ANTINOMIANISM, an interpretation cif the antithesis be tween law and gospel, recurrent from the earliest times (Gr.avri against vopos, law). Christians being released, in important par ticulars, from conformity to the Old Testament polity as a whole, a real difficulty attended the settlement of the limits and the im mediate authority of the remainder, known vaguely as the moral law. Indications are not wanting that St. Paul's doctrine of justi fication by faith was, in his own day, mistaken or perverted in the interests of immoral licence. Gnostic sects approached the question in two ways. Marcionites, named by Clement of Alex andria Antitactae (revolters against the Demiurge) held the Old Testament economy to be tainted throughout by its source ; but they are not accused of licentiousness. Manichaeans, again, hold ing their spiritual being to be unaffected by the action of matter, regarded carnal sins as being, at worst, forms of bodily disease. Kindred to this latter view was the position of sundry sects of fanatics during the Reformation period, who denied that regener ate persons sinned, even when committing acts in themselves gross and evil (see ANABAPTISTS).
During the Commonwealth period Antinomianism was found in England among the high Calvinists who maintained that an elect person, being predestined to salvation, is absolved from the moral law and is not called upon to repent. In less extreme forms, Antinomianism is a feature of those forms of Christianity which lay stress on justification by faith (see Fletcher's Checks to An tinomianism, 1771).