John Piper is Wrong About Masturbation

Mindy:        Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s my masturbating time.

Eleanor:      When isn’t it?

The Good Place S1 E12, ‘Mindy St. Claire’ (2017)

 

All right, not my cleverest cover picture ever, but I challenge you to think of an appropriate one for a post like this.

Well, with a title like that, I should probably kick off by clarifying that there are a heck of a lot of things I think John Piper is thoroughly, and thoroughly helpfully, right about. He’s pretty undeniably a very astute and very godly chap, and I’m as much of a Desiring God article junkie as any evangelical of my age. I draw attention to this issue, then, not as an example of the common pattern but as a notable exception to it. Nor is Mr. Piper by any means the only one to hold the view he does on this topic, but given that he’s articulated said view very neatly on a very influential platform, that seemed a good place to start.

This is what John Piper says about masturbation:

Is masturbation wrong? Let me address the issue mainly for men. I cannot imagine sexual orgasm in the loins without sexual image in the mind. I know there are nocturnal emissions, which I regard as innocent and helpful, but I doubt that they are ever orgasmic apart from a sexual dream that supplies the necessary image in the mind. Evidently God has constituted the connection between sexual orgasm and sexual thought in such a way that the force and pleasure of orgasm is dependent on the thought or images in our minds.

Therefore, in order to masturbate, it is necessary to get vivid and exciting thoughts or images into the mind. This can be done by pure imagination or by pictures or movies or stories or real persons. These images involve women as sexual objects. I use the word “object” because in order for a woman to be a true sexual “subject” in our imagination she must in reality be one with whom we are experiencing what we are imagining. This is not the case with masturbation.

So I vote no on masturbation. There may be other reasons why it is wrong. For now I rest my vote on the inevitable sexual images which accompany masturbation and which turn women into sexual objects. The sexual thoughts that enable masturbation do not help any man to treat women with greater respect. Therefore masturbation produces real and legitimate guilt and stands in the way of obedience.¹

All right, he’s talking about men. And maybe, if I were to meet with an onslaught of evidence of sufficient volume and reliability demonstrating that his claim is true of men, I might be prepared to believe it. But I can tell you right now that it’s not true of women. At least not this woman, nor others she knows.

I’ve said before that the world’s label for the form in which my sexual inclinations tend to manifest is ‘demisexual’.² Long story short, nobody in the entire world is romantically appealing to me until we’ve had a lot of conversations about things that matter and he’s shown that he gets me. Erōs, for me, is conditional on philia; the pink heart of the Sims 2 relationships panel (‘crush’) is conditional on the double green smiley faces (‘best friend’).³ Anybody who falls outside that parameter is automatically unattractive; so, due to other reasons, are many who fall inside it, and so right now, there’s nobody at all whom I actually fancy. But that’s not to say I don’t have a sex drive. I want to have sex; I just don’t want to have sex with anyone specific.

Now, on one level, this makes me really lucky, because there are some kinds of sexual temptation that are just not even on my radar: I’m never going to be tempted to sleep around or have a one-night stand or even to entertain lustful thoughts about some celebrity or other. On another level, though, you can probably see the natural conclusion towards which my natural inclinations incline. Masturbation is an ideal solution to the demisexual problem, precisely because it does not require the reference point of any particular individual. For the demisexual, it is perfectly possible to achieve sexual pleasure in the loins without a sexual image in the mind, and in actual fact, the introduction of any specific image or character into the imagination would rather ruin the whole thing. Envisioning romantic contact with a particular individual human is weird and gross and unpleasant; masturbation is tempting because it’s a site of sexual satisfaction that’s free from the need for romantic contact with a particular individual human, real or imagined.

And in this way, John Piper’s entire argument about why masturbation is wrong collapses to the ground with one blow. Leaving … well, leaving what, exactly? If we’ve nullified the one reason we had to call masturbation a sin, can we even be sure that it is?

I once had a lengthy conversation in a pub with a Christian who reckoned it wasn’t.⁴ If I remember rightly, she appealed to Matthew 5:28, the bit about how looking at a woman lustfully counts as committing adultery with her. Based on that principle, she argued, the sinful thing about lust is that it’s an offence against its object; the object of a lustful thought has not consented, cannot consent, and if what takes place in the mind is to be reckoned as if it had taken place in reality (a sobering thought, to be sure), that makes lust essentially a kind of mental sexual assault. Masturbation is different, she continued. It’s not any kind of attack on anyone else, but rather a way of getting to know your own body, which is important for people – in particular women – to feel able to do, especially since things of a bodily and sexual nature – in particular of a female bodily and sexual nature – have often been disdained as sordid and taboo in the past.⁵

There was much there that I was ready to agree with. The point about Matthew 5:28 and the nature of lust rang true. I certainly concur that historic suppression and contempt of female sexuality is something to be resisted. But instinctually, the conclusion that masturbation isn’t wrong didn’t sit right with me. I needed to give the matter more thought.

Of a certainty, the sin of masturbation is not lust. Lust is an offence against its object; masturbation requires no object and so entails no such offence. But still, if we’re arguing that the proper context for sex is between a man and a woman as husband and wife, then masturbation does still take sex out of its proper context.

Because of this a person shall leave behind father and mother and adhere to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, and I say (this) with regard to Christ and the Church.

Classic bit of Ephesians 5 quoting Genesis 2 there.⁶ The ‘one flesh’ thing is clearly about sex, and what Paul then says is that marriage and sex (which is, ultimately, the one thing that distinguishes marriage from any other sort of relationship) are a ‘mystery’ representative of Christ and the Church. By calling it a ‘mystery’ he tells us that we’re dealing with something with a hidden meaning: a metaphor or type whose true significance is only known by divine revelation.⁷ Marriage, and marital sex, is a type of the relationship between Christ and the Church, an imperfect prototype or preview, a picture or stage-play of the real thing. For this reason, to engage in sexual activity of any sort outside that context is to break the type. And God is really not happy about people breaking types, even when they don’t understand them. Take a look at Numbers 20:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Take the staff, and gather the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock, before their eyes, and it shall give its water. And you shall bring out for them water from the rock, and give drink to the congregation and their cattle. And Moses took the staff from before the LORD, as he commanded him. And Moses and Aaron gathered the gathering before the rock, and he said to them: Hear now, O rebels; from this rock shall we bring out for you water? And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and much water came out, and the congregation drank, and their cattle. And the LORD said to Moses and to Aaron: Because you did not believe in me, to hallow me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this gathering into the land which I have given them.⁸

Note the deliberate placing of ‘as he commanded him’ after Moses took the staff, not after he rebuked the people and struck the rock twice; the latter actions don’t come under the category of ‘as he commanded him’. And we know that disboedience in itself warrants severe punishment – but blimey, isn’t it striking that this episode is the one on whose account Moses and Aaron (both of them; the second-person verbs here are plural) are excluded from entering the Promised Land? And indeed, it continues to be mentioned as such until their deaths. You’d have thought that if anything was going to get Aaron banned from the land, it would have been that whole golden calf business back in Exodus 32, but no: it was this. Why such a big deal?

Well, in 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul explicitly identifies the rock from which the people drank in the desert – ‘the spiritual rock following them’ – as Christ.⁹ The rock was a type of Jesus. And by the time we get to Numbers 20, we’ve already had one episode where the rock was struck to bring forth water,¹⁰ just as Jesus was struck once for all the sins of his people and brought forth streams of living water welling up to eternal life.¹¹ That time, God told Moses to strike the rock. This time, he told him only to speak to it. Because in terms of the typology, to strike it again was to re-crucify Christ. Moses and Aaron wouldn’t have been aware of the type, but in disobeying God they broke it, and the punishment was severe.

Returning to the matter at hand, then, I very much suspect that one reason why the Torah prescribes such severe punishments for sexual sin is because sexual activity outside the proper paradigm amounts to type-breaking. There may be other sins involved, sins of lust or theft or betrayal, but even if none of those necessarily apply in the case of masturbation, the issue of type-breaking does. Marital sex is a type of Christ and the Church; to pursue sexual pleasure in the absence of an appropriate partner, then, is, in terms of the typology, to sever Christ from his bride, to demand the blessings brought about by the union while spurning the union itself, to throw aside the hope we have of being with our Lord as his beloved forever and ever.

Is it really as significant, as terrible, as all that? I think so. Then again, I think most sins are more significant and more terrible than we generally realise. And if this is an area in which you’re struggling, O righteous and much-beloved sister or brother in Christ, I say this not to condemn you but to provoke you to fight. The stakes are too high to drift into complacency. Tell somebody about the nature of the temptation you’re battling; get that person to check up on you as often as need be. Set boundaries to avoid tempting scenarios, if you can. Most importantly, pray and pray and pray, because it’s God who achieves your sanctification; you stand no chance in your own strength. (God knows I’ve learned that from experience as well as from scripture.) And preach the gospel to your weak and battle-bruised soul, that God gives strength to stand and grace should we fall, that Jesus was struck once for all and has once for all purified us from all our sins, that all transgressions shall be forgiven human beings provided they acknowledge the power by which Jesus achieved what he did¹² – and that that same power now dwells in us to enable us to live holy lives. You’re not alone, and you’re never too far tainted for forgiveness to find you; and you’ve been freed from your slavery to sin, and by grace through faith you’ve been made capable of conquering and killing your former captor.

John Piper is wrong about masturbation. The sin of masturbation isn’t lust, much as it’s possible that lust and indeed any number of other sins might be involved in it; the sin of masturbation is type-breaking. We are blessed that the mystery, the hidden meaning, of marriage and sex has been revealed to us; let’s strive to treat that mystery with the reverence due it, rather than twisting and breaking it for the indulgence of our flesh. In this as in all sins, adelphoi, confess to your comrades, rely on your Captain, and fight.

Footnotes

¹ What I’ve quoted constitutes most of the article, but if you want the introduction and conclusion as well, here it is: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/missions-and-masturbation.

² See ‘More Conversations with my Internal Hopeless Romantic’, under May 2018 in my blog archive.

³ If I seem to be spouting gibberish at this point, ‘The Sims 2 and C. S. Lewis on Friendship’, under September 2017 in my blog archive, should help to clarify.

⁴ Said Christian blogs at Christians for Feminism, https://christiansforfeminism.wordpress.com/. I don’t agree with everything on there, of course (not a blog exists that I agree with everything on, even my own), but it’s definitely worth a bit of your time. Try ‘Queen Vashti and the Power of Women’, from August 2017, to kick off.

⁵ Sincere apologies are due if I have misrepresented my colloquary’s position in any way. The conversation was some time ago and, you know, I wasn’t taking notes.

⁶ Do check it out in context: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+5&version=ESVUK.

⁷ The complete list of instances of the word ‘mystery’ in the New Testament, for your perusal and conclusion-forming: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=SBLG|strong=G3466&options=GVUVNH&display=INTERLEAVED.

⁸ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=num+20&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Again, whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+10&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ Back in Exodus 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ex+17&version=ESVUK. That took place at Rephidim, which was then nicknamed Massah and Meribah; the events of Numbers 20 took place at somewhere called Meribah. Same place? Same rock? Surely it must be.

¹¹ I here allude to John 4:14.

¹² And I here allude to Mark 3:28-30.

Without Reward: Further Thoughts on The Good Place

“Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis.”

Doctor Who S10 E6, ‘Extremis’ (2017)

 

Medals. A reward for some achievement for other, I imagine.

I begin this post by informing you of the threat of impending spoilers. A common enough occurrence on my blog, you might remark, and entirely fairly, but this instance is a little different to usual, in that the threat operates on two levels. On one level, you my dear and cherished reader are threatened that, if you continue reading past the end of this sentence, you’ll encounter an outline of some of the major events of the recent third series of Netflix’s The Good Place, which I anticipate might cause you some distress if you’re not yet all caught up with said recent third series.¹ On another level, when, in the fourth episode of the series, the Brainy Bunch stumbled upon Michael and Janet operating an interdimensional portal, they were threatened that, if they kept pushing for a plausible explanation to the point where Michael and Janet saw no option but to resort to the truth, they would encounter an outline of some of the major operating principles of the afterlife, which would unavoidably end up causing them a very great deal of distress indeed.

The Brainy Bunch is a collective title adopted by our heroes Eleanor Shellstrop, Chidi Anagonye, Tahani al-Jamil, and Jason Mendoza, who by this point have all died; been sent to the Bad Place; blown holes in Michael’s experimental torture method of getting dead humans to torture one another (rather than he and his fellow demons doing all the work themselves), a feat they achieved mainly by becoming better people (and therefore less deserving of being sentenced to the Bad Place) as a result of their interactions with one another, and then by persuading Michael that he really ought to be on their side; and then had Michael interfere with their timelines so that they never died in the first place and don’t remember any of that, in order that he might conduct a new experiment into whether humans are capable of moral improvement if granted more time.² Whew. So right now, they’re totally ignorant of the rules about needing to accrue a certain number of ‘points’ by performing good deeds while alive in order to snag a spot in the Good Place afterwards – but they’ve seen and heard enough that it simply doesn’t seem possible to keep things that way for long.

“Michael, they’ve seen through the door into the afterlife, and they’ve heard how it works,” Janet counsels Michael, out of earshot of the increasingly suspicious Brainy Bunch. “It’s over.”

“Ah.” Michael spends a couple of seconds taking this in and composing himself, then resigns himself to the necessary task. “Fine.” He turns to address the Brainy Bunch. “I guess I’ll start at the beginning: you all died.”

Time elapses as he explains, or so we gather from the ensuing shot of the exterior of the building. When we return to the scene indoors, our heroes are looking rather stunned. The first we hear speak is Eleanor: “Well, this sucks.”

Chidi, pacing nearby, is next: “So, to sum up, there is a heaven and hell. We’ve been to hell, and now, no matter how good we are for the rest of our lives, we’re going back to hell.”

“Again, it’s not the classic Christian hell,” Michael replies – which rather makes one wonder what ‘the classic Christian hell’ is imagined to be in the mind of the viewer, but regardless³ – “but that’s the gist, yes. As soon as you learned about the afterlife, your motivation to be good was corrupted, so you can’t earn points any more. So sorry for eternally dooming you.”

“And that’s our bad, guys,” interjects Janet helpfully.

So you see what I mean about the Brainy Bunch being threatened with spoilers of a dramatically more grievous nature than any you’ve met in my blog: their knowledge of these spoilers is nothing less than a sentence to everlasting damnation. The principle is that as soon as someone knows that her good deeds in this life are stacking up points to win her a pleasant experience in the next one, she is no longer capable of performing any truly good deed. Her motivations, as Michael puts it, have been corrupted: she would, inevitably, be doing good in order to gain something nice for herself, rather than to help others. And goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Virtue is only virtue in extremis – without reward.⁴ Right?

But if it were true that doing good in expectation of a reward renders that good no good at all, why on earth would our Lord repeatedly tell us in no uncertain terms that we can expect rewards in the next life for righteousness in this one?

Rejoice when others hate and persecute and tell horrible lies about you for my sake, he says, for your reward is great in heaven. Do more than love those who love you, he says, for if you do merely that, what reward do you have? Give in secret, and pray in secret, and fast in secret, he says, for in each case, your Father who sees in secret will reward you. He tells us to lay up treasure in heaven for ourselves, and so prove that it’s to heaven that our hearts belong. He tells us to love our enemies, and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return, and our reward will be great. And the same tune is taken up in the letters the first apostles wrote under inspiration of his Spirit: if what one has built on Christ the foundation survives trial by fire in the day of the Lord, he will receive a reward; we’re to watch ourselves, that we might lose nothing, but win a full reward; we’re to carry out work heartily, as for the Lord, knowing that from the Lord we will receive the inheritance as our reward.⁵

It’s the exact opposite of the The Good Place view. Far from concealing from us the fact that righteous deeds will be rewarded in heaven lest our motivations be corrupted, the Bible actively encourages us to let the expectation of a heavenly reward prompt us to do good. Indeed, the implication here goes beyond merely confirming that one can, after all, receive the reward for one’s righteous deeds despite knowing that that reward was coming; it goes so far as to suggest that one must know that the reward for one’s righteous deeds is coming in order to receive it. And indeed, to push that point a bit harder, we know that whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.⁶

The issue at hand, then, actually turns out not to be so much the precise justification behind this good deed or that, but rather what one believes about the character of God. Is God just? Does he value and recognise righteousness? Well, yes he does – and so, inkeeping with that, he must give fitting rewards to those who seek to obey him. Expecting to be rewarded for good deeds isn’t a corrupt motivation: it’s an expression of faith in the fact that God is good and righteous. To do good without expecting reward, meanwhile, would be to suppose that God can’t be relied upon to render justice, and hence to impugn his character.

It’s something of a counterintuitive idea, and so I’m keen to rein it in with a couple of clarifications. First off, it does nullify a good deed to perform it in anticipation of a reward from other humans; Jesus was very clear that if one does good before others in order to be praised by them, that’s all the reward one’s going to get.⁷ If that’s what’s going on, the point about the character of God doesn’t come into it. Under this principle, it’s to some degree valid for The Good Place to talk about corrupt motivations and so forth, because in that imagined universe, God as he is in the real world isn’t a thing; there isn’t an ultimately good and just Judge whose perfect character one can unfairly impugn.⁸

Second, none of us is, in her natural state, capable of performing a truly good deed worthy of heavenly reward. Man is born spiritually dead and enslaved to sin; every inclination of his heart is only evil all the time; there is none who does good, not even one.⁹ But Jesus, when, for the joy set before him¹⁰ – for the sake of obtaining his own reward, justly due him from his Father’s hand for his perfect righteousness – when for that he endured the cross, he swapped our sinfulness for his righteousness and bore the full punishment for the former, cancelling every debt of sin; and that means that, if we’re trusting in him, our nature has been changed, and we are now capable of good. We are now capable of such good as justly earns a heavenly reward. If that weren’t so, what would be the point of Jesus encouraging us to conduct ourselves in such a manner as to obtain one?

It’s not just that goodness can still be goodness if it anticipates a reward; beyond that, goodness is not truly goodness, not goodness by God’s standards, if it doesn’t anticipate a reward. In order to be counted good, it’s necessary to believe in the ultimate goodness of God who is the judge and measure of all goodness – and an ultimately good God cannot but reward goodness as it deserves. But thank God that his goodness goes beyond rendering to us what we deserve, even as far as giving up his beloved Son, the only truly good human being who ever lived, to the punishment that we in our utter lack of goodness deserved, in order that we might be made good, even as good as he is – and share in the reward he justly earned by that goodness.

Footnotes

¹ If you want to get up to speed quickly now, here it is: https://www.netflix.com/title/80113701.

² I wrote about some of those earlier events of the serial in ‘For the Eleanor Shellstrops of This World’, in January of this year.

³ The English word ‘hell’ is used to translate three different Greek terms in the ESV translation of the New Testament: Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus. Not my strongest theological suit, I’ll admit, but I’m pretty sure those are not all the same thing.

⁴ ‘Extremis’ was a cracking episode: Moffat being clever without being too clever, you know? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rydyk/doctor-who-series-10-6-extremis

⁵ Oh crikey, here come the references … Matthew 5:11-12, 44-46; 6:3-4, 6, 17-18, 19-20; Luke 6:35; 1 Corinthians 3:11-14; 2 John 1:8; Colossians 3:23-34. Here’s the Matthew to get you started: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+5&version=ESVUK.

⁶ And that’s out of Hebrews 11: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=heb+11&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Check Matthew 6; just click once to the right from the link two footnotes up.

⁸ On the contrary, our heroes were at one stage genuinely entertaining the possibility that the judge of the universe was literally a burrito. It’s not exactly what you’d call weighty viewing.

⁹ You’re looking at Genesis 6 and Romans 3 and, oh, I don’t know, like, the whole Bible, basically.

¹⁰ A phrase out of Hebrews 12:2. Fancy a beautiful track by Pas Neos that takes it as its title? Yes, yes you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G3lWQFNkf8.