Conscience as Knowing-With Others

How I changed my mind about radical individualist understandings of conscience

Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash

Someone recently asked me how I came to my understanding of conscience as a “knowing-with” others rather than an radical self knowledge like we tend to think of it. I certainly spent most of my life thinking of conscience as this deeply private, intimate, individualistic voice, shaped by the Holy Spirit but expressed primarily (if not exclusively) through feelings of “peace” and other positive emotions, which I’ve written about recently. I think part of this came from my charismatic upbringing and hearing people often talk about having “peace about a decision” or having “the Spirit” tell them things or “not feeling right” about someone. Some of it would be rational, but a lot of it was just a subtle voice of condemnation (never affirmation). In that understanding, my “conscience” was one of the strongest and earliest forces in my life, judging me and my actions against a shifting and emotionally-driven standard. As I aged, I came to trust more in the gift of wisdom and discernment that God had given me to shape my conscience, but even there, I often found myself getting stuck in mental gymnastics. I would try to use reason to get to an emotional state of peace, but rarely found it. Instead, my conscience would condemn me even when wisdom said I was not condemned! For me, it wasn’t until a friend reminded me that in English (and apparently the Greek) the world “conscience” literally means to “know-with” that I began to rethink my understanding of conscience as a radically autonomous inner voice.