I recommend this post by Justin Taylor, in which he summarizes a blogospheric debate over antinomianism. Read the whole thing.
Jason Hood of CT Online began it by leaning against the notion that accusations of antinomianism are a good litmus test for whether or not you are preaching the gospel of real grace. He is answered thoughtfully by others, who point out that the issue is not whether holiness is optional (obviously it is not), but rather what the engine is that drives the holiness car. The question is how we are to live holy lives, not whether we need to.
This brings us back, as it always ought, to the absolute necessity of the new birth — and not as a doctrine to be affirmed, but an experience to be lived. Unless a man is born again, none of this makes any sense whatever. The unregenerate heart has only two motions it can make — that of trying to climb to God on its own, or trying to run away from God.
The unregenerate heart can understand the holiness of God and flee from Him, or misunderstand it, and try to attain to it on its own. Only the converted heart can see the holiness as gladness, and the gladness as righteousness, and the righteousness as glory, and love all of it. As John Piper has argued concerning 1 Tim. 1:11, we have to have our eyes opened so that we see the gospel of the glory of the gladness of God. Would this really resolve all these issues? Taste and see.
Historic evangelicalism (rightly understood) is therefore not one more sectarian option among many. It is the lived experience of potent grace that actually resolves many of these sectarian conflicts and debates. But it only resolves them when the Spirit is actually moving — codified and abstracted evangelicalism resolves nothing, and a great sermon preached seventy-five years ago, pinned up carefully as a dusty parchment in a museum display case, doesn’t have the same effect it once did. And the empty display case right next to that one, the case containing the Spirit who moves just as He wills, doesn’t attract the visitors it once did. Whenever we open up that display case, it just smells kind of musty.
Outside the museum, the real litmus test, if I may be so bold, is to manage to be accused simultaneously of antinomianism and legalism. When you have gotten to the point where any stick is good enough to beat you with, then you really have something. This is like what one Puritan called the bracing experience of “living in the high mountain air of public calumny.” The legalists think you are a libertine, and the libertines think you are a fusser, and they all say so in loud voices. That’s the ticket.
For many among the contemporary Reformed, a legalist is someone who loves Jesus more than they do, and an antinomian is one who appears to enjoy loving Jesus like that. And if this ever happens on a large scale, it will be a great revival and reformation, recognized as such by the museum curators of the future.