As it turns out, the legalist and the antinomian are not opposites. They are two sides of the same coin.
Both errors separate the law from the gracious character of God and his loving will for us. That perfect and loving will which he lays down for us in his law.
The legalist was formerly infatuated with the law. It consumed him. It dominated his life. He used it for his own ends. But, when he finds his rabid obedience empty, he is disgusted by it. He turns against obedience, and the law entirely. And all the while, the law remains separated from Christ in his mind and heart.
Thus, the legalist tries to escape his legalism by rejecting the law as having any role in his life. He shifts into antinomianism. Now the law’s only role is to expose him as a sinner.
With the law out of the picture, good works become merely a coincidental byproduct of faith. They serve no purpose for the believer, and they have no place in our salvation.
This is what the antinomian means when he says ‘it is all of grace alone, by faith alone, in Christ alone’. He means the law has NO role in our living as believers. Obedience is not necessary. The law is voided for life and for living. To the antinomian, it cannot give direction or guidance. (TheGospelCoalition, KDY, see #5-7).
Antinomianism’s failure
Antinomianism fails “to see the clear scriptural connections … between the mighty indicatives of the grace of God that join us to the Lord Jesus Christ, … and those immediate moral imperatives that flow out of the indicatives of the grace of God”. Ferguson’s Lecture #3, PDF, pg. 32.
This is the great pattern laid down for us in the giving of the law at Sinai. The substance of the law is the moral shape that our salvation takes in our lives.
The antinomians disown the imperatives of the law for living life. They see no pattern when they hear ‘do this and live’. They only hear conditions. Their legal frame adds a threatening ‘or else’ ultimatum to what they perceive as a condition. Like Eve, they add their own fence to it.
Antinomianism is a reaction
Antinomianism is most always a clearcut reaction to legalism. The antinomian retains precisely the same bondage of spirit and legal frame as he had when he was a legalist. In his heart of hearts he thinks of God in exactly the same way he did when he was a legalist: angry, cold, and austere. Ralph Erskine, one of the Marrow Men, once said that ‘the greatest Antinomian was the Legalist’. Ferguson’s lectures PDF, pg. 36.
And, according to Ferguson, you can put it the other way around. The greatest Legalist is very often the Antinomian. Why? Because both distort the grace of God. They both fail to recognize grace in the law of God.
Ghost of the old ‘husband’
According to Ferguson, very often the people who have fled to antinomianism, have never escaped the ghost of the ‘covenant of works’ which they held as legalists. And based on what the RPs say, I tend to agree. They were the 200%ers. Now they deny the use of the law for living godly lives for God’s glory; or for any purpose.
Neither the antinomian, nor the legalist, have truly died to the law in Christ, Rom. 7:4. The antinomian remains married to the law in their former bondage of their legalism. And so, they seek to abandon the law of God all together. They run away from it. They don’t know how to die to the law in Christ, so they just try to divorce it by ‘putting it away’.
Ferguson explains that although one runs into antinomianism, he will carry along with him his legal spirit. Such a spirit will always be a slavish and unholy spirit.
And very often in the reformed tradition and in reformed circles, those who have become antinomian have been those who have espoused outwardly a reformed position in theology; but inwardly have had a spirit of bondage and a legal frame. In their heart of hearts, they have never fully and radically been touched by the knowledge of the free grace of God in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Whatever form, however, Antinomianism may assume, it springs from Legalism. None rush into the one extreme, but those who have been in the other. ~ J H Thornwell
Cranfield on Paul and the law
According to Sinclair Ferguson in The Whole Christ, C. E. B. Cranfield wrote a very important article in the Scottish Journal of Theology in 1964. In it he said this, “The Greek language used by Paul has no word group to denote Legalism, Legalist and legalistic. And, of course, they had no word there for Antinomianism. This means not just that he did not have a convenient terminology to express a key idea, but that he had no definite ready-made concept of Legalism with which to work in his own mind. And this means, surely, that he was at a very considerable disadvantage”.
Cranfield means that Paul was not equipped with the modern theological vocabulary that developed over centuries. Words like trinity, accountability, soteriology, and theology for example, are not found in the bible. Neither is legalism.
That means that in the discussion of Paul’s view of the law, one must recon with the fact that Paul did not have a working vocabulary for legalism, legalist, or legalistic. He never used those terms. Nor did his vocabulary stretch to the term antinomian (how could it when Luther coined the term).
Paul expounds the role of, and misunderstandings of, the law without this verbal and categorical equipment. This means that we should not take his passages where he disparages the law as an attack on the law, but on the misunderstandings and misuses of the law.
Paul did not have such ready-made theological terms to express key ideas that later involved the Marrow Controversy, the Puritan struggles, or the schismatic arguments of today’s hyper-grace teachers.
Calvin on Paul and the law
You will find exactly the same point made very strikingly by John Calvin four centuries before in his Institutes, Book 2, chapter 7, part 2. After Calvin makes clear that Paul taught that the law serves the Christian. The Jews in the Old Testament were subject to the law as a schoolmaster, to learn, but never to earn. And other things including that Christ is ‘the Spirit’ who gives ‘life’ to the otherwise dead letter.
Calvin ends with, “but as he [Paul] was engaged in a controversy with erroneous teachers, who pretended that we merit righteousness by the works of the law … in order to refute their error, he was sometimes obliged to use the term ‘law’ in a more restricted sense, as merely preceptive, although it was otherwise connected with the covenant of gratuitous [gracious] adoption.”
In other words, Calvin is saying that Paul had the most glowing things to say about the law in the whole of the New Testament. But Paul’s refutation against misuse of the law explains the very passages where Paul seems to take such a harsh view of the law.
Antinomianism fails to be sensitive to the restricted vocabulary with which the New Testament operates.
So, antinomianism is merely a reaction to the discovery of one’s legalism, it is not the answer. It supplies a different view of the law, but not a biblical view. The problem is not the law, it is the heart.
Scripture never prescribes antinomianism as a cure for legalism and vice versa, it prescribes grace for both.
