The third occasion on which Luther’s innocence of the charges of Romanists that he was an instigator of lawlessness was most effectually vindicated was the Antinomian controversy.  This episode, more than any other, embittered the life of the aging Reformer.  The Antinomians drew from the evangelical teachings those disastrous consequences which the Catholics impute to Luther:  they claimed that the Law is not in any way applicable to Christians.  They insisted that the Ten Commandments must not be preached to Christians at all.  Christians, they claimed, determine in the exercise of their sovereign liberty what they may or may not do.  Being under grace, they are superior to the Law and a law unto themselves.  At first Luther had been inclined to treat this error mildly, because it seemed incredible to him that enlightened children of God could so fatally misread the teaching of God’s Word.  He thought the Antinomians were either misunderstood by people who had no conception of the Gospel and of evangelical liberty, or they were grossly slandered by persons ill-disposed to them because of their successful preaching of the Gospel.  When their error had been established beyond a doubt, he did not hesitate a moment to attack it.  In sermons and public disputations, before the common people of Wittenberg and the learned doctors and the students of the University, he defended the holy Law of God as the norm of right conduct and the mirror showing up the sinfulness of man also for Christians, and he insisted that those who had fallen into this error must publicly recant.  It was due to Luther’s unrelenting opposition that Agricola, one of the leaders of the Antinomians and at one time a dear friend of Luther, withdrew his false teaching and offered apologies in a published discourse.  To his guests Luther in those days remarked at the table:  “Satan, like a furious harlot, rages in the Antinomians, as Melanchthon writes from Frankfort.  The devil will do much harm through them and cause infinite and vexatious evils.  If they carry their lawless principles into the State as well as the Church, the magistrate will say:  I am a Christian, therefore the law does not pertain to me.  Even a Christian hangman would repudiate the law.  If they teach only free grace, infinite license will follow, and all discipline will be at an end.” (Preserved Smith, p. 283.) Luther held that forbidding the preaching of the Law meant to prohibit preaching God’s truth (20, 1635), and to abrogate the Law he regarded as tantamount to abrogating the Gospel (22, 1029).

Far from repudiating the Ten Commandments, then, Luther, by insisting on a distinction between Law and Gospel, and assigning to each a separate sphere of operation in the lives of Christians, has done more than any other teacher in the Church since the days of Paul to impress men with a sincere respect of the Law, and to honor it by obedience to its precepts.

19.  Luther’s Invisible Church.