The Appeal to Conscience

Appeals to conscience are common in our time. Some persons resist induction into the army because they claim that such service violates their conscience. Many others engage in protest movements in the name of conscience. Students demand changes in the structure of universities; they, too, claim to act in the name of conscience. Nearly every day, it seems, newspapers record the advent of some new movement conceived in the name of conscience. Appeals to conscience on such diverse matters can be perplexing, particularly since both sides of many issues today are defended in this way.

One reason for the confusion evident in the understanding of conscience is the Christian community’s failure to set forth any firm idea of what conscience is and how it functions. This failure is most regrettable, since conscience has been an important part of the Christian concept of man from the time of St. Paul. The word conscience appears more than thirty times in the New Testament. In the seventeenth century, a great age of Christians, theology focused on the place and use of conscience in the life of the Christian.

For the Christian, a definition of conscience must begin with the Bible. Most authorities agree that the Old Testament contains neither the word nor a concept of individual conscience though one may speak of the idea of a corporate conscience. This seems to fit with the fact that religion in the Old Testament emphasizes corporate and external responsibilities, while in the New the emphasis is on individual responsibility.

When the New Testament writers spoke of conscience they seemed to assume that their audience had some understanding of the idea. Modern scholars have shown that the concept of conscience was part of Hellenistic anthropology for centuries before the time of St. Paul. Viewing Paul’s use of conscience in conjunction with that of his contemporaries indicates that he qualified it in such a way as to create a distinctive concept.

From the time of Paul, therefore, two views of conscience have grown side by side in Western culture. In both, conscience is an inner voice that judges the moral acts of the person. For a typical non-Christian, such as Paul’s contemporary Seneca, conscience was a holy spirit within man that pronounced a final judgment at the end of each day on that day’s actions. If the accused rectified the wrong, his conscience was clear, and he would begin the next day with a clean slate. For Paul, on the other hand, the judgments of conscience each day were not final. He was willing to follow his conscience, knowing that he had brought it into captivity to the will of Christ. But he also knew that in the final judgment of Christ all a man’s actions would be considered. Paul’s view differed from the Hellenistic view, then, in that he saw the judgment as authoritative but not final. A more important difference was that in Paul’s view conscience was not part of self—“it bears witness with me”—nor was it God. For Paul, conscience stood apart from the self in the normal sense, though it was part of the integrated creature, that is, man. The point he made was that conscience is not subject to the willing self in the day-to-day operation of life.

Although every man has a conscience, not all consciences are educated in the same way. Each man’s conscience will judge and condemn, but the critical factor is the standard by which it makes its judgment. Without pressing the idea, one might say that virtually all men by conscience judge murder to be wrong, according to the law of God in nature that all men may know. It might be argued, further, that nature and reason are the only standards of authority by which conscience must be educated. That is precisely the position of the Hellenistic tradition. Yet though society may be the embodiment of natural light and reason, that does not change the fact that in such a view Divine Revelation is absent.

Conscience will be educated in some way, and it is in light of this that Paul comments on conscience, setting the record in order for the Christian. A passage in First Corinthians 8, Paul’s discussion of the use of meat offered to idols, illustrates the point well. Some believers had claimed they could eat such meat in good conscience. Paul agreed, but further argued that the Christian had also to consider the effect of his action on the conscience of a weaker brother. His conclusion was that even though one could eat the meat in good conscience, he had also to educate his conscience to the needs of a brother. In short, he applied the rule of love and charity: one could not discharge his responsibility without following the summary of the law. For Paul, the authoritative standard for conscience was not reason, or reason alone; rather, it was the will of Christ. In the final judgment those who know Christ cannot say that deeds were done in good conscience if that conscience did not conform to the will of Christ, made known to man through the Scriptures.

Linking conscience to Christ’s law of love may seem odd to many in our day, but that relation was understood clearly by Christians in other times. At no period of Christian history were men as sensitive to this as in seventeenth-century England. That was the age of great divines, of the Westminster Assembly and the Puritans. It was not by chance that Westminster was the first Reformation synod to include a chapter on conscience in its confessional statement. The divines understood the significance of conscience in the life of the Christian. Bibliographies of seventeenth-century literature document the frequency with which people wrote and preached and debated problems of conscience. Indeed, it is not too much to say that during most of the seventeenth century English theology was a theology of conscience.

Often today the well-known phrase from the Westminster Catechism, “The chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” is considered representative of late Reformation theology. Surely that statement is a compact summary of the relationship man ought to have with God, but its real significance remains hidden if one does not ask how the Westminster authors felt man was to glorify God. Glorifying God meant living a life of faithful service, and faithful service was not the product of some hit-and-miss system. Conscience was the means by which the Christian knew whether he was following the will of Christ as he tried to be a faithful servant. It was a special faculty placed in man by God for the purpose of judging moral actions.

The authors of the Westminster Standards and their contemporaries did not leave the definition and education of conscience to chance. Conscience, they said, operated in a rational way and could be examined with confidence that the result would be clearly understood. Its operation involved a major premise, a minor one, and a conclusion. The major premise stated the general moral principle, while the minor one reflected a particular practical experience. The conclusion that followed embodied the judgment of conscience. Although conscience through memory might know some general moral injunction—such as, murder is sin—it needed to be instructed in all matters moral. Seventeenth-century religious writers believed that all important moral truths could be gleaned from the Bible, and that it was their duty to set these down systematically for study and instruction. The result was that many men wrote manuals to be used in the education of conscience.

Unfortunately, these manuals have a bad reputation today. That is not the fault of the manuals, however; the problem is that they have become confused with Roman Catholic manuals on conscience from the same period. There is a great difference between the Roman Catholic works and the Protestant ones. In Roman theology, conscience is an inner voice but is subject to the priest in the confessional. Protestants, insisting on the priesthood of all believers, have always taught that conscience is subject only to God and his will as made known in the Scriptures.

English manuals on conscience are great pieces of literature and deserve wider circulation in our time. In them problems of conscience were organized into three general categories: problems of the self and God, of self and neighbor, and of self as self. Each of these had many subdivisions, and together they covered all conceivable areas. In some cases of conscience, a writer could demonstrate proper action or judgment in a few lines because the command of God in the Scriptures was evident. Most problems, however, had no such clear answers, and here the writers show great moral and spiritual insight.

Persons seriously interested in formulating a Christian view of conscience today should begin with the teachings of Paul and the experience of seventeenth-century English Christians. From Paul it is evident that the Christian must distinguish between a biblical view of conscience and a non-biblical view, such as that of Seneca. The essence of this difference is that the Christian must try to bring his conscience into captivity to the will of Christ. Following Paul, seventeenth-century English Christians developed a full-blown theology of conscience. Although not all that they had to say is relevant today, much of it is instructive. Protestants today who stress self-examination but do not provide themselves with the tools for such an examination might well learn from their seventeenth-century counterparts. Without the tools that earlier Christians had, people are left to their own devices, or lack of them. The result has been that people have only a “feeling” of right and wrong; the element of knowledge is missing.

The restitution of a doctrine of conscience today could begin with the borrowing of two insights from earlier Christian experience. First, the operation of conscience is a process, and this process involves knowledge and judgment. Recognition of this would allow persons to examine and educate their consciences. It would, moreover, provide a basis for individual Christians to help one another resolve problems of conscience. Second, it would be very helpful to arrange systematically the host of problems that impinge on conscience in our day. Whether the system used in the seventeenth-century manuals or some variation of it should be adopted is an open question, but the value of having a systematic arrangement cannot be doubted. Much of the confusion over the use of conscience today occurs because people have no way to judge the magnitude of the issue claimed in the name of conscience. An orderly arrangement would help. It would not, of course, spare anyone the agony and responsibility of conscientious decisions; but it would allow a person to understand better the priority and gravity of specific matters of conscience.

A neglected truth in our time is one stated with confidence by the divines in Westminster, that “God alone is lord of the conscience.” Appeals to conscience and debates about it would be more profitable if Christians today would say this as confidently.

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