Antinomianism

Antinomianism and neonomianism are both perversions of the gospel, and you can't use the law to fix either one. You have to get the perversion out of grace. Jude calls it exactly that in Jude 4: grace that has been perverted.

The word "antinomian" gets thrown around a lot. The moment you start emphasizing grace, someone pulls the pin on that grenade. "You're going to make people lazy." "Where's the call to obedience?" "That's cheap grace." I've had it thrown at me, and every time I hear it I think, I don't think that word means what you think it means.

If someone has been handed the wrong definition, I understand why they use it. But if they know the real definition and use it anyway, it's slander. Calling someone an antinomian when they don't teach antinomianism is like calling someone anti-Trinitarian because you misunderstand the Trinity. That's on you, not on them.

Here's my argument up front. True antinomianism is a real problem, but it isn't an overemphasis on grace. It's a perversion of grace. And the bigger problem in the church today is the error on the other side that almost nobody names: neonomianism. Most people are neonomians without knowing it, and when they finally hear the gospel, they mistake it for antinomianism.

We'll walk through what the word means, where it came from, how it gets misused, what scripture actually says produces obedience, and why the answer to both errors isn't a balance. It's Christ.

What the word actually means

Antinomianism is a compound word: anti (against) and nomos (law). It means "against law," the teaching that a believer has no obligation to obey God's law.

Some people are surprised to learn the term traces back to Martin Luther, the man who gave us faith alone. Some have even called Luther an antinomian. But Luther wrote against this very idea.

One of his former students, Johann Agricola, who had served as a recording secretary taking down Luther's notes, began teaching that the Ten Commandments belonged in the courthouse, not the pulpit. Only grace should be preached. Luther answered him in a series of theses and disputations written between roughly 1537 and 1540, known as Against the Antinomians.

Luther's response was simple and devastating: how can you say you need grace if you throw out the law? The law shows you what you lack. No law, no sin. And if there's no sin, what exactly is grace doing for you?

So law and grace belong together, but they are not the same thing. They have different roles and do different work. The mistake I keep fighting is the attempt to combine them. You can't blend law and gospel, and you can't blend law and grace.

Two kinds of real antinomianism

When the reformers used the word properly, they meant one of two things.

Doctrinal antinomianism teaches that the moral law has no binding authority on the believer at all. Not merely that the law can't justify you (every Protestant believes that), but that it tells you nothing about how to live. Once you believe the gospel, you have no obligation of any kind. Taken seriously, that would mean no church discipline, no call to love your neighbor, no call to be faithful to your wife. Nothing guides your life.

Practical antinomianism doesn't necessarily argue the theology. It just lives it. Grace becomes permission, and grace turns into sensuality. This is what Jude confronts, and it's the objection Paul anticipates in Romans 6:1–2:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

The practical antinomian answers Paul's question with, "Sure, why not?" He believes he's been freed from the consequences of sin, not from sin itself, so he can stay in it.

The Second London Baptist Confession (1689), 19.5, speaks to this 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.

The reformers didn't think grace led to lawlessness. They taught that grace produces a response: we are liberated from sin to holiness.

How the label gets misused

Most of the time the word isn't used that way. It's used as a weapon. Here's how I've seen it thrown (including at me):

You didn't end with an application list. If a sermon doesn't close with things to do, the preacher must be against obedience.
You told struggling Christians to look to Jesus instead of their fruit. (Try counting how often scripture, read in context, points people to their works to test themselves versus how often it points them to Christ. Even "examine yourselves" in 2 Corinthians 13:5 isn't about fruit. Paul's gospel was under attack, and he's saying, if I don't have the true gospel, you don't either, because you got yours from me.)
You said I'm fully accepted right now, and that makes me nervous. The fear is that if people hear there's nothing left to do, they'll do nothing.

At bottom, this is less a theological category than a fear response: if people really believe they're forgiven, they'll stop trying. So if you aren't pressing people toward obedience, or you don't sound like a heavy-handed revivalist, you must be an antinomian.

Paul faced the same accusation. In Romans 3:8 he writes:

And why not do evil that good may come? As some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.

Paul's gospel was so free that people heard license in it. He expected the charge, and he called it slander.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, preaching through Romans 6 at Westminster Chapel, made this observation:

The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it.

Think about that. Legal preaching never gets accused of antinomianism. Nobody hears "try harder or else" and asks, "Shall we sin that grace may abound?" Only a gospel that is actually free gets that question. Grace is so foreign to our transactional hearts that it should sound scandalous. That's why Paul says he is not ashamed of it.

Three common misfires

Confusing "not under law" with lawlessness

This is how some people misread Paul and drift into practical antinomianism. Romans 6:14–15:

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

"Not under law" means not under the law as a covenant of works, the arrangement where obedience earns righteousness (think of Adam in the garden). We no longer try to earn our standing by obedience because we have the obedience of Christ. That's what it means to be under grace. It does not mean we stop caring about what God commands.

Thinking harsh law preaching is the cure

On the other side, people assume that if grace produces laziness, more pressure will produce holiness. I grew up hearing this, and many of you still do. But Paul never says the law kills sin. He says it arouses sin. Pressure doesn't produce performance. It produces fear and despair, and it never produces love.

Calling assurance presumptuous

When a believer rests in Christ's finished work and stops auditing himself, someone says, "Careful, that's antinomianism. You should be examining yourself." That isn't antinomianism. That's faith. The Marrow men were called antinomians for exactly this.

Hebrews 12 tells us to lay aside the weight and the sin that clings so closely, "looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith." Why does it say perfecter? Because he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. Not you, auditing your good works. Hyper-introspection doesn't produce obedience, and it certainly doesn't produce rested Christians who have the capacity to obey.

Grace is the cure for lawlessness, not the cause

Let's take the charge seriously. The fear goes like this: if you tell people they are fully accepted and fully forgiven, with nothing to add, they'll have no reason to obey. Many in the Reformed world affirm justification by faith alone, but then quietly pit sanctification against it, as if how you obey will determine whether you're justified.

My argument is that grace is the cure for lawlessness, not its cause. Read the logic of Romans 6:14 again: sin will have no dominion over you since you are under grace. Grace isn't the threat to holiness. Grace is the reason sin loses its grip.

The law commands, but it can't give what it commands. Romans 8:3–4:

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

The law is weakened by our flesh. Pile on more law and the flesh still can't do it. Paul points instead to the person of Jesus Christ.

Grace trains us

Titus 2:11–14 says it plainly:

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Grace isn't the thing that forgives you so the law can keep you on the straight and narrow. Grace is what trains you for godliness. What does Jesus redeem us from? Lawlessness. What does he produce in us? A people zealous for good works. Then Paul tells Titus to insist on these things.

So more gospel preaching doesn't lead to lawlessness. You can't overemphasize grace any more than you can overemphasize air. It's what we breathe. Why don't we preach that grace creates people zealous for good works, instead of reaching for the law in its place?

Works are the destination, not the entrance fee

Ephesians 2:8–10:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Works can't get you in, but works are what you were made for. We tend to use works backward, as a way of verifying our justification after the fact. Paul says works are where you're headed. I'm all for people obeying. I'm convinced that giving people grace is what gets them there. It's like being handed a car and then being shown how to drive it.

Fruit comes from union

Romans 7:4–6:

Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

You were married to the law, and that marriage could only bear fruit for death. Now you belong to another. You're united to Christ, and fruit comes from the union, not from pressure.

Romans 6:17–18 shows where that obedience comes from:

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

Obedient from the heart. That's what grace makes, and the law alone never could. Paul believed the same power that regenerates and cleanses is the power that transforms us to obey.

What true antinomianism looks like: Jude

You can't overemphasize grace, but you can pervert it. That's the whole point.

We tend to treat grace like a thermostat. A little is healthy, too much is dangerous, so set it just right. Scripture never talks that way. Romans 5:20 says, "Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." God himself made grace superabound. You can't preach more grace than God gave.

The perversion isn't a quantity problem. It's a substance problem. It isn't too much grace. It's something that isn't grace at all, wearing grace's name.

Think of counterfeit money. A counterfeit $100 bill isn't too much money. It isn't money. The Treasury doesn't fight counterfeits by printing less real money. It fights them by teaching people what the real thing looks and feels like. That's Jude's strategy. Not less grace, real grace, so you can spot the forgery.

Jude's situation

Jude 3–4:

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Jude wanted to write a happy letter about salvation and had to write a warning instead. Notice what he says:

They crept in unnoticed. These are insiders using the church's words.
Ungodly people. Jude's diagnosis is aimed at the people, not at the doctrine of grace. Grace isn't the problem.
Who pervert the grace. The word carries the sense of swapping one thing for another and keeping the label.
The grace of our God. God defines grace. It belongs to him, and they're tampering with it.
Into sensuality. Unrestrained appetite with no brakes. Grace that leaves you enslaved to what you were in the kingdom of darkness is a forgery. When you try to spend it, it buys you nothing.
And deny our only Master and Lord. This is the key to the whole verse. Perverted grace always comes packaged with a smaller Jesus.

Grace without the Master isn't more grace. It's no grace at all. Grace is a person: when grace appeared, Jesus Christ appeared.

Jude never says they had too much grace. He never tells them to balance it with some law. He says they changed grace into something it was never meant to be.

The same word, the other direction

Paul uses that same idea in Galatians 1:6: "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel." The Galatians weren't drifting toward license. They were drifting toward the law. Both are a perversion of grace.

So a little more law can't fix antinomianism. That just commits the Galatian error in the opposite direction. Grace in its pure form doesn't need anything to help it. Remove the substance and you get either license or legalism.

How Jude answers it

Jude 20–21:

But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

Keep yourselves in the love of God. Not earn it, not prove it. Stay where the love is, near the one who loves you. And look who does the keeping, in verses 24–25:

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

The letter with the sharpest warning about perverted grace ends with one of the most grace-saturated doxologies in the New Testament. Real grace doesn't make people careless about the Master. It makes them want to stay near him.

Perverted grace promises freedom and delivers slavery. 2 Peter 2:19: "They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved." If someone uses grace to justify staying enslaved to sin, run from it. That's the giveaway of a counterfeit.

How to test the message

I don't want anyone to become the antinomian police on either side. But when you hear a message about grace, these three questions help.

Does it make Jesus bigger or smaller? Perverted grace wants a Savior but not a Master. If grace is talked about apart from the person and ongoing work of Christ, something is wrong.
Does it say grace forgives sin, or that grace permits sin? Forgiven and permitted are not the same thing. I emphasize the full forgiveness of sins (past, present, and future) because so much of church history has offered a partial forgiveness, as in Roman Catholicism. People need to know they don't have to do more, pay more, or perform penance to be forgiven before a holy God. But forgiveness is not permission.
Does the freedom it offers lead toward Jesus or away from him? Real freedom is freedom toward the person of Christ. A teaching that offers forgiveness and then leaves you disconnected from him deserves rebuke. Who would want to walk away from the one who forgave them?

The law still has a place

If you've been afraid to preach grace too strongly, hear Jude. He isn't telling you to turn grace down. He's telling you to spot a forgery, and the answer to counterfeit grace is the real thing. You can't overdo grace. You can only lose it by trading it for law or for license.

The law doesn't balance grace. Grace needs no balancing. The law is powerless through the flesh, and the only thing that animates obedience is the grace of God through the Holy Spirit.

So let's be clear about what is not antinomianism: saying your assurance rests on Christ and not your performance, saying obedience flows from grace rather than producing it, and refusing to end every sermon with a guilt list.

True antinomianism denies that the law is a rule of life for the believer. The reformers called this the third use of the law. It guides us for the glory of God and the good of the kingdom, but it can never animate obedience. And if someone wants forgiveness without the person of Christ, or disconnects grace from the good works God prepared for us, that's antinomian too.

The Second London Baptist Confession, 19.6, holds this well:

Although true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned, yet it is of great use to them as well as to others, in that as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly.

The law shows us the heart of God for us. In a world bent on self-gratification, it tells us the truth: what the flesh wants isn't good for our neighbor or what God designed for us. Our relationship to the law changes under the gospel, but we still want to live in a way that reflects our God. The antinomian loses that second half.

Paul says the same in Romans 3:31 ("Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law") and 1 Corinthians 9:21, where he describes himself as "not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ." He was free from the law as a covenant, but never without it.

And yet, if someone struggles to obey, coming at them with more law won't fix it. True antinomianism isn't solved by putting the law back in. It's a perversion of grace, and only real grace corrects it.

Neonomianism: the error nobody names

Neonomianism means "new law" (neo, new; nomos, law). Its best-known proponent is Richard Baxter, a 17th-century Puritan who gets quoted a lot in Reformed circles. I'd encourage you to read him with great discretion, if at all. He was worried that people weren't living holy lives, and his solution was to rebuild a system of works. It went something like this:

Jesus satisfied the old law, the covenant of works. (So far it sounds Reformed.)
In doing so, he made a new, easier law: the gospel.
The conditions of that new law are faith, repentance, and sincere obedience.
Your keeping of that new law becomes your personal righteousness before God.

Neonomianism sounds orthodox. It uses all the right words: grace, faith, Christ, atonement. But it quietly moves the ground of your standing from Jesus' obedience to your own faith and obedience. Jesus lowers the bar, and now you clear it.

This is exactly what Paul fights in Galatians 3:10–12:

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them." Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for "The righteous shall live by faith." But the law is not of faith, rather "The one who does them shall live by them."

And Galatians 2:21: "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose." Not even a little righteousness comes through the law, no matter which law you have in mind.

Our confession was written to shut this down. The Second London Baptist Confession, 11.1, says God justifies believers:

not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ's active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith.

That phrase about "evangelical obedience" is a direct shot at Baxter's system. Christ's active obedience, the whole law kept for us, is the only righteousness that counts. (This is why confessions are so helpful. They keep us from swinging back and forth into bad doctrine.)

What neonomianism sounds like today

Nobody calls himself a neonomian. But you'll hear it:

Saved by grace, but kept by obedience. You were pulled into the boat by another's power, but you stay in the boat by your own.
Faith gets you in, faithfulness keeps you in. That sounds a lot like Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and a lot of evangelical pulpits.
Jesus did his part, now do yours.
Final justification rests on the believer's works. If you want to know you'll be justified at the end, look at your good works.
Examine your obedience to see if you're really saved, as the main ground of assurance.

Obedience can encourage you, and it can support assurance, but it is never the reason you were saved. There's a difference between "I think I'm alive" and "I know I'm right before God because of my obedience." I know I'm right before God because of the obedience of Jesus.

That last one should hit home. The introspective audit is practical neonomianism. When my assurance rests on my sincere obedience, I've made that obedience a new law. I've traded looking to Jesus for looking to myself.

Here's the irony. The people most worried about antinomianism are often the most vulnerable to neonomianism. They're so afraid of grace being abused that they slip a new law underneath it. The Marrow Controversy showed exactly this (Sinclair Ferguson tells the story in The Whole Christ). The assembly that condemned the Marrow men as antinomians was the side drifting toward legalism.

One root, two fruits

This is why the law doesn't correct perverted grace. Christ does. Both errors remove Jesus from grace, so the answer isn't to find a balance. It's to rebuild the whole structure on Christ.

Sinclair Ferguson makes this point in The Whole Christ. Legalism and antinomianism aren't opposite ends of a line with safety in the middle. They grow from the same root: separating the gifts of God from God himself, and doubting his heart toward us. The legalist wants God's blessing, so he works for it. The antinomian wants God's blessing without God. The cure isn't a little more law for one and a little more grace for the other. The cure for both is the whole Christ.

The gospel in its proper form does what both sides are trying to do. Jesus kept the law for us as our whole and sole righteousness, so no obligation remains for our justification. Jesus died under the law's curse for us, so we're no longer under it as a covenant. Then he unites us to himself and gives us his Spirit, so the law's righteous requirement is fulfilled in us. Now we pursue obedience out of joy, to advance his kingdom and glorify God, not to justify ourselves or keep ourselves in.

The Second London Baptist Confession, 19.7:

Neither are the aforementioned uses of the law contrary to the grace of the Gospel, but do sweetly comply with it, the Spirit of Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely and cheerfully which the will of God, revealed in the law, requireth to be done.

Freely and cheerfully. Not to keep our place or prove we're real, because we already have a place. This isn't new. The reformers understood that obedience comes from a heart overpowered by grace, not by law.

Paul closes his case against the Galatian error this way, in Galatians 5:13:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

Freedom isn't the danger. The flesh is the danger. And the answer to the flesh isn't taking freedom away. It's love, and love comes to us through grace. The law increases sin. Love, through grace, increases obedience.

Keep the definitions clean

If you've been called an antinomian for preaching Jesus plainly, you're in good company with Paul, Luther, Lloyd-Jones, and the Marrow men. Just make sure you understand that real grace changes a life.

And if grace has become your excuse, you don't have too much grace. You don't have grace at all. You have a counterfeit. The grace of God opens your heart to see that you need him more and more. You won't want to hide or justify your sin. You'll want to be freed from it.

I don't think the great danger in the church today is grace perverted into license. I think it's that we're all inclined toward neonomianism, and much of what clarifies the gospel gets labeled antinomian. Grace is offensive. It disrupts the systems of the world. You can't use your flesh to fix yourself, and you can't use the law to fix yourself. The law tells you what to do. The grace of God empowers you to do it.

You cannot overemphasize grace. We live under grace and we preach grace. The law is our guide, but it is not what animates us.

Go deeper

I cover how to distinguish law and gospel, and how to preach it, in my book The Bible According to Jesus, available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. If you're a pastor or missionary who can't afford it, reach out and we'll send it to you.

If you have questions, come join the Theocast Community. It's a place to connect with like-minded believers, access our resources, and ask questions. We're currently working through Sinclair Ferguson's The Whole Christ together.