In Christianity, an antinomian is one who takes the principle of salvation by faith and divine grace to the point of asserting that the saved are not bound to follow the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments.[2][3] The distinction between antinomian and other Christian views on moral law is that antinomians believe that obedience to the law is motivated by an internal principle flowing from belief rather than from any external compulsion.[4]
Examples of antinomians being confronted by the religious establishment include Martin Luther’s critique of antinomianism and the Antinomian Controversy of the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the Lutheran Churches and Methodist Churches, antinomianism is considered a heresy.[5][6]
Outside of Christianity, the tenth-century Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj was accused of antinomianism and the term is also used to describe certain practices or traditions in Buddhism and Hinduism, such as the transgressive aspects of Vajrayana and Hindu Tantra which include sexual elements.[7][8]