Justification and the Antinomian Crisis
How do you secure sola fide without letting the law fall away?
Alternative rejected
Background
The 1640s saw a fresh outbreak of antinomian preaching in London and the army. Tobias Crisp's *Christ Alone Exalted* (published posthumously 1643) pressed *sola fide* so hard that the law's role in the Christian life seemed to evaporate: Christ's righteousness covered the believer so absolutely that the believer's sins were 'as if they had never been,' and the Christian life consisted in resting in justification rather than in any pursuit of holiness. John Saltmarsh, Henry Denne, William Dell, and others preached variants of the position to army audiences. The Assembly's drafters had to write chapters on justification (XI), sanctification (XIII), good works (XVI), and the law (XIX) in the shadow of this crisis — securing imputed righteousness against Rome while securing the third use of the law against the antinomians.
The Assembly’s handling
The Assembly's response is one of the Confession's masterstrokes of confessional engineering. WCF XI.1-4 secures forensic justification by imputed righteousness alone, received by faith alone. XI.2 insists that 'faith…is no dead faith, but worketh by love.' XVI.2 makes good works 'the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith.' XVI.5 denies all merit. XVI.7 holds that even the works of unregenerate persons, though commanded by God, are 'sinful and cannot please God' because not proceeding 'from an heart purified by faith.' XIX.5-6 affirms the third use of the moral law for the regenerate. Anthony Burgess's *Vindiciae Legis* (1646) is the canonical Reformed reply to Crisp and the deepest expression of the Assembly's collective mind on the question.
Parties
The Assembly's anti-antinomian consensus
Justification is forensic and by faith alone, on the ground of Christ's imputed obedience and satisfaction. But true faith is never alone — it works by love, produces good works as its necessary fruits, and submits to the third use of the moral law as the rule of life for the regenerate.
- Anthony Burgess (d. 1664)
- Edward Reynolds (1599–1676)
- George Walker (1581–1651)
- Edmund Calamy the Elder (1600–1666)
- Anthony Tuckney (1599–1670)
- Daniel Cawdrey (1588–1664)
The antinomians (rejected; mostly outside the Assembly)
Justification covers the believer so absolutely that the law has no continuing normative claim on the regenerate. The Christian life is rest in finished work, not pursuit of holiness under the law. Tobias Crisp, John Saltmarsh, John Eaton.
Confessional language
WCF XI.2: 'Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification: yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.' WCF XIX.6: 'Although true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned, yet is it of great use to them, as well as to others; in that, as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly…'
Ontology placement
This crux bears on the following attributes of the Westminster ontology. The Westminster baseline value is marked WCF.
V · Soteriology · Justification Ground
VI · Law & Sanctification · Good Works
VI · Law & Sanctification · Uses of the Law
Legacy
The Assembly's careful threading between Rome and antinomianism has defined the Reformed handling ever since. Richard Baxter's *Aphorisms of Justification* (1649) attempted a different synthesis (the 'neonomian' reading of faith as the believer's evangelical righteousness) which John Owen and the Reformed mainline rejected as betraying Westminster. The Marrow controversy (1717-22) revived the antinomian question in Scotland. Modern Reformed debates over 'gospel sanctification' (Tullian Tchividjian and the controversy of the 2010s) have rehearsed the same crisis at a smaller scale.