Luther coined a word to condemn followers who took him too far
Martin Luther taught that faith, not good deeds, saves. Some followers concluded that believers were therefore free of God's moral law altogether. Luther was horrified, invented the label antinomian, meaning against the law, and spent six public disputations and 258 theses fighting the idea, chiefly against his former ally Johannes Agricola.
The word joins the Greek for against and law, and it now describes any stance rejecting moral, religious or social rules. In Christian debate it refers to pushing salvation by grace so far that the saved owe nothing to the moral commandments. Critics have always accused antinomians of claiming a licence to sin; defenders say good behaviour should flow from inner faith rather than outward pressure. The underlying argument, faith alone against good works, runs through the whole history of the Church.
Agricola argued as early as 1525 that non-Christians remained under the law of Moses while Christians lived under the gospel alone. Sin, to him, was more sickness than guilt, and repentance came from knowing God's love, not from fear of judgement. Philipp Melanchthon insisted the reverse: awareness of the law must come first to stir contrition. Luther patched up a quarrel between them at Torgau in December 1527, but Agricola kept publishing, and in 1539 Luther issued Against the Antinomians, the first use of the term. Agricola sued him for slander, then left Wittenberg for a court post in Berlin and eventually recanted.
Luther's own view was that true faith cannot help producing good works, as inseparable as heat and light from fire. Lutheran churches today classify antinomianism as heresy, and the Formula of Concord rejects it explicitly. The Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians likewise holds that the Ten Commandments bind everyone, justified or not. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, attacked the idea fiercely in the 18th century.
The attitude is older than the word. Opponents accused Gnostic sects of ignoring Mosaic law, and Marcion rejected the Hebrew Bible entirely, calling its God a lesser deity. By extension the label has been attached to the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, to the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, and to Tantric rituals in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Source: Antinomianism
