Theopedia

Legalism

“You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”

— Galatians 5:4

Definition

Legalism is the error of treating obedience to God’s law, or to human additions made to it, as the ground of a sinner’s justification or standing before God, rather than as the fruit of a standing already given by grace. It is usually treated as the opposite extreme from antinomianism, which denies that believers have any continuing obligation to the law at all.1 Where antinomianism separates grace from obedience, legalism collapses grace into obedience, making a sinner’s own law-keeping, rather than Christ’s righteousness received by faith, the basis on which God accepts him.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 confession states the ground of justification in terms that directly exclude legalism: God “freely justifies, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone… by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.”2 The same chapter that binds believers to obey the moral law “for ever” is equally clear that this obedience is not what justifies them: they are “not under the Law, as a Covenant of Works, to be thereby Justified or condemned,” even though the law remains “of great use to them… as a Rule of Life.”3 The confession’s answer to legalism is the same distinction it uses against antinomianism, applied from the other side: the law binds believers as a rule of life without ever functioning again as the ground of their acceptance with God.

Biblical Basis

Paul confronted a concrete legalist demand at Antioch and in the churches of Galatia: that Gentile believers submit to circumcision and the works of the law to be justified. His answer is direct: “we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ… because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Gal. 2:16). He states the stakes just as bluntly: “if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (Gal. 2:21), and warns that seeking justification by the law severs a believer from Christ and grace (Gal. 5:4). Romans states the same rule as a general principle rather than a local controversy: “by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight” (Rom. 3:20).

Paul’s own biography shows that the object of his critique is misplaced trust, not obedience as such. Writing of his pre-conversion life, he lists real, sincere credentials: circumcised on the eighth day, “a Hebrew of Hebrews,” and “as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:4-6). He does not call that record false; he calls it worthless for the purpose he had put it to; he counts it “as loss” and “rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:7-9). Jesus makes the same point in narrative form in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, told “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous” (Luke 18:9): the Pharisee’s fasting and tithing are real, but his confidence is in them rather than in God’s mercy, and it is the tax collector, not the law-keeper, who “went down to his house justified” (Luke 18:14). Ken Magnuson reads Jesus’s broader critique of the Pharisees the same way: they were “concerned to impress people (and perhaps God) with their righteous acts and adherence to the law,” a performance Jesus calls hypocrisy rather than righteousness (Matt. 6:2, 5, 16).4

Historical Development

Second Temple Judaism and the Judaizing controversy

Herman Bavinck traces legalism’s biblical-era form to the centuries after the exile, when, “instead of expecting their righteousness and salvation from God, the Jews increasingly sought to construct a righteousness of their own out of works,” a pattern he labels nomism.5 Andrew Hassler’s study of Paul’s own context confirms that this was a real feature of first-century Judaism alongside genuine Old Testament grace, not merely a caricature later read back into it by Christian polemic: “there was… presence of legalism or works-righteousness among the Jewish people” in Paul’s own day.6 The Judaizing party that followed Paul into the Galatian churches, insisting Gentile converts be circumcised and keep the law, was this same impulse turned into a concrete church controversy, and it is what provoked Paul’s sharpest statements of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The post-apostolic church continued that resistance: Brian Arnold reads Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, as “consciously opposing the Judaizers” with a gospel of justification by faith rather than the works of the law.7

Rome’s doctrine of merit

Bavinck finds “points of resemblance between Roman Catholic and Jewish nomism” in the medieval and Tridentine doctrine of merit.8 A. A. Hodge documents that doctrine in Rome’s own words: the Council of Trent and the Jesuit theologian Robert Bellarmine held, in Hodge’s summary, that “the common opinion of all Catholics holds that all the good works of justified persons are truly and properly meritorious, and deserving not merely of a reward of some sort, but of eternal life itself.”9 The Reformers and their Puritan successors answered this directly rather than merely asserting the opposite. William Perkins, replying point by point to Roman Catholic controversy, held that “good works cannot be any meritorious causes of justification,” since a sinner’s person must already be justified before any of his works can please God at all.10 The Particular Baptist theologian John Gill made the same argument from a different angle: “the best works of men are due to God; he has a prior right unto them, and therefore cannot be meritorious of pardon,” since no one can earn credit for paying a debt he already owed.11

Post-Reformation and modern forms

Bavinck traces legalism’s persistence past the Reformation itself, in movements that in other respects moved away from Rome: “Rationalism emphasized the human subject’s faith and obedience, creating a new form of nomism or legalism,” while Pietism and Methodism, for all their differences from Rationalism, likewise turned toward the believer’s own religious experience as a condition of salvation.5 A more recent instance surfaced within confessional Reformed circles in the late twentieth century, when Norman Shepherd’s covenant theology drew the charge that it made a believer’s own obedience, not merely its fruit, a condition of justification. Samuel Waldron’s study of the controversy describes legalism and antinomianism together as “the spiritual tendencies that result” when law and grace are pulled apart.12

Objections and Responses

If good works cannot be the ground of a believer’s standing with God, why does Scripture keep commanding obedience and warning of real consequences for disobedience? Isn’t insisting on that itself a form of legalism? The confession’s own distinction answers this: the law that cannot function as a covenant of works for a justified believer still functions for him as a rule of life, informing him of God’s will and showing him what obedience looks like, without his obedience becoming the ground of his acceptance.3 Obedience commanded as the necessary fruit of a standing already given by grace is a different thing, categorically, from obedience required as the price of that standing. The first is what law and Scripture both ask of a believer; only the second is legalism.

Doesn’t Paul’s own pre-conversion example show that zeal for the law is commendable? What exactly was wrong with it? Paul never disowns the accuracy of his own record: he really had kept the law blamelessly by his own account (Phil. 3:6). What he repudiates is not the keeping but the trusting, the attempt to stand before God on “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” rather than the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ (Phil. 3:9). Legalism’s error is a misplaced object of trust, not the practice of obedience itself, which is why the confession can condemn legalism in the same chapter that it binds believers to obey the law “for ever.”13

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 169. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” paras. 1, 3. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 6. ↩ ↩2

  4. Ken Magnuson, “5. Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Andrew Michael Hassler, “The Problem of Jewish Legalism,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 35-69. ↩

  7. Brian John Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 56-103. ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation,” n. 21. ↩

  9. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 33, “Justification,” 496-514. ↩

  10. William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge: John Legat, 1598), 61-102. ↩

  11. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VI, chap. 7, “Of the Pardon of Sin.” ↩

  12. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 163-194. ↩

  13. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 5. ↩