Page 24 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 10

Eric L. Johnson (USA): Eric L. Johnson

The Christian Conscience: Ph.D. is Lawrence

The Transformation of a and Charlotte
Hoover Professor
Created Module through of Pastoral Care
at The Southern
Christ and the Spirit Baptist Theologi-
cal Seminary. He
edited Psychology
Ted felt so vindicated. While he and his wife and Christianity:
Sally were getting ready for bed, she had bluntly Five Views and
suggested that he had not been spending much wrote Foundations for Soul Care: A Chri-
time with the children recently. But she didn’t stian Psychology Proposal and God and
know that he had been making plans all week to Soul Care: The Therapeutic Resources of the
spend time with the entire family this weekend. Christian Faith. He’s married to Rebekah,
So her comment struck him as really unfair, who keeps him grounded.
and he lashed out at her, leaving both of them
put out and not talking as they went to bed. The Former articles by Eric you can see here:
next morning, on the way to work, Ted reali- http://emcapp.ignis.de/1/#/96
zed that he had been putting in a lot of overtime http://emcapp.ignis.de/6/#/8
over the past few weeks, working on a project http://emcapp.ignis.de/2/#/4
at work, and he felt a strong wave of guilt come http://emcapp.ignis.de/8/#p=8
over him.
Ted is a fairly typical person. Normal adult
humans have a moral awareness, and they
feel guilt when they do something wrong. The
“conscience” is the module or faculty that has mily and cultural influence to shape the parti-
been identified with that sense of morality. cular beliefs and attitudes that could activate the
With a few exceptions, modern psychologists negative emotions we now call shame and guilt
made little reference to the conscience. One (Gangestad, 2012;.Haidt, 2012). So, for most
1
reason for this neglect was that the worldview of the past 100 years, the shaping of individual
assumptions that underlie modern psychology moral awareness has been understood to be a
(materialism and positivism) are reductionistic, function of general cognitive and emotion pro-
in that they result in the reduction of all distinc- cesses, socialization, and enculturation (Harter,
tive human processes to mere biological pheno- 2012; Turiel, 1998). As a result, there is no need
mena. The dominant explanation of moral awa- to distinguish a distinct moral awareness mo-
reness, for example, interprets it as a function dule or faculty, especially since materialism and
of evolutionary pressures early in humanity’s positivism entail that there is no objective mo-
phylogenetic development that rewarded more ral order to which that module might conform
cooperative humans who experienced negative and be directed.
emotion when faced with ostracism for unco- Humanist and existential psychologists, by con-
operative behavior with survival, allowing fa- trast, have identified authenticity as a uniquely
human trait that should be honored and cele-
brated that resembles moral awareness in some
1 William James (1890), for example, in his early classic respects (Bugental, 1965; Rogers, 1961). Howe-
made no reference to the conscience. Freud (1923/1960), ver, the strong individualism of humanism and
by contrast, identified the “super-ego” as a structure of existentialism leads them to define it in highly
the human personality, so psychoanalysis has recognized individualistic terms, as a sense of personal in-
such a module. However, it was assumed that the super- tegrity and trust in oneself, making it difficult,
ego was a function of socialization and not reflective of a
transcendent reality. but not impossible, to understand how it con-
22