Friday, February 29, 2008

• Conscience Sake

   

  For conscience sake, we’ve done a lot of things.  Maybe we had a chance to take advantage of someone weaker than ourselves, and we declined to do so, for the sake of our conscience.

   

  But where do we get this idea of a conscience from?  Certainly no doctor or scientist dissected a human body and found the conscience among its parts.

   

  Yahoo’s online education dictionary gives the preferred definition of “conscience” as:  “The awareness of a moral or ethical aspect to one's conduct together with the urge to prefer right over wrong: Let your conscience be your guide.”

   

  Implied in this definition is that it is the individual’s conscience that guides that person, and not necessarily other people.  Each person has his or her own conscience. 

   

  There may be minimal standards of conduct for a group, and those standards might become enacted as the laws for that group, but the individual members of the group could have standards above and beyond the minimal standards of the group, and those above-and-beyond standards could be called the conscience for those individuals.  An example of such laws might be – don’t steal, where the individual conscience might lead someone to exercise special charity to a person.  It wouldn’t be stealing to withhold the charity.  The charity would be above and beyond the laws against stealing. 

   

  There might even be times when an individual’s conscience might require him to go against the laws of the group.  An example of that might be the former racial-segregation laws, which some people’s consciences called upon them to challenge.  In cases like that, the actions of conscience led to getting those bad laws changed. 

   

  We have a rich history behind our current sense of conscience and how that works out relative to a group’s laws.  Part of the Protestant Reformation was a clear statement on “Liberty of Conscience,” which said:

   

  God alone is Lord of the conscience (Rom_14:4; Jam_4:12), and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to His Word, or besides it, in matters of faith or worship (Mat_15:9; Mat_23:8-10; Act_4:19; Act_5:29; 1Co_7:23).  So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience (Psa_5:1; Gal_1:10; Gal_2:4, Gal_2:5; Gal_5:1; Col_2:20-23): and the requiring of an implicit faith [in such doctrines], and an absolute and blind obedience [to such commandments] is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also (Isa_8:20; Jer_8:9; Hos_5:11; Joh_4:22; Act_17:11; Rom_10:17; Rom_14:23; Rev_13:12, Rev_13:16, Rev_13:17).

  This Reformation statement is found in Chapter 20, paragraph 2 of the Westminster Confession of Faith formulated in Britain in 1641-48, which can be found on the webpage of the Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics.  Wikipedia has a version of this without the Scriptural references. 

  I would summarize that paragraph this way:  God has set forth beliefs and laws in the Bible, but when groups of men go against these beliefs and laws of God, or make rules in addition to these beliefs and laws of God, they go too far, and violate liberty and reason.

  A strong belief in liberty of conscience as stated in this Reformation creed was adopted by creeds of major churches in this country by 1729 and was in place by the time of our break with Britain in 1776.  This belief was foundational to our First Amendment’s prohibition against Congress establishing a national religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion.  The American revision of this creed of 1787-89, which was contemporaneous with the adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, involved removing provisions from the British version having to do with the national government resolving controversies about religious matters, but instead leaving the responsibility for resolving such disputes to the churches. 

  Originally, the First Amendment’s prohibition against establishing a government religion was binding on the national government but not the various state governments.  In fact, until well into the 1840s, all of the state governments except Rhode Island had religious establishments of one kind or another.  But with Reconstruction after the Civil War and the passage of the 14^th Amendment, the Courts began to say that the 14^th Amendment required the First Amendment’s prohibitions, such as preventing a government religion, to be applied to the states as well as the national government.  So that, now, no state government can tell you what to believe or not believe. 

  This is an important liberty.  And a lot of people are not familiar with its rich heritage.  For that reason, I decided to start a blogring on Xanga named “Conscience Sake,” dedicated to this liberty.  You are invited to click on the link to it and join. 

   

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