Like Moses (Dt 6:5; Lev 19:18), Jesus taught that the whole law was summarized by the command to love God and neighbor (Mat 22:37). He came not to abolish but to fulfill the law (Mat 5:17-20).
Nevertheless, Jesus was famously accused by the religious leaders as
an “antinomian” for refusing to accord the same weight to the
extrabiblical rules of the elders. Evidently, Paul, too, was accused of
“antinomianism” by his critics. “And why not do evil that good may
come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying” (Rom 3:8; cf. 6:1). Encouraging believers in God’s grace, nevertheless warned them against “using your freedom as a cover-up for evil” (1 Pet 2:16).
Peter adds that “lawless people” were using the gospel as an excuse
for license; “ignorant and unstable,” they were twisting the Scriptures
“to their own destruction” (2 Pet 3:16-18). It should be noted that the charge
of antinomianism and the reality of a lawlessness based on
Scripture-twisting could only arise perpetually throughout the church’s
history because the gospel of free justification in Christ apart from
works is so clearly taught in Scripture.
As Packer’s first type indicates, the first form of explicit
antinomianism was a stripe of Gnosticism. Gnostics identified the body
with evil, the prison-house of the soul, longing to be reunited with the
cosmic Christ (distinguished from the human Jesus). For some, this
meant extreme asceticism and mistreatment of the body; for others,
licentiousness, since it didn’t matter what the body did, as long as the
spirit was pure. The church father Augustine was famously converted
from a life of debauchery in Manichaean Gnosticism. Continue at Michael Horton
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