|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
INTRODUCTION – The Conscience – Every Person’s “Mental Moral Monitor”
“Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.” – John 8:9
In his popular Catholic Dictionary, Father John A. Hardon S. J., says this about the conscience:
“[The] Conscience…is a specific act of the mind applying its knowledge to a concrete moral situation. What the mind decides in a given case depends on the principles already in the mind.” [1]
Taking my cues from Fr. Hardon, my formal definition of the conscience is “One’s personal understanding of right and wrong, and his/her response to that understanding.” In simpler terms, I refer to the conscience as a “mental moral monitor” because those three words capture Fr. Hardon’s big ideas. First, the conscience is an act of the mind. We begin the entire engagement with our conscience by thinking about something, even if it is only for a split second or even less. Second, the conscience applies what is in the mind (good stuff and bad stuff, as we’ll see in future posts) specifically to questions of morality. Third, and finally, the conscience, using what is in the mind, makes a final decision, a judgment, or a conclusion (that is to say, it registers an output much like a monitor) about the moral question which then informs the action a person takes based on the entire process. As I said, this can all happen so quickly that we may not even be aware of the entire process in certain circumstances, whereas in other cases we may agonize over a moral question as we sift through everything in our minds in an attempt to arrive at some kind of conclusion.
The Greek word that is translated into the English word conscience appears about thirty times in the New Testament. It is the word suneidesis, and it literally means “knowledge of self.” The English word is derived from two Latin words combined together (con, which means “together”, and scire, which means “to know”). Literally, the concept of conscience has to do with knowing yourself and governing yourself based on what you know, or what you are convinced is true and right.
The way the conscience works in every-day life
The conscience is in operation when a person is faced with a decision about right and wrong. The person contemplates what they know, and they “look into the mirror” of their own knowledge. They make their choice based on what they believe to be either right or wrong. When a person chooses to do what their conscience tells them is the right thing to do, they deepen and solidify their own convictions. When they choose against what they believe to be right, their convictions diminish as their conscience becomes defiled (1 Cor. 8:7). If they continue to violate their own convictions, they may develop what the Bible calls a “seared” conscience (1 Tim. 4:2).
Your conscience is the thing that keeps you awake at night if you have done something that you believe is wrong. It is the sense of anguish that you feel just after you go against something that you believe and value. Your conscience is the thing that drives you to fix a problem that you know you created or to make things right with a person that you have offended. It is the voice in your head that reminds you of your choices, your actions, and your beliefs—and whether or not you are truly living in accordance with these things. Your conscience yells “stop” when it knows you are headed down the wrong path, and it urges you to “do it—you know you should” when you are wondering about whether or not to do the right thing.
A final word of caution – The Conscience is not God
It will be important to stress over and over in this series that the conscience is not to be confused with the voice of God, or the Spirit of God, or God Himself. That is because, as I said (drawing on Fr. Hardon’s insights) the conscience is an operation of the mind of the person as they respond to what is in their own mind regarding good and evil. There can be good things and bad things in all of our minds. These are the resources upon which each of our consciences draws when we are faced with moral questions. Another quote from Fr. Hardon regarding the principles that already exist in the mind of the person facing a moral question can help here:
“These principles are presupposed as known to the mind, either from the light of natural reason reflecting on the data of creation or from divine faith responding to God’s supernatural revelation. Conscience does not produce these principles; it accepts them.” [2]
I would go further and say that a person’s conscience may either accept or reject what is known either from the light of natural reason or even supernatural revelation (cf. Rom. 19:21). Thus, the conscience is not God. Rather, it is, in the end, a formal judgment made by each individual to respond (first in the mind) to their own sense of what is good or bad when faced with moral questions. A person’s conscience will only draw upon what it knows (even if what it knows is either right or wrong or a mixture of both). While it is important for each of us to pay close attention to what’s going on in our conscience when faced with questions of morality, it is not enough to confuse obeying our conscience with obeying God if what we “know” is actually not true. There will several biblical examples of this tension in the posts that follow. The advice to “let your conscience be your guide” is not the end of the matter for followers of Jesus, though it is always important to be very thoughtful about, and to even try to articulate (if we have the space to do so) what is happening in our conscience. As we’ll see, we may have serious problems in our conscience that need to be corrected or even wholly transformed.
My hope in doing this little series is to help Christians to become “conscious of their conscience,” to understand how the conscience works, and to do all they can to keep it strong and pure before God. This does not happen accidentally, as we will learn. We cannot minimize how important it is to care for the conscience because the condition of the conscience ultimately determines what kind of person we become. I hope you’ll stick with me through the five-part series, and may you earnestly desire to live “in all good conscience before God” (Acts 23:1).
————
Notes
[1] Hardon, John A. Catholic Dictionary. Image, 2013. p. 106
[2] Ibid