antinomianism

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Related to Antinomian controversy: antinomianism, Anne Hutchinson

antinomianism

(ăntĭnō`mēənĭzəm) [Gr.,=against the law], the belief that Christians are not bound by the moral law, particularly that of the Old Testament. The idea was strong among the Gnostics, especially MarcionMarcion
, c.85–c.160, early Christian bishop, founder of the Marcionites, one of the first great Christian heresies to rival Catholic Christianity. He was born in Sinope. He taught in Asia Minor, then went (c.135) to Rome, where he perfected his theory.
..... Click the link for more information. . Certain heretical sects in the Middle Ages practiced sexual license as an expression of Christian freedom. In the Protestant Reformation theoretical antinomian views were maintained by the Anabaptists and Johann Agricola, and in the 17th cent. Anne Hutchinson was persecuted for supposed antinomianism. Rom. 6 is the usual refutation for antinomianism.

antinomianism

the beliefs held, e.g. by the members of some Protestant sects in the 16th and 17th centuries, that, as members of ‘God's elect’, they could no longer be guilty of sin. As WEBER (1922) put it, such persons felt themselves ‘certain of salvation’, and ‘no longer bound by any conventional rule of conduct’. This belief was interpreted by some believers as permitting them to engage in unorthodox marital practices, including plural marriages, as well as in sexual activity outside marriage, which they justified as bringing others to salvation. Weber's view was that antinomianism is a generally occurring phenomenon, and that the more systematically the ‘practical psychological character’ of a religious faith develops, the greater is the tendency for antinomianism to be the outcome.
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85) See Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 220-242 (many of the errors enunciate the supersession of legal duties and evangelical graces), 263-264, 301-303, 352, 374-376.
Redeeming free grace: Thomas Hooker and the contested language of salvation
7) Zora, in turn, follows Hester s footsteps, and though (like most) Du Bois may lack Hawthorne's allegorical zeal, he does refashion the Antinomian Controversy and the politics of The Scarlet Letter.
Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece
Those drumbeats bang louder as Gordis in another chapter jog trots through the dense, interrelated political and religious quarrels that nineteenth-century historians misleadingly labeled the Antinomian controversy (Gordis gives a misleading definition of antinomianism on page 147 by conflating it with Familism, thereby demonstrating again that labels guide perception as much for scholars as for Puritans).
Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England
Hall, "Assurance, Community, and the Puritan Self in the Antinomian Controversy, 1636-38"; and Stephen Woolsey, "Staging a Puritan Saint: Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.
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