Christianity

Conscience

General Information
Conscience is the awareness that an action conforms to or is contrary to one's standards of right and wrong (Acts 23:1; 1Tim 1:5; Heb. 13:18). Important New Testament passages that deal with conscience are Rom. 2:14,15 and 1Cor. 8:10. The New Testament stresses the need of having a good conscience toward God.

Con'science

General Information
Conscience is the capacity for moral judgment (moral awareness). Evidence of appeals to conscience to determine right from wrong date from ancient times. Such appeals have been adopted by all religious traditions, in which conscience is always related to the acceptance of the divine will. As such, conscience has been explained popularly as the voice of God inwardly directing a person to do right.

Conscience has been variously explained by philosophers. In one conception, conscience is a kind of intuitive perception. Francis Hutcheson and the 3d earl of Shaftesbury, for example, thought conscience could be described as a moral sense, an intuitive faculty that operates through feelings of right and wrong. In another conception, conscience is reason applied to moral principles. Philosophers such as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price proposed that conscience be explained as a kind of reasoning process that makes it possible to distinguish what is right from what is wrong. Proponents of Empiricism have suggested that conscience is the cumulative and subjective inference from past experience giving direction to the choices made by an individual.

A widely accepted explanation of conscience stems from the depth psychology of Sigmund Freud, according to which a form of conscience, the Superego, is a product of the unconscious activity of the underlying instinctive reality. Some psychologists have identified conscience with an expression of values or guilt feelings. Others regard conscience as learned reaction to stimuli. One of the tasks of Ethics is to determine the nature and function of conscience and to explain why divergence exists both within and between cultures in what conscience says one must do.

Richard H. Popkin

Bibliography
Bier, W. C., ed., Conscience: Its Freedom and Limitations (1971); Carmody, J., Reexamining Conscience (1982); Kroy, Michael, The Conscience: A Structural Theory (1974); Nelson, C. Ellis, ed., Conscience: Theological and Psychological Perspective (1973); Reik, Theodor, Myth and Guilt (1970); Stuart, Grace, Conscience and Reason (1951).

Conscience

Advanced Information
Conscience is that faculty of the mind, or inborn sense of right and wrong, by which we judge of the moral character of human conduct. It is common to all men. Like all our other faculties, it has been perverted by the Fall (John 16:2; Acts 26:9; Rom. 2:15). It is spoken of as "defiled" (Titus 1:15), and "seared" (1 Tim. 4:2). A "conscience void of offence" is to be sought and cultivated (Acts 24:16; Rom. 9:1; 2 Cor. 1:12; 1 Tim. 1:5, 19; 1 Pet. 3:21).

(Easton Illustrated Dictionary)

Conscience

Advanced Information
The word is derived from the Latin conscientia, which is a compound of the preposition con and scio, meaning "to know together," "joint knowledge with others," "the knowledge we share with another." It stems from the same root as consciousness, which means "awareness of." Conscience is an awareness restricted to the moral sphere. It is a moral awareness. The Greek equivalent in the NT is syneidesis, a compound of syn, "together," and eidenai, "to know," that is, to know together with, to have common knowledge together with someone. The German Gewissen has the same meaning. The prefix ge expresses a collective idea, the "together with," and wissen is "to know."

In the Bible

The word "conscience" does not appear in the OT. However, the idea is well known and is expressed by the term "heart." It appears at the very dawn of human history as a sense of guilt with Adam and Eve after the fall. We read of David that his heart smote him (II Sam. 24:10). Jobs says: "My heart shall not reproach me" (Job 27:6). And Pss. 32:1-5 and 51:1-9 are the cries of anguish of an aroused conscience.
The Babylonians, like the Hebrews, identified conscience with the heart. The Egyptians had no specific word for conscience but recognized its authority, as is evident from the Book of the Dead. The early Greeks and Romans personified conscience and depicted it as fiendish female demons called Erinyes and Furies respectively.

The word syneidesis or "conscience" appears thirty times in the NT, nineteen times in the writings of Paul, five times in Hebrews, three times in the letters of Peter, twice in Acts, and once in the Gospel of John, although the correctness of the latter reading (8:9) has been questioned.

(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)

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