Both are true, of course, but in very different ways. After all, to live in love for God and man is a very difficult thing. Anyone who has tried it knows how difficult it is. Paul perhaps has special reasons to head off an antinomian misunderstanding of his emphasis on justification by faith and not by works, or, which is the same thing, justification by Christ s righteousness and not our own, or justification by grace and not by our own effort. First, almost certainly the judaizers were charging that Paul s rejection of the law as necessary for salvation would lead to lawlessness and corrupt living.
People always object to justification by faith on that ground.
Indeed, the new Roman Catholics object to it on precisely that ground today. The problem with that objection, among others, of course, is that Paul himself teaches that people would object to his doctrine of justification precisely on that ground , that it seemed to undermine moral living. But, surely, that means that if one s doctrine of justification is not subject to that objection it is not Paul s doctrine and it is not the Bible s doctrine. The problem with the RC doctrine of justification by faith, looked at from this vantage point, is that no one would ever imagine objecting to it on the ground that it encouraged loose living. Second, Paul s teaching about justification was a particularly dangerous teaching, however necessary, in a culture that was as morally corrupt and lawless as was the culture of these Gentile Christians, the culture from which they had come, and in which they still lived.