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nects to an interpersonal world, and usually un- Scriptural Teaching on the Nature of the
necessary to appeal to a transcendent, objective Conscience
moral order that could ground it. Consequently, The vocabularies of languages increase over
humanists and existentialists encourage others time as terms are devised to label newly reco-
to be true to themselves and to principles that gnized features of reality. It just so happens
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respect the rights of other individuals, but they that the Old Testament (OT) was written before
too have little reason to acknowledge the exi- a term for conscience had been coined in the
stence of conscience. Perhaps to posit such a Hebrew language, whereas the New Testament
module would be a threat to individual autono- (NT) was written when such a term was avai-
my. lable in Greek. Nevertheless, there are many OT
One must read pre-20th century authors in the texts that point to the existence of a conscience.
West to learn about the conscience and also to In addition, the Hebrew Bible provides the pri-
find defenders in the West of the notion that the- mary interpretative context for understanding
re is an objective moral order in the universe in the NT. Together the two testaments of the
the West (with a few contemporary exceptions). Christian Bible provide a sketch of a lay psycho-
Perhaps there is a correlation regarding these logy of the conscience from the standpoint of
two matters, such that, if humans assume the redemptive-history, giving the Christian com-
existence of moral reality, they are more likely munity today a divinely-inspired starting point
to recognize the existence of a module or facul- for a more elaborate Christian psychology of
ty that perceives such reality. Regardless, prior the conscience.
to the late-modern era, most Western thinkers The foundational text in the Bible for under-
(along with most Eastern) believed that moral standing the conscience is the record of Adam
awareness is similar to human understanding of and Eve’s reaction to their having eaten from
the physical, biological, and social worlds, sin- the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
ce it corresponds to an actually, existing reali- “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they
ty. Hence, this stance is called “moral realism.” knew they were naked. And the sewed fig leaves
Eventually in the ancient era a term arose to together and made themselves loincloths. And
designate the faculty responsible for this aware- they heard the sound of the LORD God wal-
ness, syneidēsis in Greek and conscientia in La- king in the garden in the cool of the day, and
tin (Glare, 2012; Arndt & Gingrich, 1958). Just the man and his wife hid themselves from the
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as humans have faculties or modules that enable presence of the LORD God among the trees
them to sense and perceive various aspects of of the garden.” (Gen 2:7-8) Presumably, Adam
the natural world (the five senses, and now we and Eve were created with a conscience that was
know, brain regions dedicated to processing only activated upon the commission of sin.
their respective kinds of sensations and per- However, the entire OT assumes that an awa-
ceptions), so humans have a faculty or module reness of guilt is a common feature of post-lap-
responsible for the perception of moral reality. sarian human life. Consider the sacrificial sy-
stem, particularly the guilt offering, which was
to be performed when people committed a sin.
Though the emphasis in the book of Leviticus is
on the objective guilt that is accrued when so-
2 Both the Greek word and its Latin and English equiva- meone sins, there has to be some kind of cogni-
lents mean literally “to know with.” We might speculate
that the compound word probably reflects the visceral tive awareness of that guilt in order for people
phenomenology of the conscience as a discrete, differen- to understand that a guilt offering is needed
tiable kind of self-knowledge beyond mere reason or con- (see 5:15-19; 7:1-7; 14:12-29). The penitential
sciousness, distinctly moral in nature and registered in psalms also indicate the presence a profound
the body and one’s emotions. Perhaps we could go further
and pull the word into a more theistic direction and im-
port the notion that a goal of the Christian life is to have
our conscience conformed increasingly to the mind and 3 Part of the job of a science is the development of an
heart of God, so that our moral awareness becomes more enhanced vocabulary as more features of its object are
and more a moral “knowing with” God. recognized.
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