Jiminy Cricket. Angel Clarance. The proverbial angel and demon on our shoulders.
The conscience-as-character trope in human storytelling points to a deeply ingrained reality inside the human psyche—albeit one we may not feel in quite the same way we used to. In older pop culture, this characterization highlighted that every person faces moral dilemmas. The decision is up to the protagonist to choose right or choose wrong. As you can tell from the examples above, however, this theme has largely lost relevance in our present-day media.
Where the voice-from-without used to guide the hero along his or her journey to defeat evil, now our heroes (and villains) are often portrayed along “morally gray” lines. Right and wrong are supposedly more a matter of the voice-from-within overcoming circumstance and trauma in order to reach self-actualization.
Of course, the stories we tell reveal a great deal about our cultural sense of what is true, good, and beautiful. Conforming to right and wrong “out there” has largely been abandoned and replaced with illuminating and conforming to the truth “in here.” In short, we have replaced “doing what’s right” with “following one’s heart.”
Rather than lamenting the superiority of the bygone era, I would like to argue that our current cultural imagination presents us with a great opportunity in the moral formation of our students. Even if the conscience-on-the-shoulder is less explicit than it once was, that does not mean that the sense of conscience has gone completely mute. In fact, I would argue the opposite is true. If anything, conscience has become even more influential as the older models of ethics have receeded. Now, the conscience must speak. With the rejection of external moral influences, the internal moral influence sings all the more loudly.
Thus, on the one hand, as youth ministers, we must understand and teach that the Bible has a true, objective, and external ethical calling. Meanwhile, we must seek to disciple students and to form their internal consciences to sing along to that same tune. The following are biblical truths that help us practically.
1.) The conscience is a God-given faculty and is useful for life.
Our consciences represent a common grace. Human beings are those made in the image of God for the purpose of knowing him, loving him, and having a worshipful relationship with him. In many ways, the conscience is nothing more than the God-given faculty that sounds the alarm when we are out of step with these purposes.
This internal compass is always operating. It inescapably cries out to condemn where we fall short, even where the Law of God is not explicitly acknowledged. Just think of Paul’s words in Romans 2:14: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.”
This means that just because our cultural climate may not appeal to the same objective standards of morality it once did, it’s not an indication that the conscience has gone silent. Our students still feel guilty! They still feel anxious! They still have a sense of justice, equity, morality, right, and wrong (perhaps an even stronger one)! These are not indicators of an internal sense of morality that is lacking, but, in fact, symptoms of very active consciences.
Thus, simply because the flavor of moral imagination has changed in our time, that does not mean that the internal, subjective aspect of conscience has gone by the wayside. It is still there and we do well to make sure we still appeal to it often in our teaching our students. It is still the God-given faculty whereby we all internally sense that we are not what we should be and do not act how we ought.
2.) The conscience is fallen and thus fallible.
It may seem counterintuitive, but I would argue the issue in our day is not the abandonment of the conscience, but rather the absolutizing of it. The call to “follow your heart,” “live your truth,” and the like are all actually calls to make your lived experience the absolute standard for yourself.
The issue with this, of course, is that we are all fallen. All of us, from head to toe, are tainted by sin. Even the conscience, though a God-given faculty, is not immune from this pollution. It is malformed and misdirected. It condemns us where God’s law acquits, and acquits where the God’s law condemns.
So where one mistake in the moral formation of our students may be to ignore the conscience completely and simply moralize, another is to so emphasize the conscience that it becomes the functionally infallible compass of morality. In a word, we can mistakenly “spiritualize” the biggest issue in the moral vision of modernity. Another way to say this is that appeals to conscience are necessary in moral formation, but they are a means, not an end.
3.) Appeal to and then direct the conscience.
One way to think about this may be to look at Paul’s example as he debates the Athenians in Acts 17. Seeing all of the idols saturating the city, he makes a direct appeal to their consciences.
“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.”
Acts 17:22
Paul knows that their idolatry reveals not the absence of conscience, but the misdirected, malformed expression of a conscience that cannot but help seeking to worship God even if it does not know him properly. Paul then seeks to direct their right impulse to its true expression.
“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”
Acts 17:23
Their felt sense of religiosity has primed their hearts so that Paul may make an appeal to something that is familiar within them in order to expose them to truth outside of them. The issue is not their desire to worship. Their conscience correctly compels them to worship. The issue is rather the object of that worship. Their conscience acquits a form of worship that God’s law condemns.
This “inside out” movement is the key to appeals to conscience in our students. As we build relationships with them, we should have an ear open to the ways that they articulate their own felt sense of morality—even if it directly opposes the biblical standard! Perhaps this is on issues of sexuality. Perhaps it is on issues of justice. In whatever way it manifests, we should be seeking to hear the conscience so that we may identify the reality beneath it crying out to know truth.
“How can a good God send people to hell?” “Why does God care who I love or who that person chooses to be romantic with?” “Why don’t Christians do more to help marginalized people?” All of these are perennial questions that have surfaced time and time again in my own conversations with students. In talking with other youth ministers, I know I am not alone.
These questions present us with an opportunity to engage rather than a fire to squash. They reveal a great deal about the questioner’s internal sense of morality—they all reveal the conscience! The premises and framing of our students’ questions will often show us where the pressure points of “right and wrong” are welling up from within.
Rather than dismissing the questions out of turn and simply telling them “Because God said so” or, “you just have to believe,” like Paul, we must identify the right impulse, and then direct it to its proper end. Only by listening carefully to the sense of conscience within our students questions can we then move to introduce that “alien” righteousness of Christ that is the true desire of their heart. “I perceive that in every way you desire justice, equality, love, companionship”—whatever it may be! And then we can say “what you desire as unknown, this I declare to you—Jesus has done everything necessary for you to know God, have eternal life, and flourish.”
He does this not in a temple made by human hands, not in a relationship comprised of human partners, not in a politic of human origin. Instead, it is only the outworking of the divine will to reveal himself to us and reconcile us back to himself through the person of his Son, Jesus Christ.
The gospel is the rest we need.
St. Augustine famously said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” As regards our consciences then, the gospel is more than just a tool to make sure our students don’t do certain undesirable behaviors. It is rather the rest for the weary, downtrodden soul—for the conscience pricked by a million little needles unsure when it may finally find the comfort of forgiveness. Our world demands much of our students. It makes constant appeals to them to back this cause or speak out against this injustice all the while, their internal compasses are crying out that they are not good enough and likely never will be.
Only, it is all a mirage taking a false form of what we all truly need—which is the rest, hope, comfort, and peace offered to us by the cross of Christ. Only in the gospel does the conscience find respite, for “even where our hearts condemn, he is greater than our hearts” (1 John 3:20).
For more resources on teaching the Bible to teenagers, consider Rooted’s Bible-based curriculum, available on Rooted Reservoir.
