Conscience and Discernment

The writer to the Hebrews interrupts his argument about Christ the high priest to rebuke his readers. 'We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain, because you are dull of hearing' (Hebrews 5:11). They had been believers long enough to be teaching others, and instead they needed to be taught the basics again. 'You need milk, not solid food!' (5:12). Then he describes the difference between infancy and maturity, and the description is the anchor of this lesson: 'But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained their senses to distinguish good from evil' (5:14).

Every word in that sentence is chosen. Senses, aistheteria, a word found only here in the New Testament, means the faculties by which we perceive, the eye that sees and the tongue that tastes. Moral discernment, on this picture, is a kind of perception: the mature person sees what is good and evil in a situation, as an experienced cook tastes what a dish needs. Trained, gegymnasmena, is the athlete's word, the root of gymnasium. And constant use is hexis, the word Aristotle used for a settled habit, which lesson 4 studied. The writer is saying that moral perception is trained by practice, the way an athlete's body is trained, until it becomes a stable capacity.

This has two consequences for anyone who teaches ethics. First, discernment is not a special gift reserved for a few spiritual people. It is the normal mark of Christian maturity, and every believer is expected to grow into it. A church in which only the pastor can tell right from wrong is a church of infants, however old its members are. Second, discernment cannot be gained only by reading. You can read every lesson in this track and still be unable to see what a real situation requires, as a person can read a book about swimming and drown. Senses are trained by use: by facing real moral questions, making judgments, seeing how they turn out, being corrected, and trying again. That is why this track asks you to work a real case and not only to learn the theory.

Notice also what discernment is for. The writer puts it in the context of solid food, the deeper teaching about Christ that he wants to give them. Discernment of good and evil and understanding of the gospel grow together. A believer who stops growing in his grasp of who Christ is will usually stop growing in moral perception as well, and a believer whose moral perception is dulled by habitual sin will find he cannot hear the deeper teaching. Hebrews ties the intellect, the moral life and spiritual maturity together, and it does not let a reader treat any of them as optional.

The New Testament word for conscience is syneidesis, which means knowing together with, a knowledge one shares with oneself about oneself. It appears around thirty times, most often in Paul and Hebrews, and the Hermeneutics track met it in 1 Corinthians 8. Paul says that even Gentiles without the law show 'that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts either accusing or defending them' (Romans 2:15). Conscience, on this account, is a witness inside a person that testifies about his conduct, accusing or excusing him in the light of what he knows to be right.

Scripture describes conscience in many conditions, and the range is instructive. It can be good and clear: 'The goal of our instruction is the love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a sincere faith' (1 Timothy 1:5). It can be weak, as in 1 Corinthians 8:7, where some believers 'are still so accustomed to idols' that their conscience is defiled by food a stronger believer eats freely. It can be defiled more deeply: 'both their minds and their consciences are defiled' (Titus 1:15). And it can be seared, cauterised until it no longer feels anything: 'whose consciences are seared with a hot iron' (1 Timothy 4:2). A conscience, in other words, is not a fixed instrument. It can be trained or damaged, sharpened or dulled.

That is why Paul refuses to treat even a clear conscience as the final word. 'My conscience is clear, but that does not vindicate me. It is the Lord who judges me' (1 Corinthians 4:4). He had good reason to know. Before his conversion he 'was convinced that I ought to do all I could to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth' (Acts 26:9), and Jesus had warned that 'anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God' (John 16:2). Sincerity is not the same as rightness. A man can obey his conscience perfectly and do great evil, because his conscience has been formed by falsehood.

The medieval theologians gave the church a precise vocabulary for this. Aquinas, in the first part of the Summa (question 79, articles 12 and 13), distinguished synderesis, the natural habit by which every person grasps the first principles of moral action, such as that good is to be done and evil avoided, from conscientia, conscience in the narrower sense, the act by which a person applies what he knows to a particular case. Synderesis, he held, does not err; conscience can, because it can apply true principles badly or reason from false premises. Then, in the second part (I-II, question 19, articles 5 and 6), he argued that a person must not act against his conscience even when it is mistaken, because to do so is to will what he believes to be evil; but that he is not thereby excused if his error comes from an ignorance he could and should have corrected.

The result is the teaching that most Christian traditions share: there are two duties concerning conscience, and they must be held together. The first is never to act against your conscience, since, as Paul says, 'everything that is not from faith is sin' (Romans 14:23). The second is always to keep informing your conscience, by scripture, prayer, the teaching of the church and the counsel of wise believers, because a conscience left to itself drifts towards whatever its society or its desires approve. At the Diet of Worms in April 1521, Martin Luther refused to recant unless convinced by scripture or plain reason, saying that his conscience was captive to the Word of God and that it was neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Notice the order: his conscience was bound to the Word, not floating free. The famous words Here I stand, I can do no other appear in early printed versions of the speech but not in the record taken down at the time, and many historians doubt he said them. John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a Catholic cardinal, made a related point in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875): if he were obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, he wrote, he would drink to the pope, but to conscience first and to the pope afterwards. Newman meant a conscience formed by the truth, not a private preference, and he said so.

The Hermeneutics track worked through 1 Corinthians 8 in detail, so this lesson takes up its companion, Romans 14, where Paul states the same teaching with a symmetry the Corinthian passage lacks. The Roman house churches were divided over food and days. 'For one person has faith to eat all things, while another, who is weak, eats only vegetables' (14:2). 'One person regards a certain day above the others, while someone else considers every day alike' (14:5). The divide probably ran largely, though not neatly, between believers of Jewish background who kept the food laws and the sabbath and Gentile believers who did not. Paul opens with an instruction to the whole church: 'Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on his opinions' (14:1).

Then he warns both sides, and this is what makes Romans 14 so useful. 'The one who eats everything must not belittle the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted him' (14:3). The strong are tempted to contempt; the weak are tempted to condemnation. Paul forbids both. He gives his own view plainly: 'I am convinced and fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean' (14:14). Then he lays the main burden on the strong: 'Do not by your eating destroy your brother, for whom Christ died' (14:15), and, 'We who are strong ought to bear with the shortcomings of the weak and not to please ourselves' (15:1). And to each person he says: 'Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind' (14:5). On disputable matters, the church is to hold together people who reach different conclusions, without either side forcing its conscience on the other.

But not everything is disputable, and Paul knew the difference. In the same letters where he tells the church to accept differences over food and days, he refuses to treat other matters as opinion. When Peter withdrew from table fellowship with Gentiles under pressure, Paul opposed him to his face, because 'the truth of the gospel' was at stake (Galatians 2:5, 2:14). He pronounces a curse on anyone who preaches a different gospel (Galatians 1:8). And in 1 Corinthians 5 he rebukes a church for tolerating a case of sexual immorality, rather than treating it as a matter on which members might differ. The Reformation had a name for matters that God has neither commanded nor forbidden: adiaphora, from the Greek for things indifferent. The Lutheran churches then learned in a hard controversy after 1548, when some of their leaders accepted Catholic ceremonies under imperial pressure, that even an indifferent thing can stop being indifferent when giving way would be a denial of the faith before its enemies. Matthias Flacius pressed that point, and the Formula of Concord (1577, article 10) largely accepted it.

So how does a church tell a disputable matter from one that is not? Several tests have been proposed, and they are most useful together. Does scripture speak plainly to the question, or must the answer be inferred? Does scripture itself treat the matter as indifferent, as Romans 14 does with food and days? Have the churches across the centuries and the traditions agreed on it, or have faithful believers always differed? Is the truth of the gospel, or the protection of someone vulnerable, at stake? And would giving way, in this place and time, be heard as a denial of Christ? A question that scripture addresses plainly, on which the church has agreed, and where people would be harmed, is not a matter of opinion, however much a modern culture may treat it as one.

Honesty requires one more admission: Christians who hold scripture's authority sometimes disagree about which category a question belongs in. Alcohol is the clearest case. Many Baptist, Methodist and Pentecostal churches, especially in Africa and parts of Asia and the Americas, require their members to abstain completely. They point to the warnings of Proverbs, 'Wine is a mocker, strong drink is a brawler' (Proverbs 20:1), to Paul's 'It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything to cause your brother to stumble' (Romans 14:21), and to the devastation drink causes in families and communities they serve. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and many Reformed churches teach that moderate drinking is permitted. They point to the psalm's 'wine that gladdens the heart of man' (Psalm 104:15), to Jesus' wine at Cana (John 2:1-11), to 'use a little wine' in 1 Timothy 5:23, and to the fact that scripture forbids drunkenness (Ephesians 5:18) rather than drinking. Each side can cite Romans 14 for its position. A second case, live in many churches, is how far a believer may take part in traditional funeral and ancestral ceremonies: some treat parts of them as honouring the dead within the culture, while others see in them the participation with demons that Paul forbids in 1 Corinthians 10:20-21. This lesson does not settle either question. It asks you to notice that deciding whether something is disputable is itself an act of discernment, and to be slow to accuse a fellow believer of either laxity or legalism when he has reached a different conclusion with his Bible open.

Much of moral life involves a situation no command directly names. When that happens, Christians have always reasoned from cases they know to the case in front of them. Jesus does it himself. Challenged over his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath, he asks, 'Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?' (Matthew 12:3), and reasons from David eating the consecrated bread to the disciples' hunger. Then he argues from a case every farmer knew: 'If one of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath' (Matthew 12:11-12). That is case reasoning: a clear case, an analogy, a difference in weight, and a conclusion.

The disciplined form of this reasoning is called casuistry, from the Latin casus, a case. It flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among Catholics and Protestants alike. Catholic moral theologians, especially Jesuits, produced large handbooks of cases to help confessors advise penitents. One of their methods, probabilism, first formulated by the Dominican Bartolomé de Medina in 1577, held that in a doubtful case a person may follow an opinion that is genuinely probable, supported by serious reasons or authorities, even if the opposing opinion is more probable. Its defenders argued that a law which is genuinely doubtful does not bind, so that a conscience need not be burdened with every possible obligation. Rival systems answered differently: probabiliorism required following the more probable opinion, tutiorism required always taking the safer course, the side of the law, and Alphonsus Liguori in the eighteenth century proposed equiprobabilism, a middle way that many later Catholic moralists followed. Rome condemned laxist propositions in 1665 and 1679 and the strictest tutiorism in 1690, but did not settle the argument between the moderate systems. Some later casuists stretched probabilism into what critics called laxism, finding reasons to permit almost anything. Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters (1656 to 1657) mocked the laxist casuists so brilliantly that casuistry became, in English and French, a word for dishonest reasoning, and has remained one in ordinary speech.

That reputation is unfair to the best of the tradition. The English Puritans were great casuists. William Perkins's The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience was published in 1606, after his death; his student William Ames wrote De conscientia (1630), later translated as Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof; Richard Baxter's enormous A Christian Directory (1673) worked through hundreds of practical questions of family, business, church and state; and the Anglican Jeremy Taylor wrote Ductor Dubitantium, a guide for the doubting (1660). These writers believed, as Hebrews 5:14 teaches, that pastors must help believers apply scripture to real situations, and that this is skilled work. In 1988 Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin published The Abuse of Casuistry, a history and defence of case reasoning, and showed that hospital ethics committees had rediscovered the method without knowing its name.

The method, at its best, has four steps. First, find a paradigm case: a clear case where the answer is not in doubt, ideally one scripture itself addresses. Second, compare your case with the paradigm, listing both the similarities and the differences. Third, attend to the circumstances. The tradition, following Cicero, listed them as who, what, where, by what means, why, how and when, and Aquinas used the same list (I-II, question 7, article 3); a payment to an official is a different act if it is a fixed public fee, a bribe to pervert a verdict, or money extorted under threat to release a prisoner. Fourth, reach a judgment that is as certain as the case allows and no more certain, and say how confident you are. Two dangers stand on either side. Laxism searches for the reason that permits what you already wanted to do. Rigorism refuses every distinction and so treats the payment extorted from a widow at a roadblock as if it were the same as the bribe a contractor pays to win a tender. Both are failures of honesty, and the remedy for both is to reason in the open, before others.

Hebrews addresses its rebuke to a community, and the New Testament assumes that moral discernment is done together. The clearest example is Acts 15. A dispute arose in Antioch over whether Gentile believers must be circumcised, and after 'sharp debate' Paul and Barnabas went up to Jerusalem 'to see the apostles and elders about this question' (15:2). The council heard testimony: Peter told what God had done among the Gentiles, and Paul and Barnabas reported the signs and wonders God had done through them. James then read the experience in the light of scripture, quoting Amos 9:11-12. And the council reached a decision it could express in a remarkable phrase: 'It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us' (15:28). The letter they sent was read in Antioch, and 'When the people read it, they rejoiced at its encouraging message' (15:31).

Look at the elements: a real dispute, openly stated; the gathering of those responsible; testimony about what God was doing; careful reading of scripture; prayerful dependence on the Spirit; a decision stated with modest confidence; and a letter explaining the reasons to those affected. Proverbs had said it long before: 'Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed' (Proverbs 15:22). Paul's instruction 'test all things. Hold fast to what is good' (1 Thessalonians 5:21) is addressed to a church, not an individual.

Christian traditions have developed their own practices of discerning together, and you may find one of them useful in your setting. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, approved by the pope in 1548, include rules for the discernment of spirits, which teach a person to notice the movements of consolation and desolation in prayer and to test where they lead. Quakers developed the clearness committee, a small group who meet with a person facing a decision and ask honest questions rather than give advice. The Congolese Catholic theologian Bénézet Bujo, in Foundations of an African Ethic (2001), has argued that the African palaver, the long communal conversation in which a community talks a dispute through until a shared judgment emerges, is a resource for Christian moral discernment, because it treats moral truth as something sought together by a community that, in his account, includes the dead and the not yet born as well as the living, elders and young people alike.

Community discernment has its own dangers, and they must be named. A community can silence a dissenting voice that turns out to be the prophet. It can be dominated by the powerful, so that the decision of the group is simply the will of the strongest family or the wealthiest donor. It can protect itself rather than the vulnerable, as churches in many countries have done when abuse by leaders was reported. Where there is any question of abuse or danger to a person, a church's discernment never replaces reporting to those with the duty and power to protect, as the Pastoral Care lessons Protecting the Vulnerable and Domestic Abuse make clear. And community discernment never removes the individual's conscience: the believer who, after listening, still cannot in good conscience agree must not be forced to act against it, though he may be asked to accept a church's decision on a matter of order. Discernment together, done well, is a check on each person's blind spots, not a replacement for each person's responsibility before God.

This is the last lesson of the module, and your working case now has four pages behind it: the question and its two forms, the five methods, the texts and the neighbours, and the character the case requires. This week you will draw them together into a first, provisional judgment. Head a new page Discernment.

First, classify your case. Write whether you think it is a disputable matter, on which faithful Christians may differ, or one that scripture and the church have settled, and give your reasons using the tests in section 3. If Christians you respect disagree about which kind of matter it is, say so and state the strongest reason on each side. Second, find a paradigm case, a clear case from scripture or from ordinary life where the answer is not in doubt, and write the similarities and the differences between it and your case. Third, list the circumstances that matter: who, what, where, by what means, why, how and when.

Fourth, make a discernment plan. Write down the kind of people you would ask for counsel, describing them by role, such as an elder, an older believer who has faced something similar, someone affected by the decision, or someone who usually disagrees with you; do not write names. Write what you would pray, and one passage you would read again before deciding. If your case involves anyone being harmed or in danger, write down who in your setting has the duty and power to protect them, and remember that this step comes before any other.

Last, write your provisional judgment in three or four sentences: what you think should be done, how confident you are, and what would change your mind. Then, if you can do so without breaking anyone's confidence, talk the case through this week with one wise believer, and add a short note of what you learned. You now have the first draft of the case study that will close this track. The remaining modules will test it against particular questions of life and death, family, money, justice and creation, and you will return to it at the end with a much fuller set of tools.