Conscience

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man."

-- Matthew 15:18

Recently I watched a very good video, loaned me by one of you, on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a Lutheran pastor who actively opposed the Nazis during WW2 and paid with his life. He worked against the Nazi state as part of a conspiracy within the military intelligence service, run by Admiral Cannaris, and in the course of that work had to tell lies. He justified himself by claiming that it is better to be a good person and do evil than to be an evil person and do good. In certain circumstances he believed that the good person was obliged to tell a lie. Later this position was called situation ethics or contextual ethics and was much debated in Christian circles. Jesus says, in today’s lesson, that the important thing is who we are not what we do, and thus seems to endorse situation ethics. Does Jesus really teach that who I am is the important thing and not what I do?      

We begin our reflection by asking what the situation is in which Jesus speaks the words of our text. The pious are criticizing him and his disciples for not washing their hands before eating. This is not a matter of hygiene as it would be for most of us, but of ritual, much like the saying of grace before meals. The pious critics imply that Jesus and his group are bad people because they do not perform certain ritual acts having to do with the religious concept of purity, and Jesus replies that it is not ritual purity but spiritual and moral purity that matters. The inner meaning not the outer action is the important thing. Purity is a matter of the heart.

There is another dimension to the argument in addition to this question of the relative importance of who we are and what we do, namely tradition. The opponents are dismayed because Jesus does not observe tradition. The other example of traditionalism that Jesus attacks in this context concerns the duty to care for ones parents. Apparently, at that time a pious Jew could escape the obligation by declaring that his resources belonged to God. Thus, Jesus says, they avoid the real purpose of the law, the care of aged parents, by the traditional act of willing their money to God, to be collected from the estate. Such a person continues to have the use of these resources in this life, without breaking the law by not supporting his parents. This bit of pious tradition is really a selfish ruse to avoid taking care of aged parents, which is what God really wants. God does not want our posthumous memorial gifts; God wants us to care for parents now.

To return to the matter of purity and hand washing: Jesus’ words are startlingly negative: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man (vs. 18-20).” Is it only negative impulses that come from the heart? Does Jesus here teach the doctrine of original sin that the human heart is perverse from birth and unless it is radically renewed produces only negative thoughts and actions? That is another, important reflection; but our present context is a discussion of what religious studies calls ritual purity, and that is why Jesus cites as examples of the fruit of the heart these negative things, things that are morally not ritually impure. They are the things that really pollute us, not eating with unwashed hands. Sin is inward and moral not outward and ritual. Thus Jesus claims that purity is a moral not a ritual category. No matter how scrupulously and traditionally you wash your hands the ritual act will not make you pure because it cannot cleanse the dirt from your heart. Indeed, external ritual often serves to cover the internal need by diverting attention from it to a theatrical substitute. Instead of changing my life I substitute a ritual or play act for the more difficult real act. Perhaps the most notorious act of ritual hand washing is Pontius Pilate washing his hands to claim judicial purity as he hands the innocent Jesus over to death.

Now one might argue that external observances can effectively facilitate inner transformation. Given our nature it is important not merely to say or think but also to do, and since we cannot always find the right context or opportune time for action in the real world we perform ritual acts in a parallel world. The situation is comparable to the theater where actions take place in a parallel world which can seem very real. We who are in the priestly trade and regard our ritual acts, like the consecration and distribution of the Eucharistic elements, as efficacious work, know that eating the bread and drinking the wine together in the world of ritual does have a good effect in the realm of reality. Our feelings are soothed and we experience the presence of Christ. The ritual of the sacraments is indeed the outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace.” Such ritual is clearly a good thing as long as it does not become a substitute for reality, which is what had happened to the pious critics of Jesus in our story. They thought it was enough to act it out on the ritual stage rather than to do it in fact  in the real world.

What does his have to do with conscience? In my meditation on this gospel text it seemed to me that the way Jesus emphasizes the inner source of action in the heart suggests the phenomenon of conscience. The history and etymology of the term conscience (suneidesis) in the Geek of the NT suggests the inner duality of our self-consciousness that we know so well. Duality and dialogue is a universal feature of our experience of self; somewhere deep down there we talk to ourselves all the time, are in constant dialogue, and even accuse ourselves. As the notion of conscience developed it came to denote not so much the inner dialogue in general but the aspect of self-accusation in particular. Plato tells us that Socrates was guided by an inner daimon, but that the daimon only told him when he had done wrong not what to do from the beginning. It did not relieve him of the need to make his own judgments about what course of action to follow. Thus according to the history of the word in the Greek of the NT conscience is mostly bad conscience, a voice inside that tells us that what we are doing or have done is wrong.  This self-accusation can become quite brutal. It is one of the recognized sins in Christian spiritual practice, called scrupulosity, and it is linked to the sin of acedia, which we with clearer psychological understanding call depression and recognize as an illness not a sin.

How do you experience conscience? Does this description fit your experience? Does conscience guide you beforehand or only accuse you after you have messed things up? I think for me it does a bit of both because I have gained some wisdom from experience. With experience we are able to remember what we did that caused our conscience to accuse us and so avoid those courses of action, unless we are addicts. Addicts keep doing the same destructive thing with the expectation that this time, despite thousands of indications to the contrary, it will have a positive outcome.

In this spirit, those of us who have lived through or read about WW2 and the Vietnam war and the South African Apartheid regime have consciences that certainly accuse us for what we did not but should have done then, and alert us to comparable situations that call for conscientious response right now. It is for the sake of conscience in this sense therefore that I have spoken out as I have on Palestine and Israel, and am inviting you all to a meeting tomorrow evening to discuss what conscience might demand of us all, as individuals and possibly as a church together. There is in this regard a body of experience to instruct our conscience, on which we can draw in that inner dialogue with ourselves about what we must do to be doing the will of God, and if we fail to do the right thing we shall accuse ourselves more sternly because this time we know, or could have known if we had paid attention and taken the trouble.

It is vital not to ignore one’s conscience because it is an expression of the heart, a crying out of our real selves, and if we stifle it we shall lose touch more and more with who we really are. Because conscience is so integral to human identity civilized governments allow for the conscientious practice of religion, conscientious speech, and conscientious objection to military service. Respect for conscience is the measure of civilized government, and a salient mark of the mental health of the individual. Never act against conscience and never ignore the demands of conscience for the sake of mere convenience. Living below the level of conscience is untroubled, but it is also inconsequential, insipid and boring. That is a very noble, and for the most part true sentiment, but is it all there is to say?

There is a remarkable passage in 1 John 3 as follows, “Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything (vs.18-20).”  What I have said up to this point could have been said by any moralist or psychologist, without reference to God, but in this passage we go to a deeper level of reality and enter the world of the biblical God. The Bible knows as do we that conscience is largely a socially conditioned reaction. The crimes and failures we accuse ourselves of are defined by our culture; for example, a man who was married to four women at the same time would normally have an uneasy conscience in our culture but not in a Muslim one. This means that if we act in ways that are outside our culture we are liable to be accused by conscience. Bonhoeffer lied conscientiously and that is action outside of the clerical culture of the church. So we might assume that his conscience plagued him. Nevertheless he rose above his conscience because as John says he was showing love in deed and truth and not in word only, and for that reason God who knows everything reassured him when his heart condemned him.