Theopedia

Masturbation

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.

— 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5

Masturbation is the act of stimulating one’s own genitals for sexual pleasure, ordinarily apart from a spouse. Scripture never names the practice directly, so its moral evaluation rests on what Scripture says about the desire it typically expresses and the body’s proper use: Jesus locates the sin of adultery in lustful desire itself, prior to any outward act (Matt. 5:27-28), and Paul calls believers to control “his own body in holiness and honor,” not “the passion of lust” (1 Thess. 4:3-5). Reformed writers have generally judged the practice by that same standard: sinful to the degree it expresses forbidden lust.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, like the Westminster Confession before it, has no chapter naming masturbation, and, unlike the Westminster Standards, it includes no commandment-by-commandment exposition of the moral law at all; Particular Baptist catechisms of the period, such as Benjamin Keach’s, followed the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s own structure rather than replacing it.1 The fullest confessional-family statement comes from the Westminster Larger Catechism’s exposition of the seventh commandment, which closes its list of forbidden sins with “all other provocations to, or acts of uncleanness, either in ourselves or others.”2 Thomas Ridgley’s contemporary exposition of the same question explains what the commandment as a whole is guarding: it “respects, more especially, the government of the affections, and the keeping our minds and bodies in such an holy frame, that nothing impure, immodest, or contrary to the strictest chastity, may defile, or be a reproach to us.”3 The catechism’s own phrase, “in ourselves or others,” places a solitary act in the same category of uncleanness as one committed with another person, rather than treating solitary acts as outside the commandment’s reach.

Biblical Basis

No biblical text addresses masturbation by name. The nearest text is Jesus’s own command in the Sermon on the Mount: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matt. 5:29-30), repeated almost verbatim at Matt. 18:8-9. The command follows directly from the verse before it, where Jesus teaches that “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27-28), grounding the doctrine that lust itself, prior to any act, is already sin. What is specific to Matthew 5:29-30 is the further step Jesus takes from the lustful heart to the bodily “hand” that carries the desire out. Craig Keener reads the hand this way, calling it “possibly a reference to masturbation.”4 Gregg Allison goes further, holding that “hand” is itself a euphemism for “onanism,” while D. A. Carson argues it probably names “the male sexual organ” directly.5 Whichever specific reading is right, the interpreters agree that Jesus names an “instrument” by which lust already present in the heart is externalized or carried out, rather than introducing a new, independent sin.5

Paul supplies the positive counterpart. Writing to the Thessalonians, he makes sexual self-control part of sanctification itself: believers are to “know how to control [their] own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:3-5). To the Corinthians he grounds the same call in the body’s own standing before God: “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body,” which is “a temple of the Holy Spirit” bought at a price and owed to God rather than to the self (1 Cor. 6:18-20). Both texts locate the moral question inside the believer’s own body and its use, the same territory masturbation itself occupies.

Objections and Responses

Since Scripture never names masturbation, doesn’t its silence mean the practice is morally neutral? Scripture’s silence about a specific act does not by itself make that act neutral; plenty of specific technologies and practices modern Christians face go unnamed simply because they postdate the biblical writers. The relevant question is instead whether the act is governed by a principle Scripture does state. Here it plainly is: 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5 and 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 both address how a believer uses his own body sexually, and Lust already establishes that Jesus locates the sin of adultery in desire itself, before any outward act completes it. To the degree masturbation is fueled by, and gives expression to, that same forbidden desire, it falls under the same judgment without needing its own separate prohibition.

Does Matthew 5:29-30 really refer to masturbation, or is that reading too specific? The identification of “hand” with masturbation is a real interpretive question, not a settled consensus; Allison’s, Carson’s, and Keener’s readings differ on exactly what the hand names, and Themelios contributor Greg Palys treats the identification as one live possibility among others rather than the passage’s own stated point.5 What the passage secures regardless of that specific identification is Jesus’s own move from the lustful heart to the bodily means by which lust is acted out, and his call to deal “ruthlessly” with whatever functions that way for a given person.6 Palys’s broader argument, that the outer self does not merely reflect inward lust but can also inflame or dampen it, supplies a practical corollary: removing habitual triggers is itself part of fighting the desire, not a separate, merely external matter.6

Isn’t the “sin of Onan” in Genesis 38 a direct biblical condemnation of masturbation? The term “onanism” borrows Onan’s name from Genesis 38:9-10, but Onan’s own recorded offense was refusing the levirate duty he owed his deceased brother’s widow, the same reading behind Contraceptives’s handling of the same passage, not masturbation as such.7 The passage does not settle this question either way, and citing it as though it did overstates what the text itself says.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Alex Charles Scheiderer, “An Eternal Covenant” (PhD diss., 2022), chap. 3, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” discussing Keach’s reliance on the Westminster Confession and Larger Catechism as sources of some authority for Particular Baptists. ↩

  2. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 139. ↩

  3. Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 4, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), 9-10. ↩

  4. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 170, citing Craig Keener. ↩

  5. Greg Palys, “Cut Off Your Hand, Save Your Soul: How the Outer Self Affects the Inner Self in the Fight against Lust,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 150-51. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Palys, “Cut Off Your Hand, Save Your Soul,” 142. ↩ ↩2

  7. Ken Magnuson, “Marriage and Sexuality,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), n. 49. ↩