melanchthon’s view (i.e., the Philippist position) and defined the gospel narrowly as pure promise, which excluded repentance from consideration. Because he supposedly confused the law with the gospel, and argued that the gospel produced repentance, Melanchthon was accused of antinomianism. These debates show that among Lutheran theologians there were competing views on the law and the gospel, particularly in relation to the doctrine of repentance. And, in the midst of these debates, including the Majoristic Controversy, charges of antinomianism and popery were not infrequently used in order to get the upper hand.

Antinomianism in Puritan England

The antinomian movement in England during the seventeenth century was in part a rebellion against Puritan piety and practice. It was also a theological movement that lacked the sophistication found in the writings of the best Reform...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Notes
• 1. Lessons from History
• 2. The Imitation of Christ
• 3. The Law
• 4. The Law and the Gospel
• 5. Good Works and Rewards
• 6. Amor, Amor
• 7. Assurance
• 8. Rhetoric
• 9. Toward a Definition and a Solution
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects and Names
• Notes