A Window to the Wider World

In the 1980s, a former colleague (we worked for an evangelical campus ministry) announced he was gay. When friends suggested homosexual lifestyles are sin, he disagreed. According to his interpretation of scripture, homosexual acts are not condemned. His conscience, which defends us when we’re right but accuses us when we’re wrong, wasn’t telling him he was wrong. So he was right.

That’s called “individual conscience.” And, according to Richard Beck, it’s the biggest impediment to the reunification of believers because reunification would require believers to land on an uncontested “biblical view” of what scripture means. And Beck says that ain’t going to happen because I’m wrong only when my individual conscience tells me I’m wrong. But if I don’t feel my conscience telling me I’m wrong, then I’m right.

Beck, who is Protestant, feels this is a Protestant problem. Protestants “have to own that,” which means that they’re never going to land on an uncontested “biblical view” because they believe in “individual conscience.” If my conscience tells me I’m wrong, I’m wrong. If it doesn’t, I’m right. As a result, Beck writes, “Protestants have never agreed on what the Bible says. Just look at all the Protestant churches.”

I agree, having been a Protestant most of my life. Beck is correct when he writes:

Protestantism was created when Martin Luther was asked to recant his teachings at the Diet of Worms. Asked to submit to the magisterium (teaching authority) of the church, Luther famously declared: “To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

That’s Protestantism. The elevation of the individual’s conscience over the magisterium (teaching authority) of the church.

We see this elevation of individual conscience a few years later in King Henry VIII’s famously defiant retort to his third wife, Jane Seymour. She asked how his conscience didn’t bother him as he disposed of one wife after another, all the while demanding absolute loyalty to his newly created Church of England. Henry casually replied, “God and my conscience are on very good terms, madam.”

If only that were so.

Richard Beck is right about Protestants elevating individual conscience, but it’s metastasized from a Protestant problem to a Western Christianity problem. That’s because it’s a Western Enlightenment problem. The Enlightenment elevated individual authority over any exterior teaching authority. We see this in the Catholic Church in the 1980s.

Young priests-in-formation would jostle with each other over theological interpretations of scripture. They, like many Catholics at that time, felt that conscience was an internal feedback system that helps one judge right from wrong. If my conscience told me I was wrong, I was wrong. But if I felt my conscience told me I was right, I was right.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) put a halt to that in 1991 with his essay, “Conscience and Truth.” In it, he widened how we imagine conscience. Ratzinger describes conscience as a “window through which one can see outward to that common truth which founds and sustains us all, and so makes possible through the common recognition of truth.”

In other words, the reunification of all believers would require that all believers – Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox – embrace conscience as a window through which we discover a common recognition of truth. It’s not left to the individual conscience.

Opening that window to whatever is “out there” is the work of the right hemisphere of the brain, writes Iain McGilchrist. It alone is oriented to the “Other” – other views, voices, even God. This helps an individual’s conscience to not resist external authority but actually become more vulnerable to it, more open to contrarian voices.

It is only by paying attention to the world via the right hemisphere that we experience an ongoing, spiraling, back-and-forth flow between the right and left hemisphere, getting us closer and closer to a common truth while acknowledging we never fully arrive at it in this life. That’s my dream, the reason I write these essays. I like how a dear friend of mine, a Protestant, puts it: “Truly for unification to occur, we’d all have to change.”

Amen.