Conscience is like an independent judiciary; we can never be certain of its verdict, but it represents our best hope for a fair hearing and acquittal in the end’
Paul Strohm, author
Hardly a day goes by at present without raising issues of conscience.
But what is conscience? It's such a fluid, intangible feature of humanity, but we all know it is there. Paul Strohm points to a faith-based interpretation, but conscience is at the heart of millions of charitable individuals and activities without any connection to faith. It just needs a yardstick of morality to which it can relate and, although faith can help (more often than not), there are alternatives.
Over the past week, there have been dozens of reports in the media which could be challenged by an active conscience. These range from the rampant rise in cybercrime to politicians chasing what they believe to be popular opinion, regardless of the merits of what is often narrow-minded self-interest. They have also shown disregard for the conditions in which future generations will have to live, as well as accentuating the ethnic and cultural allegiances which are driving aggression and conflict.
The struggle to understand what lies behind conscience is very deep: you only have to visit its 22,000-word Wikipedia page to understand how hard people have sought to find answers from religious, secular and philosophical sources and global perspectives — as well as through literature, art, film and music.
But it cannot, and must not, be ignored. There are real dangers in our amoral and technically-driven society of regarding conscience as something which is outdated. Artificial Intelligence may attempt to report on the formation of human morality, but it’s hard to see how it could originate it. However, if young people grow up with a disregard for a sense of conscience, society will go downhill rapidly — some would say it already has.
One of the few direct examples of Christian teaching on the use of conscience can be found in the eighth chapter in St. John’s Gospel. In this story, a crowd of accusers (of a woman caught in adultery) had been invited to look deeply inside themselves, and to examine their consciences. It’s interesting to read that as they all melted away, the older — and wiser? — recognised the challenge first.
Conscience is a difficult thing for religious folk — it simply does not conform to those rules and regulations which so many like to follow. For centuries the Church has fought shy of its challenge, and it is difficult even today to find serious theological analysis thereon.
In his book, ‘Conscience: A Very Short Introduction’, Paul Strohm recounts that Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, argued that a purely subjective conscience can err. The cardinal proposed that a conscience-based sense of guilt is a specious and unnecessary form of consciousness that needs to be addressed outside the arena of personal ethical choice. He saw the role of Catholic authority as therefore to assist errant and forgetful people in the discovery of this hidden capacity, and he claimed that conscience needs authority in order to hear itself or to discern its right objects.
However, for those who feel in need of such guidance, the Bible provides a wealth of reference, together with much of the debate on how to apply it. The Old Testament texts were available two thousand years ago, but it still took the simple challenge of Jesus that sufficed to waken their conscience.
As Paul Strohm also wrote, ‘Particular challenges arise when religious and secular authorities challenge each other, and conscience comes into its own to help resolve the dilemma, notwithstanding that uncertainty’.
‘Living in Love and Faith’ is a book produced by the Church of England containing Christian teaching and learning about identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage, and it contains this paragraph on conscience:
‘Conscience is not infallible. We can feel guilty when we do not need to. We can feel confidently innocent when we really should not. We can be driven by an anxiety about salving our own consciences when we should be willing frankly to admit our failings and trust in God’s mercy. Our consciences are shaped by all kinds of factors, and we can work together to form them well — by reading the Bible, listening to and learning from the Church’s teaching and from one another, and learning to trust in God’s mercy in Christ.’
This open conversation within ourselves and with others is the complete opposite of hypocrisy and judgement. It points directly towards reconciliation, and this lies at the heart of our wrestling over questions of how to find love at the cutting edge, including loving our enemies. It is about bridge building, and the greatest demonstration of that was to span the gulf between the perfect goodness of God and the human experience of living so close to chaos and darkness.
This illustrates how the struggle to understand conscience is such an issue for religious folk, but it’s also a major challenge for our secular and often faith-less society. It is said that a mobile phone is stolen every six minutes in London and the contents of monetary apps are routinely drained of their balances. Is there any sense of conscience there? It would appear not.
And the cyber-criminals who stole the children’s database of Kido last week displayed no evidence of conscience when they set about their blackmailing for a ransom; although there are now indications that they are beginning to understand that they have crossed even a criminal assessment of morality.
If the Church of England was to provide any further guidance on how to understand and be guided by our conscience, at least there is now a new Archbishop of Canterbury in the form of Sarah Mullally, who made a helpful reference to servant leadership in her opening address. In contrast, former Archbishop Justin Welby was clearly struggling to understand his conscience as he made his valedictory speech in the House of Lords.
From my own experience, I would say that the Archbishop before him, Rowan Williams, had a much clearer understanding of how to plumb the depths of our conscience. Let’s hope Sarah Mullally will follow in his footsteps.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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