When I was seven, my family went on holiday to France.

I remember vividly the final day. We set off in the dark and had to drive along a narrow, dark country lane, with a ditch on either side. Suddenly, the back wheels ended up sliding, with the nose of the car pointing up out of the ditch. How were we going to get out? Thankfully, we managed it – and I survived to tell the tale!

The path of Christian obedience has, as it were, a ditch on either side. On the right there is the ditch of Legalism, and on the left there is the ditch of Antinomianism. What they have in common is this: both misunderstand the relationship between law and gospel. Get that relationship right, and you stay on the road. Get it wrong, and you end up in a ditch.

In what way does the antinomian misunderstand the relationship between the law and the gospel? Whereas the legalist uses the law to displace the gospel, the antinomian uses the gospel to displace the law. The word antinomian simply means ‘against the law’. Not all Antinomianism looks the same, however, and we can distinguish between ‘hard’ Antinomianism and ‘soft’ Antinomianism. (Apologies if those titles sound a bit ‘Brexit’ to you!)

Hard Antinomianism

Hard Antinomianism is when someone deliberately abuses the grace of God in the gospel. They hear the message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ, and think: ‘Great! I can forget all about God’s law! I can sin as much as I want because as long as I believe in Jesus, God won’t punish me!’ They are using the gospel to displace the law.

This is the issue Paul is dealing with at the start of Romans 6. He writes: ‘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?’ (Romans 6.1-2). In verse 15, he says: ‘What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!’

These verses address hard Antinomianism; abusing God’s grace to indulge in sin. Such an attitude puts a question mark over a Christian’s faith, because it is impossible to love Christ and be unconcerned about sin. As someone has put it, if you don’t have a new relationship with sin, you don’t have a new relationship with God.

Hard Antinomianism is an easy error to spot, and though we are not immune from this error, we are well aware of it.

Soft Antinomianism

Soft Antinomianism is the idea that after we have become a Christian the moral law of God no longer has any authority over us. Such people are not condoning sin, like the hard antinomian; they are just saying that the law no longer has any function in their life. So, the soft antinomian will point to Romans 6.14, where Paul says: ‘you are not under law but under grace.’ They will interpret that to mean: ‘If you’re a Christian, you’re done with the law. It’s all about grace now.’ In a different way to the hard anti-nomian they are nonetheless displacing the law with the gospel.

This approach to the Christian life has become very popular. It is characterised in an approach which says that as soon as you try and apply God’s law, you’re a legalist. The objection will be raised: ‘You’ve forgotten grace! Come back to the gospel!’

Maybe you’re thinking: ‘But what about all the commands in the New Testament which are applied to Christians? How does a soft antinomian deal with those?’ This is how they do it. They come to a command and say: ‘See, this is God’s standard. This is what he demands. And have you kept it? No, because you’re a sinner. But the good news is that Jesus has kept that command for you, and taken the punishment for your law breaking. So, through faith in him, you are justified; declared right in God’s eyes.’

For command after command, the same point is made over and over! Soft anti-nomian preaching is characterised by going in circles. It is justification ad infinitum.

Now, let me clarify: of course we love the doctrine of justification by faith alone. We want to keep preaching that. But it would be remiss of us to use that doctrine to exclude everything else – and especially to exclude preaching about sanctification, that is, our growth in Christlikeness as we live in greater obedience to God’s law.

No application?

I was listening once to a sermon by a well-known preacher, who said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if every preacher for a whole year had no application in any of their sermons!’ In other words: ‘Preachers, stop telling people how to live! Only tell them about what Jesus has done, and leave it there. Say nothing more. Don’t try and give people any commands to go and obey.’

As someone else has put it: ‘Preach justification, and people will be justified and sanctified. Preach sanctification, and neither will happen.’

Now, notice, he is not a ‘hard’ antinomian, because he is not saying that sanctification is unimportant. What he is saying, though, is that we should only preach justification, and never actually spell out the implications of that for how they should live now, because the only means by which our sanctification is advanced is by understanding our justification more. Preaching about sanctification would in fact be counterproductive. Do you see how the soft antinomian, in a more subtle, more convincing way, is actually driving a wedge between the law and the gospel, even to the point of saying that there are certain Christian truths you should not preach about.

Pastoral implications

First of all, it would be good to ask yourself ‘which of these two errors am I personally more likely to drift towards? Am I more likely to drift towards Legalism, where I start to displace the gospel with law? Or am I more likely to drift towards the antinomian side of things?’

Or maybe it’s the case that you oscillate between the two. Martin Luther once said that Christians can be like a drunk person getting on to a horse. They are stood on one side, and they jump up onto the horse’s back, but fall straight off the other side. So they try again, from the other side, but the same thing happens, and they are back where they started.

Out of the ditch of Legalism, and straight into the ditch of Antinomianism – and then the reverse, because we just can’t get that delicate relationship between the law and the gospel right.

Secondly, think about your fellowship. God has placed you in a church family.

The antinomian looks at Christian discipline, and mistakes it for Legalism. So, you have someone who is maybe drifting towards an antinomian outlook. They see other believers in their church, and they look at them and think: ‘Those people over there are legalists! Look at how strict their Christian lives are! They’re always talking about God’s law.’ Well, they might be legalists. But actually, that might just be normal Christian discipline, which from your antinomian perspective you wrongly interpret as Legalism.

It works the other way too. The legalist looks at Christian liberty, and mistakes it for Antinomianism. So, you have someone else in the church who has something of a legalistic outlook on things, and they look at others in the church, and they say: ‘I can’t believe how they live their life! Look at what they wear to church! They engage in this and that which I would never touch. They must be antinomians!’ Well, again, they might be. But all of those things might be areas of Christian liberty which, with a legalistic outlook, you have misinterpreted as a sinful flouting of God’s law.

Right relationship

How you understand the relationship between the law and the gospel is so important, for you yourself, and also for how you relate to others in the church.

Why, then, do we keep the law, if we have already received God’s acceptance in Christ? We obey God’s law out of gratitude to him for all he has done for us in Christ, and because in fulfilment of God’s promises in the new covenant, the Holy Spirit has come to dwell within our hearts. As we grow in sanctification we have a deeper knowledge of God (John 14.23-24).

As Christian people, justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, the law of God provides us with the map of how to live now in light of the grace we have received in the gospel. If we love Christ we will want to be like him.

Andy Hambleton is minister of Crumlin Evangelical Presbyterian Church, N. Ireland.