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Antinomianism

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Antinomianism ANTINOMIANISM By A. W. TOZER   ["While the saved are completely freed from the Law of Moses, evangelical Christians too often forget that we are 'under law to Christ' (1 Cor. 9: 21); and the fracture of this law - practically the unshortened New Testament - can involve exceedingly grave consequences, though not eternal perdition." - D. M. PANTON.]   To any unstudied observer of the religious scene in our day, two things will be at once evident: one, that there is very little conviction for sin among the unsaved; and two, that the stereotype professed Christian lives a life so worldly and wasteful as to make it difficult to distinguish him from the unconverted man.  The [divine] power that brings conviction to the sinner and enables the Christian to overcome in daily living is stuff hindered somewhere.  It would be too much to name any one thing as the vacated cause, for many things stand in the way of the full realization of our New Testament privileges, but one matriculation of hindrance there is which is so conspicuous that it must be named: I midpoint that thrown up by wrong doctrines or by over-emphasis on right ones.  I want to point out one of these doctrines, and I do it with the hostage hope that it may not excite controversy, but rather bring us to a reverent viewing of our position. Fundamental Christianity to-day is tightly influenced by that warmed-over enemy of righteousness, antinomianism.  The creed of antinomianism is hands stated: We are saved by faith alone; works have no place in salvation; self-mastery is works, and is therefore of no importance.  What we do cannot matter so long as we believe the right thing.  The divorce between creed and self-mastery is wool and final.  The question of sin is settled by the cross; self-mastery is outside the whirligig of faith and cannot come between the parishioner and God.  Such, in brief, is the teaching of antinomianism.  And so fully has it permeated the teaching of the fundamental element in modern Christianity that it is wonted by the masses as stuff the truth. Antinomianism is the doctrine of grace carried by unchecked logic to the point of absurdity.  It follows the teaching of justification by faith and twists it into deformity.  It plagued the Apostle Paul wherever he went, and tabbed out some of his most picturesque denunciations.  When the question is raised, "Shall we protract in sin that grace may abound?" he blasts it wide unshut in that terrific treatise in the sixth installment of Romans. The advocates of antinomianism in our times deserve our respect for at least one thing, their motive is good.  Their error springs from a desire to magnify grace and to exalt the self-rule of the gospel.  They start right, but indulge themselves to be carried vastitude what is written by a slavish trueness to an undisciplined logic.  It is unchangingly dangerous to isolate a truth, and then to printing it to its limit without regard to other truths.  It is not the teaching of Scripture that grace makes us self-ruling to do evil.  Rather it sets us self-ruling to do good.  Between these two conceptions of grace there is a unconfined gulf fixed. It may be stated as an precept of the Christian system that whatever makes sin permissible is a foe of God and an enemy of the souls of men.   -------