Logical Antinomianism

Ellet J. Waggoner

The Signs of the Times : May 13, 1886

*(Antinomianism is a term used to describe the view of some professed Christians who believe that being saved by grace means that grace has saved them from anything to do with God’s law.)

A writer for a paper in the East, in an article against Sabbath-keeping, says of the Ten Commandments: “Paul tells those who keep this law that they are ‘fallen from grace,’ which is equivalent to saying that there is no salvation in keeping the Ten Commandments.” We never yet came across any such statement in any of Paul’s writings, but we know that there are many people who, in their hatred of the Sabbath, teach just such stuff. There are people organized into churches, whose chief article of faith is that the law of God is abolished, although it is seldom that one is found bold enough to declare that all who keep the law of God are worthy of death. But this is the inevitable conclusion; for if God’s law has been abolished, then it must now be sin to follow the injunctions of that law.

Let us suppose that we have the records of a church whose foundation is built on the belief that God's law has been abolished, in which discipline is rigidly enforced. We should read something like this: “Brother A was charged with a crime of not having taken the name of God in vain for three months. A committee was appointed to labor with him, but he acknowledged the truth of the charge, and stubbornly refused to change his course, stating that he was determined always to hold the name of his Creator in reverence. Accordingly he was disfellowshiped as one irrevocably fallen from grace.