The first thing to realize before discussing a topic as sensitive as masturbation, especially when coupled with the idea of “murder,” is this: the biblical ethic is an impossible standard. It cannot be achieved perfectly in this life by anyone save One: Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, even if biblical morality is impossible for any particular human being, who is not Jesus Christ, to fulfill in practice, this does not mean the principles of biblical morality can be subsequently abandoned. The principles of God’s moral Law always hold, regardless of who can keep them or not or to what extent they can be kept.
The typical “progressive” Christian move to abandon the moral Law in the face of its severity, is, therefore, not only unbiblical, but is incredibly un-theological. For if God is “the Good,” and if there is a way for human beings to actually be that moves us ever closer to that ontological reality, then the means to moving toward that goal cannot be rejected, nor can the goal be altered. This is in spite of how difficult it may be to follow those means and regardless of how distant the goal may seem.
The Christian life is, therefore, inherently one of striving toward an end. We do not strive alone, however. We progress with and by the grace of God as given us through the Spirit of God (Rom 5:5). Nevertheless, in this world, there is always a dynamic at play of: “moral attempt-failure-repentance-renewed moral attempt-hard won transformation.” Not unlike in some Eastern religions, the Christian “journey” is in some way its own end. It is not a journey without an end, since the chief end of man is God. However, if the end of man is an infinite God, then the journey into God’s divine Being is also, in some sense, never-ending.
Unfortunately, as our culture has abandoned nearly all of the specific moral commands of the Bible in favor of a generic Christian “feel” about morality, it may seem to some Christians who consider themselves “conservative,” as if they are actually very close to the biblical moral standard. However, that would be a false presumption. “Conservative” Christians, myself included, are really only conservative in relation to how progressive and unbiblical the culture has become.
Thus, the average “conservative” thinks that so long as they do not have sex outside of marriage (fornication), they are upholding the entirety of the biblical law on sexual ethics. They would, unfortunately, only be partially correct. There is more to sexual morality than only remaining chaste up to the day of one’s marriage (which even few “conservative” Christians achieve these days). This is not meant to discourage those Christians who genuinely long to love God with all their “heart, soul, mind and strength.” Still, it is to say that, in this life, for every moral victory won, and for every step in the overall transformation of the soul toward Christ-likeness, a new set of moral challenges emerges.
The Sin of Onan
One of the hard, moral injunctions the Bible imposes upon us is represented in Genesis 38:8-10. In this story, Onan, Judah’s younger son, refuses to carry out the act of Levirate marriage. This act entailed having intercourse with his brother Er’s wife so as to procreate and carry on the line of Er. According to Shulchan Aruch, Even HaEzer 23,(Code of Jewish Law), this failure of Onan to carry out the act of Levirate marriage is more than just the disregarding of a social convention, it is akin to murder:
Those who ‘commit adultery’ with their hand and thereby cause semen to be spilled it is not enough that this is a great prohibition, but one who does so should sit in excommunication and about them it is said ‘There hands are full of blood’ and it is as if they have killed a person.
The sephardic canon of Jewish halachic rulings goes even further, speaking about the inner workings of masturbatory imagination:
It is forbidden for a man intentionally make himself have an erection or to cause himself to think about sex. Rather if he thinks about sex he should remove himself from vain things and go to the words of Torah which is like a beloved doe and a graceful deer.
These moral adjudications about Onan’s act of coitus interruptus are not without historical contention. Other Jewish traditions view Onan’s sin as merely a breaking of God’s command to procreate for the sake of carrying on Er’s lineage. These other traditions do not necessarily see Onan’s “contraceptive” act as itself immoral, more the context in which it was carried out. For these minority traditions, and they are the minority, Onan’s sin is merely a sin of omission. It is failing to do something he should have done.
However, the stronger evidence and great bulk of the Jewish tradition, especially given that the Onan incident occurs chronologically before the giving of the Mosaic laws, suggest that there is a deeper reason for Onan’s act being sinful than just the failure to execute this particular legal command on this particular occasion. There is something, as the Shulchan Aruch text clearly indicates, metaphysically problematic with spilling one’s seed in such a way that procreation cannot possibly occur. Onan did something detestable to the Lord (v.10), and he paid the ultimate price for doing so. Rarely, if ever, do sins of omission warrant death in the Bible. It is not not worshipping Yahweh that brings divine punishment on Israel, it is actively worshipping other gods that demands divine chastisement.
The Shulchan continues to explicate in vivid detail warnings against masturbation:
It is forbidden for a man who is not married to touch his private parts so that he doesn’t come to have a sexual thought. And he may not even touch anywhere under his belly button lest he have a sexual thought. And when he urinates he should not hold his member and urinate. But if he is married this is permitted. And whether married or unmarried he shouldn’t put his hand on his member at all except when he must relive himself.
In sum, according to the most widely accepted tradition of Jewish law, masturbation is undoubtedly sinful. Moreover, the command from the Decalogue that it most likely relates to is the 6th commandment: “Thou shall not murder.” Of course, it is not murder in the strictest sense. It is, as the Shulchan suggests, proleptic murder. The strongest biblical evidence for this is the consequence that Onan reaps for his action, for God “slew him, because he did a detestable thing” (Get 38:10). The punishment for breaking levirate marriage is not death (Deut 25:5-11). The death penalty is meted out only when one has murdered another human person, for “from each human being, too, I [the LORD] will demand an accounting for the life of another human being” (Gen 9:5b-6).
All the early Church Fathers and Reformers too were unanimous on the issue of masturbatory acts (or any act of sexual intercourse not open to procreation). Calvin sums up the sin of Onan this way:
The purposeful spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Purposely withdrawing from coitus, so that the seed drops on the ground, is twice as horrific. For this is to extinguish the hope of the human family and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring. This wickedness is here condemned by the Spirit in the most severe manner possible….Onan rightfully incurred upon himself the same kind of punishment.
In a powerful article that demonstrates the futility of contemporary, rationalizing arguments for contraception, James A. Altena comments on the connection between any form of contraception and the sixth commandment:
A synecdochal reflection upon the Commandments makes comprehensible the seemingly extreme assertion of Calvin and allied older theologians that the practice of contraception is a species of murder. Few would now defend the proposition that a merely hypothetical being can properly be said to be an actual object of murder. But since procreation is by divine intention and design the fundamental and irreducible purpose of marital coition, such a reflection shows that the use of contraception in fact violates several of the Commandments…the Sixth, by willfully frustrating the generation of new life and thus disobeying the creation ordinance to be fruitful and multiply.
James Altena, “Contraceptive Cons” in Touchstone Jan/Feb 2023
Onan’s sin counts as murder because it is an intentional (premeditated?) cancellation of potential human life. But, biblically speaking, even potential human life is endowed with sacred dignity, thus making it morally equivalent to actual human existence.
Jesus’ Moral Upgrade
Although Jesus does not explicitly mention many sexual sins (something Progressive Christians try to exploit at every turn), His overall approach to the moral law is to upgrade the standard, not mitigate the Law’s severity. This upgrading of the requirements of God’s moral law is most obvious in the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew 5-7. The reason for this is made clear at the beginning of the sermon, when Christ tells His Jewish audience He has come “not to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17).
Given Jesus’ intensification of the moral law, when it comes to adultery, for example, it is not only that an actual act of adultery is sinful in light of God’s moral law and harmful to one’s neighbor. It is the very thought of acting adulterously, i.e., with lust for another not one’s wife, that is condemnable (Matt 5:27-28). Of course, Jesus’ upgrade of the moral law is not that much of an upgrade from the Jewish sense of the law. The Jews were well aware that the thought life of the person increased or decreased the likelihood of immoral action. Thus, to guard one’s heart was to practice purity not just in outward behavior, but in the inward life of the mind (Proverbs 4:23).
And so Jesus’ focus on the inner life was not something that would have been all that shocking to His contemporaries. What was shocking to them was the authority He displayed in His teaching, and ultimately His self-identification as the Son of God. However, to sum up Jesus’ attitude toward the moral law, Jesus reaffirms and intensifies the idea that one’s inner life, one’s imaginations and motivations, are as important to godliness as one’s outward actions, perhaps even more so. If Jesus thought that lustful thoughts alone were akin to actually committing adultery with a woman not one’s wife, then the inference to masturbation being sinful is hardly a stretch, especially considering what almost by necessity must go through the mind of a person who intends to carry out a masturbatory act.
The Most Hated Doctrines of Christianity
Since the early modern era, the most hated doctrines of Christianity have had little to do with abstract, metaphysical issues, like the nature of the Trinity, or the hypostatic union of the Godman. That does not mean these haven’t been fervently debated among scholars, theologians and even the public in recent times. However, when it comes to doctrines of the Church that evoke genuine scorn and mockery, it is the moral laws surrounding sexuality that bring out the worst in us.
Since the days of the Romantic poets to the 1970’s “The Romantics” (the rock band), the sexual ethics of the Jews and of the Jewish Jesus have been the great foe of modern and post-modern man and woman. All forms of social and political progressivism entail an explicit rejection of Jewish sexual ethics. There is no exception to this rule. It is foundational to every type of ideological progressivism. That being the case, the reaction by many in culture to Christian sexual ethics is inevitably a negative one.
Writing about the sin of Onan, Brian Harrison, former chairman of the theology department at the Pontifical University in Puerto Rico, points out the general, cultural mood when it comes to issues like masturbation:
“Onanism,” the term derived from Genesis 38:9-10 which in traditional Christian usage has designated both masturbation and unnatural intercourse between a man and woman, is not exactly a pleasant theme to write about. And in a sense, that fact itself is the short answer to those who claim that these sorts of acts are ethically indifferent or innocent. In other words, the spontaneous negative emotional reaction of ordinary, decent people to such practices is really a “message” from the God who speaks to us in the still, small voice of our moral conscience.
This was written in 1993. In the last 30 years the “spontaneous negative emotional reaction(s)” toward topics like masturbation or unnatural intercourse have only become more loathsome to the general public. Yet this loathing of biblical, sexual morality persists in spite of the obvious, social consequences the attitude itself engenders: an endemic of broken homes, the plague of fatherlessness, the devastation of abortion, campus “rape culture,” porn addiction and, worst of all, an almost incurable sense of loneliness and isolation. We ignore the maladies surrounding the transgression of God’s purposes for sex and marriage because we want what we want. We hate these teachings of Jesus so much, we could care less about the harm that neglecting them may cause.
Trying To “Get Around” Sexual Morality
Of course, the modern attempt to get around the immorality of acts like masturbation, is to make the typical, social theory assertion that any and all feelings associated with masturbation, or any other sexual sin– feelings usually of guilt and disgust at one’s own thoughts and acts– are nothing but socially constructed impositions placed upon the social psyche by religion. This idea, one of history’s greatest rationalizations, is the most virulent intellectual disease of contemporary, western culture.
The assumption here is that if there were no Christianity, if not one Christian was left alive, then all these socially constructed moral attitudes and their accompanying feelings would simply dissolve into the ether of history. But this is a gross error. For even if the last Christian on earth was eliminated, and every Bible burned or erased from the world’s memory banks, Christianity would once again emerge. Not only because God would see to it that out of unbelief belief would come, but because non-believers would, as the ancient pagans foresaw, begin to see the need for Christianity given their understanding of reality. Guilt and shame are not fabrications of some powerful and conspiratorial political and historically contingent entity. They are part of the reality that all religions confront and try to answer and that Christianity confronts and answers completely.
With regard to the reality of masturbation in particular, Harrison sums this up quite well:
Now, since the “progressive elites deny that there are any convincing objections to masturbation based on reason or the natural moral law, they try to ascribe this widespread popular “stigma” against the practice to purely fortuitous external influences: that is, to “social conditioning” or “brainwashing” originating with Christian moralists…. But the truth is exactly the reverse. What has to be manufactured artificially by external social conditioning is not the belief that masturbation is bad or self-degrading, but the belief that it is good and natural.
That is to say, the experience of repugnance and/or guilt in response to the perversion of self-induced orgasm is the natural, reasonable, and profoundly human reaction of anyone whose moral conscience has not yet been anaesthetized by decadent cultural influences or habitual lewd behavior, and who is old enough to understand what the sexual organs are naturally designed for: loving and potentially procreative union with a person of the opposite sex.
Harrison, “The Sin of Onan Revisited,” emphasis in the original
Conclusion: Masturbation Is Not (Quite) Murder, Still…
In conclusion, I would not say that masturbation is murder. However, it is related to the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not murder.” It is the prevention of life, not a criminal act per se, but certainly an immoral one. It is immoral because it settles for something that is not best for man. It is immoral because it violates the purpose of a part of God’s creation, perhaps the most important part of it after the soul itself. After all, it is through semen and ovum that new souls begin to exist.
Minimally, just bringing up the issue of masturbation would hopefully instigate in some contemporary minds the seriousness of life and all its aspects. This is the main sin of contemporary man: in His rejection of the Creator man does not elevate the creation, he demotes it. Man demotes the value of the creation, and then exchanges the holy and living God for a piece of His creation that man has already devalued. And so semen becomes nothing more than male goo that can be spilled this way or that. It simply doesn’t matter, because it is no longer valued as the source of human life. It is just stuff.
Hence, the next time you begin to fantasize about a woman who, if she knew what was going through your head would have you arrested, or about a man who would likely not have you arrested, but would leave you in your loneliness the second his semen was spilled, take the time to think about the moral law of God. As difficult as it may seem, it is for your benefit to consider it. It is for your good to think deeply on it. And, should God give the grace, it is for your triumph to fight for it.
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