Neonomianism

Neonomianism (“new law”) is the view that the gospel replaces the law’s demand for perfect obedience with a gracious “new law” whose terms, faith and evangelical obedience, become the condition for receiving and keeping justification. Faith itself, on this account, is an act of obedience credited to the believer as personal righteousness, not merely the instrument receiving Christ’s righteousness imputed from outside. It is a minority position within seventeenth-century English Puritan theology, associated principally with Richard Baxter (1615-1691), and is disputed rather than confessionally settled: the Reformed tradition generally grounds justification in Christ’s own imputed obedience, received through faith alone.

Confessional Contrast

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession never addresses Baxter’s teaching by name; its chapter “Of Justification” was finalized decades after the controversy’s opening exchanges. But that chapter states the standard Reformed position his doctrine collapses. Those God effectually calls, he

“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.”¹

Herman Bavinck records that this was exactly the point at issue in the controversy that produced neonomianism as a named position: “a ‘neonomian’ view, held by Richard Baxter (1615-91; Justifying Righteousness), among others, considered faith as the ground of justification. Their opponents insisted that this ground could only be found in the imputed righteousness of Christ.”² That is the very position the confession’s wording states: it credits the believer’s righteousness to Christ’s obedience received “by faith,” not to any obedience of the believer’s own.

Arguments

Baxter’s own statement of the position, quoted by Carol Chen from his Treatise of Justifying Righteousness, sets out what he thought was at stake:

“the law of grace being that which we are to be judged by, we shall at the last judgment also be judged (and so justified) thus far by or according to our sincere love, obedience, or evangelical works, as the condition of the law or covenant of free grace, which justifies and glorifies freely all that are thus evangelically qualified, by and for the merits, perfect righteousness and sacrifice of Christ… If this be justification by works, I am for it.”³

For Baxter the gospel itself functions as a “new law” or “new Covenant-Righteousness” that sinners obey by faith; because that faith “also includes obedience to the law,” believers are declared righteous on the basis of faith and obedience together, rather than faith serving as the bare instrument that receives a righteousness entirely outside themselves.⁴ J. I. Packer traces the worry behind the position to a specific fear about its alternative: Baxter “was convinced that those who held the ground and formal cause of our justification to be the imputing to us of Christ’s own righteousness were logically committed to Antinomianism, on the ‘payment-God-cannot-twice-demand’ principle.”⁵ If Christ has already paid the law’s full debt on the believer’s behalf, on this reasoning, nothing remains for God to require of the believer at all.

J. V. Fesko locates Baxter’s argument in a redefinition of union with Christ itself. Where Reformed theologians like John Owen grounded the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in a real, spiritual union between Christ and the believer, “Baxter redefines union with Christ in such a manner as to exclude the imputation of Christ’s righteousness,” treating it instead as “a political rather than mystical union.”⁶ Owen’s own reply, written without naming Baxter directly, argues the position he took himself to be defending: “there is such a union between Christ and believers is the faith of the catholic church, and has been so in all ages… Upon supposition of this union, reason will grant the imputation pleaded for to be reasonable.”⁷

Chen’s own assessment gives the standard Reformed verdict on the exchange: those who, like Baxter, mix faith and obedience “insist[] believers are not justified by faith alone but also by faithfulness,” failing to distinguish that “by the indwelling presence of the Spirit believers are justified by faith alone and consequently produce the fruit of good works.”⁸ On this reading, Baxter’s error was not in requiring a holy life of believers, which the Reformed confessions require as well, but in relocating that requirement from the fruit of justification into its ground.

Historical Development

Baxter’s doctrine and the Owen controversy (1654-1677)

J. V. Fesko places Baxter’s neonomianism within a specific seventeenth-century dynamic: English Puritanism saw antinomianism rise, “and the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction and yielded a neonomian reaction.”⁹ Works such as Tobias Crisp’s Christ Alone Exalted and Edward Fisher’s Marrow of Modern Divinity drew the antinomian charge from their opponents; beginning with his Confession of His Faith (1654) and Aphorismes of Justification (1655) and continuing through two further works in 1676, Of the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness to Believers and A Treatise of Justifying Righteousness, Baxter “fired off numerous responses throughout his writing career” in the opposite direction.⁹

John Owen, one of the architects of the Savoy Declaration (1658), took up the Reformed side of the same debate. The Savoy Declaration had already stated, without yet naming Baxter, that God justifies “not by infusing righteousness into them… nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believer, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ’s active obedience to the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness.”¹⁰ Owen’s own treatise, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677), argued at length against the view that a believer’s final justification at the consummation rests on their good works, a position Fesko finds Owen targeting in Baxter, in Jacob Arminius, and in the Council of Trent alike, though the three differed on other points (Baxter and Arminius, unlike Trent, both denied that baptism itself is the instrument of justification).¹¹

Later recurrences

Bavinck’s history of dogmatics locates a related division recurring in later Reformed debate over eternal justification: both antinomians and “antineonomians” reached for that doctrine for opposite reasons, the former “treating faith as merely acknowledging what God had already done in eternity,” the latter “using eternal justification to guard the purity of grace against any mixture with law.”¹² Chen’s dissertation traces a more direct recurrence in eighteenth-century Scotland: opponents of the book behind the Marrow controversy, in stressing the covenant of grace’s own conditions, “tended toward neonomianism,” against the Marrow men’s own emphasis on the covenant of grace as unconditional and resting on the gospel’s own promises.¹³ Fesko draws a further parallel much later: “for all of his claims to offer a revolutionary understanding of justification, N. T. Wright sounds all too much like Richard Baxter.”¹⁴

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t grounding justification solely in imputation, with nothing left for the believer to do, license the very licentiousness Baxter feared? Fesko’s account of Owen’s answer is that the objection misreads what grounds the imputation. Owen “cuts a careful path between the dangerous poles of antinomianism and neonomianism”: he avoids antinomianism by holding that the believer is in union with Christ, which ensures good works as the fruit of Christ’s indwelling presence, and avoids neonomianism by holding that the believer’s justification and right to eternal life rest on Christ’s imputed righteousness rather than on the believer’s own obedience.¹⁵ Good works are secured as a necessary fruit of the same union that grounds justification, not made unnecessary by it.

Doesn’t Scripture’s own teaching that God “will render to each one according to his works” (Rom. 2:6) support Baxter’s inclusion of works in a believer’s final justification? Owen answers by distinguishing the nature and essence of justification, complete in this life, from its manifestation or public declaration at the final judgment. A believer’s standing before God is settled the moment they believe, with “no formal external evidence of it before the church and the world”; what the final judgment adds is not a second, works-based justification but a public vindication of the first one, “evidenced and declared” by the visible fruit that true faith always produces.¹⁶ For Owen this is “not a second justification,” since it “depends wholly on the visible effects of that faith whereby we are justified,” but “only one single justification before God.”¹⁶

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩
Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Justifying Righteousness, in Two Books (London: Nevil Simons and Jonathan Robinson, 1676), 163, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 30. ↩
Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 29-30. ↩
J. I. Packer, “The Doctrine of Justification in Development and Decline among the Puritans,” in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), 158, quoted in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 30. ↩
J. V. Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” Themelios 37, no. 1 (2012): 16. ↩
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 16. ↩
Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 331-332. ↩
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 8. ↩ ↩²
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 13. ↩
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 14. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩
Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 32-33. ↩
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 19. ↩
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 18. ↩
Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” 15. ↩ ↩²