self-control: the power to keep one's own impulses and appetites in hand
The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning "power" and "within," so at root it names power held over oneself. Greek and Hellenistic Jewish moral writers had made this a prized virtue: the mastery of appetite that keeps a person from being ruled by the belly, the wine cup, the bed, the temper, or the purse. In their world it was above all an achievement of trained reason, the mark of the person who has himself in hand.
The New Testament borrows this well-known vocabulary but resets its source. Rather than a triumph of willpower, self-control appears as the last-named fruit of the Spirit (σωφροσύνη is its close cousin, the settled soundness of mind that keeps within right limits). Paul preaches it to a self-indulgent Roman governor alongside righteousness and coming judgment, and Peter sets it in the middle of a chain of virtues that begins in faith and ends in love.
Across its handful of appearances the word keeps one steady sense: the disciplined power to govern one's own desires. It is never in the New Testament a matter of harsh self-denial for its own sake, and it does not single out any one appetite; it is the broad, humane strength of having oneself in hand.
Disputed
Whether New Testament ἐγκράτεια is continuous with the Greek philosophers' self-mastery or transformed into something theologically different.
- majorityThe New Testament shares the vocabulary and much of the content of Greek moral philosophy but relocates self-control within a life shaped by the Spirit and the coming age, changing its grounding without denying the phenomenal likeness.; Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (1989); Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary (1983); Ben Witherington III, Grace in Galatia (1998)
- minorityPaul uses the standard Greek moral-psychological vocabulary in ways continuous with the philosophy of his day, so self-control is essentially the virtue the moralists described.; Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (2000); Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans (1994)
- minorityNew Testament self-control is not a rational achievement at all but the organic fruit of the Spirit in the new creation, discontinuous with Greek self-mastery.; Wolfgang Grundmann, "ἐγκράτεια κτλ.," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 2:339-342; J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, Anchor Yale Bible (1997)