Legalists are under the law and in bondage to it. They imagine that their relationship to God depends on their obedience to the law, and they are seeking to be both justified and sanctified by it. They are crushed by the law’s inability to save them.
Antinomians blame the law for their problems, reject it altogether, and claim to be rid of all obligation to its demands. They have turned liberty into license (i.e., sin).
Christians rejoice in their freedom from the law for justification and sanctification, and in their freedom they fulfill God’s law. They delight in the law as the revelation of God’s will, but recognize that the power to fulfill it is not in the law but in the Spirit.
Legalists fear the law and are in bondage to it. Antinomians hate the law and repudiate it. Christians love the law and fulfill it.
Adapted from The Message of Romans by John Stott, page 191, 192