|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
If you haven’t read the introductory post yet, you can pause and read it here first. It will help give a little context to where I’m headed in this second post in the series. I decided to do this series on the conscience for a variety of reasons. Here are three that stand out in my mind:
- I happen to be writing this series during a presidential election year in the U.S., and among Roman Catholics, there is a lot of chatter online about the importance of “voting your conscience.” Trouble is — if a Catholic’s conscience is not formed in a way that accords with the truth of the Church’s teaching, then they may be missing important information, insights, or perspectives. As I said in the introduction (and as we’ll see in this post), the conscience is not God, though, as is obvious from Scripture, it is an aspect of our humanity that God uses to guide us.
- Related to this, there are many hot-button issues in our culture right now and it is difficult sometimes to know exactly how to respond to all of it. What can we affirm, and what must we disavow and repudiate? What can we support, and what must we reject? Where are the open doors, and where are the boundary lines? One very popular Catholic priest with a large social media presence and public platform often encourages Catholics to simply listen to their consciences when making moral judgments as though the conscience, in certain circumstances and conditions, cannot deceive us or lead us astray. As we’ll see in this post and every post that follows, this is simply not true. The Conscience is not the Holy Spirit, though it may listen to (or not listen to) the Holy Spirit when contemplating a moral question. The conscience is a monitor that processes questions of morality based on whatever information it has to work with, and not itself the source of truth. More on this in a moment.
- Finally, my general sense is that the formation, nurture, and development of our conscience is one of the central elements in our discipleship as Christians. If we are only working on behaviors or actions, and not digging down under the surface of how we think, reason, and understand the world in light of God’s truth, then we will take many wrong turns and fall into many traps. That’s why I am calling this series “The Pursuit of a Good Conscience.” This should be one of the preoccupations of our development as followers of Jesus.
The Fact of the Conscience – Everybody has one
Perhaps you have heard descriptions of criminals and psychopaths as people who “have no conscience.” Though they may have corrupted or even disintegrated their own conscience through repeated actions of evil – the truth is, everyone has a conscience whether they are a Christian or not. Each person’s conscience is at a particular level of development and sensitivity, depending on how they inform and respond to their conscience.
The book of Romans teaches that all people have a conscience when it says,
“When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them (Rom. 2:14-15, NRSV, emphasis added).
To make it personal, you have a conscience, and depending on your own understanding of, and responses to right and wrong, your conscience is in a state of constant development (either for the better or the worse!).
There are many ways that people, Christians or not, respond to their conscience…
- Some listen to its exhortations and make their choices based on careful consideration of what is happening in their conscience
- Some ignore and destroy their conscience by repeatedly going against what it tells them
- Some blame others for their wrong actions even though their conscience was warning them all along
- Some are paralyzed and afraid to do anything wrong because they have over-sensitized their conscience to “rights and wrongs” that are not biblically based
Where the conscience is over-sensitized, there is often an ongoing pattern of self-condemnation as well as the possibility of condemning others who fail to live up to standards where there is no biblical problem with the issue at hand. Where the conscience is desensitized, standards of right and wrong are easily ignored, overlooked, or excused.
Again, all of these things are true of the conscience whether the person is a Christian or not. As St. Paul pointed out in Romans 2:14-15, there are people who are not Christians who have a more healthy and developed conscience than people who make a claim to faith. Each person’s response to their own convictions makes all the difference in how the conscience is developed.
The Fuel of the Conscience – Ideas of right and wrong, and their source
“Now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith. – 1 Timothy 1:5
The conscience constantly collects information about moral issues. It learns to categorize things as being either right or wrong, sinful or righteous, moral, or immoral. The conscience may get ideas about these things from a variety of sources.
Paul told Timothy in the verse above that the reason he was to devote himself to teaching the truth (e.g., “the purpose of the commandment”) was to help people to (1) learn to live in love, (2) develop a good conscience, and (3) nurture a sincere faith. To state it in reverse order, he was to teach the truth of the Christian faith (1) so that people may learn to believe the right things (sincere faith), which will (2) give them the tools they need to build a good conscience, which will (3) help them to live a life of love for God and other people.
It is vitally important to understand that the conscience uses the concepts of right and wrong that we have learned in order to function. Because of this, a misunderstanding of right and wrong can negatively affect how the conscience is developed. That is why the believer must find the “fuel” for their conscience from the infallible teaching of the Faith (given to us through the “three-legged stool” of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Living Magisterium or Teaching Office of the Church) —and they must be devoted to the life-long pursuit of rightly understanding and living it.
If a person bases their concept of right and wrong on a mature understanding of the Faith, they will tend to have a strong conscience. If a person has some or no consistent understanding of right and wrong (or they get their understanding of right and wrong from false teachers), along with a mixture of ideas from other sources that may conflict with the apostolic teaching of the Church, he/she is described as having a weak conscience.
A person can never develop a strong conscience if they refuse to embrace what the Church infallibly teaches about right and wrong. This goes for the Pope all the way down to the most invisible layperson, either of whom may be either eternally lost, or spared from an eternity of separation from God depending on how they respond to the truth.
What the conscience is not
It is important to understand that the conscience is not a perfect or infallible measure of right and wrong. It is not the voice of God, but it can repeat what God has said if it knows what God has said, or if it open to hearing the voice of God. Remember what Fr. Hardon said? The conscience is not the origin of right and wrong, and it does not teach us what is right and wrong. The conscience merely alerts us to or reminds us of the standards of right and wrong that we have already learned. It points out that we have a choice to make, and it reminds us of the values that we have learned in order to help us make the choice.
In this sense, we can say that the conscience is not objective. It is completely tuned in to what each individual person has learned about right and wrong. Because of this reality, there are some people who feel guilty about doing things that the Christian Faith celebrates as virtuous, while others may feel justified and at peace with themselves for doing things that the Faith actually condemns.
For instance, a man may have been taught that hatred of a particular race or class of people is a justifiable way to think. When faced with the prospect of befriending or helping a person of this “inferior” race, he turns his back—thinking to himself, “I am to have nothing to do with such people.” Rather than feeling sad or convicted (in his conscience) about his bigotry, he may feel a sense of pride that he has kept himself free from impurity or defilement. When Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), I believe he was speaking to the conscience of people who think this way.
An illustration
I have two lamps and two windows in my office. The lamps, like the truth of the Word of God, can be used to produce the light I need, but the windows cannot (cf. Ps. 119:105, Prov. 6:23, Ps. 43:3). Windows, unlike lamps, have no innate ability to produce light. They can only keep light out (if they are dirty or covered with blinds or curtains), or let light in (if they are clean, and if there is nothing covering them). In the same way, the conscience cannot produce truth. The conscience, in this illustration, is like a window in my mind. It can only learn the truth, and then—based on its condition, it can let the truth in or keep the truth out. This is why the Bible often speaks of the importance of keeping a “clean conscience” (Heb. 9:14). If the window is clean and unobstructed, the light can come in. If it is dirty and covered and obscured, the light will be kept out and darkness will prevail in the mind faced with moral questions.
Remember, the conscience is not the source of truth, and it is not the perfect judge of right and wrong. It is simply the principle that God has put into each person’s soul to alert them when they are faced with a choice between right and wrong. The repository of truth for the Christian is the infallible teaching of the Church, which is the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15), and which is guided by the Holy Spirit through the Sacred Tradition, the Sacred Scriptures, and the living teaching office of the Church (cf. Eph. 4:11, 2 Tim. 3:16, Jn. 16:13). The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ is God’s instrument in history, empowered by the Holy Spirit to train the believer’s conscience and to inform each one of us about the difference between good and evil. The source of information used to train the conscience is the basis for how it responds to issues of right and wrong.
In summary, everybody has a conscience. And everybody’s conscience is fueled by whatever it is that is informing their understanding of right and wrong. And, as is true in the world of computer programming, when it comes to the formation and development of the conscience, garbage in, garbage out!
Further reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, sections 1776-1802