Conscience – our interior guide to the rightness or wrongness of our behavior – must not be confused with the voice of God. Our sense of right and wrong belongs to our nature, not God’s, and, as such, is sinful, fallible, fractured. It arises from our own desire to remain in control of ourselves, and stands under the judgment of the cross.
We humans are possessed of the capacity for self-transcendence, which enables us to stand in judgment on ourselves. Take, for instance, a statement like this: “I hate myself for doing that.” Identity is the relation between the judging “I” and the judged “myself.” The closer the relation of these discreet selves the more integral one’s personality.
The dis-ease of guilt emerges when these selves are in conflict, when the judging “I” is at odds with the judged “myself.” Obviously, this conflict is undesirable – more than that, it is unacceptable. So we work to undo this split by any means possible.
Essentially, then, conscience is about self-control. It is our attempt to retain autonomy. This is not all bad, of course. It is important that we have integrity, that our judging self and our judged self remain in harmony. However, we must not mistake this for God’s voice. In the final analysis, conscience often – if not always – serves as a sophisticated mechanism of self-defense. Most of the time, our sense of guilt is a defense against the truth.
And the truth is in the cross. There we see we are at odds with the true and the good. We are at odds with God and with one another – and with ourselves. We know our guilt not in subjective experience but in openness to God’s judgment as revealed in the Gospel (Rom 1.16-18).
