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Japanese Yes, if the couple is not married, according to the Catholic and Orthodox churches and many Protestant churches. They teach that sex belongs only within marriage and that love, however sincere, does not change this. Within marriage sex is not a sin: Hebrews 13:4 calls the marriage bed “undefiled.”
What does the Bible say about sex outside marriage?
The New Testament’s word for it is porneia, which the English Standard Version translates “sexual immorality” and the King James Version “fornication.” Jesus names it among the evils that come “from within, out of the heart of man,” alongside theft, murder and adultery (Mark 7:21). Paul puts it first in his list of “the works of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19), and the apostles meeting in Jerusalem asked Gentile believers to abstain from it (Acts 15:29). Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). To the Corinthians he wrote: “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18).
Paul speaks to unmarried people directly in 1 Corinthians 7. “Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband” (7:2). To the unmarried and widows he says that remaining single is good, “but if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (7:9). The answer he gives to desire between people who are not married is marriage. Hebrews adds: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4).
The law of Moses treated sex between a man and an unmarried woman as something that created an obligation to marry. “If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife” (Exodus 22:16). If her father refused the marriage, the man still paid (22:17). Adultery, sex with another man’s wife, carried the death penalty for both (Deuteronomy 22:22).
Does the Greek word porneia cover sex between unmarried people?
Scholars have argued about how much the word covers. In 1972 Bruce Malina argued in the journal Novum Testamentum that porneia meant unlawful conduct, which he took to be conduct the Torah forbids, and that “pre-betrothal, pre-marital, non-commercial sexual intercourse between man and woman is nowhere considered a moral crime in the Torah,” so the word did not include it. Joseph Jensen answered with a critique of Malina’s argument in the same journal in 1978. In 2012 Kyle Harper argued in the Journal of Biblical Literature that for Paul, as for other Jews of his time, porneia took in the wide range of sex outside marriage that Greek society tolerated. Paul’s advice to the unmarried in 1 Corinthians 7:9 does not depend on the word: it points them to marriage.
Does being in love change it?
Catholic teaching addresses the question directly. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines fornication as “carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman” and calls it “gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality” (2353). On couples who intend to marry later, it says: “However firm the purpose of those who engage in premature sexual relations may be, ‘the fact is that such liaisons can scarcely ensure mutual sincerity and fidelity in a relationship between a man and a woman, nor, especially, can they protect it from inconstancy of desires or whim.’ Carnal union is morally legitimate only when a definitive community of life between a man and woman has been established” (2391). Engaged couples “should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love” (2350).
The Catechism also explains why a good motive does not settle the matter. It names fornication among the acts “that it is always wrong to choose” (1755), and says that a good intention “does not make behavior that is intrinsically disordered” good or just (1753). It separates the act from the person’s guilt: responsibility “can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors” (1735).
The Orthodox Church in America teaches that “sexual intercourse is to be protected as a sacred expression of love within the community of heterosexual monogamous marriage in which alone it can be that for which God has given it to human beings for their sanctification.” Many Protestant churches say the same in their own terms. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message calls marriage “the channel of sexual expression according to biblical standards,” and the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer says marriage was ordained “for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication.”
Some churches frame the question differently. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s 2009 social statement on sexuality teaches that “degrees of physical intimacy should be carefully matched to degrees of growing affection and commitment,” and that “the greatest sexual intimacies, such as coitus, should be matched with and sheltered both by the highest level of binding commitment and by social and legal protection, such as is found in marriage.” It opposes “non-monogamous, promiscuous, or casual sexual relationships of any kind” and “does not favor cohabitation arrangements outside of marriage,” while noting that “some cohabitation arrangements can be constructed in ways that are neither casual nor intrinsically unstable.”
Is sex a sin in marriage, or for pleasure?
Scripture treats sex within marriage as good. Genesis describes the first couple as “one flesh” who “were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:24–25). Proverbs tells a husband to “rejoice in the wife of your youth” and to “be intoxicated always in her love” (Proverbs 5:18–19), and the Song of Songs is a book of love poetry between a bride and her beloved. Paul tells husbands and wives to give each other their “conjugal rights” and not to deprive one another except by agreement for a time of prayer (1 Corinthians 7:3–5).
Pleasure in marriage is not a sin either. The Catholic Catechism, quoting Pope Pius XII, says that God “established that in the [generative] function, spouses should experience pleasure and enjoyment of body and spirit. Therefore, the spouses do nothing evil in seeking this pleasure and enjoyment” (2362). The Orthodox Church in America teaches that “married couples may express their love in sexual union without always intending the conception of a child.”
Is it a sin to think about sex or feel sexual desire?
Scripture distinguishes desire from sin. James writes that a person “is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin” (James 1:14–15). Jesus locates the sin in deliberate lust: “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The Catechism defines lust as “disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure” (2351). Love itself is not a sin: “love is from God,” says 1 John 4:7.
Can sexual sin be forgiven?
Yes. Paul names the sexually immoral among those who “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” and then tells the Corinthians: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9–11). Catholic and Orthodox Christians confess sins such as sex before marriage in the sacrament of confession.
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