This is Your Conscience (part 1)

NPR reported this week that the Trump administration would be protecting health care workers in conflicts arising from matters of conscience or religious objection. I was relieved to hear this, but not everyone has been so excited. Since some find this move alarming, I thought it would be a good time to revisit my teaching notes from a Sunday School series on the conscience.

“To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” – Martin Luther

Historically, the conscience has been a fair-weather friend of the Christian faith. Conscience has been a powerful tool at times for showing people that Jesus provides a better way than how they have been living. But the conscience has also been used to judge Christianity and condemn it by modern or postmodern norms.

The conscience even played a pivotal role in the Protestant Reformation, where it is said that Luther cited conscience as a reason for dissent. Depending on how you feel about Reformation history, you may have mixed feelings about that one.

But what is the conscience? And how should we approach it? Is it always right? Can it be changed? Is obedience optional? Mandatory?

While I hope to dig into some of the secular literature during this study, I’m going to focus on what the Bible says. I believe the Bible is God’s word, and what it says bears His authority because He said it. And surprisingly He actually has a lot of things to say about the conscience.

But for today: definitions.

First of all, the conscience is a part of you. It’s your moral sense. Just like most people have a sense of sight to receive and process visual data or a sense of touch to receive and process tactile sensations, so you have this moral sense to receive and process moral data. And just like the other senses of the body, it may be missing or defective.

There are two basic stories about the conscience that I want to consider, and both have kind of a good news/bad news quality.

The first is what I’m going to call the Christian view, the traditional view stated through the framework of Creation-Fall-Redemption.

1. Mankind was created in the image of God, and because God is a good (moral) God, that includes a moral sense. It is one of the many facets of our humanity, and it was good and beautiful (and I have to imagine never wrong).
2. But in the Fall, every facet of our humanity was corrupted by sin. Our reason is prone to error, our desires misguided, and our conscience knocked out of alignment. It often fails to warn us when we’re wrong, and we often fail to listen when it’s right.
3. In becoming one of us, dying on the cross, and rising again, Jesus paid for the sins of our broken consciences. Those who are saved have a redeemed conscience, but one that is continually being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

And this raises an important point: the conscience is a part of you and not the Holy Spirit. We know this because the Holy Spirit is God and you are not. God is never wrong, but your conscience is.

As a result of this fallen-but-saved, already-but-in-process situation, our conscience requires maintenance. One of the goals of the Christian life, as you will see, is to live by a good conscience. We need to work hard to make sure it’s aligned with the truth, and work hard to follow its dictates as we live day to day.

So that’s the theological snapshot of the conscience from a Christian perspective.

The second story is the modern psychological story of the conscience. It’s still your moral sense, but that doesn’t mean much when you consider prevailing views about morality.

You see, for centuries it was thought that morality was objective, that moral facts and judgments were mind independent. The truth of morality was out there whether you sensed it or not. But we live in an age of skepticism about moral facts, in part because we are skeptical about anything we cannot measure. So we play it safe and focus on what we can measure, the subjective experience of morality. These are the mind dependent processes of recognizing moral issues, passing moral judgments, and making moral decisions.

In short, the fact that you have a moral sense on this account doesn’t mean much more than being able to see in a pitch-black cave.

So where do moral judgments come from if they are not related to external moral facts? Essentially they are a function of your emotions and your socialization. In other words, they are sometimes reduced to a sense of obligation based on emotional attachments.

For example, Freud related a sense of guilt to the belief that you had not lived up to your parents’ expectations. Because this guilt can cause anxiety and other kinds of harm, Freud counseled that you should let go of this guilt and live free. You owe it to yourself not to be caged by these felt obligations based on emotional attachments.

The conclusion on this view is that the conscience is at best a useful social habit, but at worst a crippling delusion.

Contrast this with the Christian view which sees morality as something external to our minds, something rooted in the very nature of God. On this view, morality is not socially constructed, and freedom comes not from casting off guilt but addressing it.

So to talk about the conscience today, you need to keep your frame of reference in mind. Are you talking about a completely internal, socially-constructed emotion? Or a part of you that orients your soul to the moral facts of the world, the real goodness that is sourced in God?

For this discussion, of course, I will be presenting the latter. I don’t understand how any Christian could claim that morality is purely subjective, even if they are skeptical about our ability to discern what is good in a given situation. To be Christian is to believe in God as Christ has revealed Him—a morally perfect being. “No one is good but God.”

But as we take this Christian view of conscience out into the world, we must understand why we are so often misunderstood. To speak of a moral sense, we need to overcome the bias against moral realism. To speak of obligations, we need to overcome the belief that they are arbitrary and socially constructed. To speak of guilt, we need to overcome the belief that it is only and always negative.

Now that we’ve taken an all-too-brief look at what the conscience is, next time we’ll look at why it matters.

I hope you feel obligated to return.