The Antinomian Dispute and the Formula of Concord

The distinction did not settle into confessional form without a fight inside the Reformation itself. In the late 1520s and again in the late 1530s, the Wittenberg reformer Johannes Agricola argued that the law had no proper place in preaching to Christians at all, that repentance should be worked by the gospel's kindness alone rather than the law's accusation, since believers under grace were no longer under the law in any sense that mattered for the pulpit. Luther and Melanchthon opposed him sharply, writing against what came to be called the antinomian controversy, on the grounds that a believer remains simultaneously righteous and sinner in this life and so still needs the law's accusation to drive them back to the gospel daily, not merely once at conversion.

The dispute outlived Luther and was addressed formally in the Formula of Concord of 1577, whose fifth article restates the law and gospel distinction as confessional doctrine and whose sixth takes up the disputed question of whether the law has any further use for the regenerate. Lutheran and Reformed confessions diverge at exactly this point: Reformed theology generally affirms a robust third use of the law, guiding the Christian's ongoing obedience, while Lutheran confessional writing accepts a third use in a narrower, more contested key, wary of letting law and gospel blur back into the single conditional message the Reformation had set out to break apart.