antinomianism
antinomianism (‘against the law’) held that the moral law was not a rule of life for believers, the opposition of matter and spirit implying the indifference of bodily functions. It was an occupational hazard of Lutheranism and Calvinism alike, lurking in the doctrine of justification by faith alone and the righteousness implied by such faith. Propounded during the Reformation by the Lutheran John Agricola, it was taken up by some anabaptists, and championed in England by Tobias Crisp (1600–43), flourishing in the 1650s. Its most egregious 18th-cent. representative was William Huntington, Sinner Saved (1745–1813), and its most telling refutation was Fletcher of Madeley's Checks to Antinomianism (1771).
Clyde Binfield
More From encyclopedia.com
NEARBY TERMS
antinomianism
