Conscience

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

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

Conscience, 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)