Before jumping into 1 Corinthians 5, this week we took some time to unpack the distinction between the heart and the conscience. The distinction is key, I think, to understanding how Paul is continuing to make judgments of the Corinthian congregation (1 Cor. 5) even after he has made the point in 1 Cor. 4 that only Christ is the final judge with the last word.

(My thanks to Chris Green for helping me think through the distinction between the heart and the conscience. He wrote up his response to my question on his substack, which you can find here.)

Making a distinction between the heart and the conscience is not a necessary way of speaking. Depending on what people mean by the terms, they may be completely interchangeable and that can be a perfectly fine way of speaking. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, however, critiques the conscience as something that is a result of the fall. Conscience is at the root of sin. For Bonhoeffer, the conscience is “in no way the voice of Christ” (Clifford Green). In this way of speaking, the conscience is always opposed to true faith because it is concerned only with self-justification. And I think Bonhoeffer’s critique is worth preserving.

Bonhoeffer puts it this way in his lecture notes for the underground seminary in Finkenwalde:

Whoever is one, whole, unbroken, has no conscience. Those in the middle, between good and evil, have a conscience...Having a conscience means that a person is between good and evil. To every person conscience says: you did something bad, only because I know about good [vs. evil]...This is why there is no completely good or completely bad human being, as long as conscience [exists]. As long as we have conscience, we cannot be as good as Jesus wants us to be. The goodness of conscience is something different from the goodness of Christ...Ultimately our conscience must die so that Christ alone may live within us. Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer.

Or, as Bonhoeffer says it in Ethics: “Christ becomes our conscience.”

Chris Green put it to me like this:

Another way of getting at all this is to say that the heart is there first. We see it in the childlike response to injustice. The conscience develops, forms, over time. And often ends up stifling the childlikeness.

There is a type of judgment that comes from being united to Christ, which Paul displays in 1 Cor. 5. Paul is able to make a true judgment on the man who is sleeping with his father’s wife because Paul’s heart is rightly oriented to Christ. His judgment (“hand this man over to Satan”) is true only because it is for the man’s good (“so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord”).

We are called by Paul to make judgments in church (not outside, though!). But this is a whole new sort of judgment. It is patterned after the judgment of Jesus. Jesus’s judgment is always for others, not against them.

Our own faulty judgments that spring from our conscience are usually violating to our neighbors. They are attempts to exclude them for the sake of exclusion. This is the problematic judgment of the conscience. But Paul’s judgment on this man is a judgment to exclude him for the sake of including him.

If we are ever going to make truthful judgments of others and of ourselves, Christ must become our conscience. His love for others has to become our love for them.

The judgment of God is always for us and our neighbors. It has as its aim reconciliation, not division. The gospel reveals that God is not against us. He is for us. But as Paul is showing us here God will be against us if he has to be, but only ever for us. It’s like the judgment of a surgeon. A surgeon only ever applies the knife against the patient to remove what is killing him.

George Macdonald explains the “fire” of God’s judgment this way:

It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship; but that the fire will burn us until we worship; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force.

Diagram: The heart is the deep center of us, the place where God speaks to us. The conscience (our faculty of judgment which is formed by the way we were raised, by the time in which we were born, and the communities we belong to) develops over time and ends up imprisoning the heart (creating what Scripture calls a “hard heart”). Our hearts cannot lie to us, but they can be deceived. The conscience can pull the heart in all sorts or directions because it “pretends to be the voice of God.” True faith—the process of discipleship—is about having our hearts rightly oriented to Christ as our conscience. Discipleship is about Christ becoming our true center, giving us a clean heart (not a clean conscience!), teaching us his truth in our inward being, and making known to us his wisdom in our secret heart (Ps. 51). The conscience deals in abstractions, ideas, rules, and laws. Discipleship (or, the process of sanctification) is about coming into alignment not with our ideas of Jesus, but with the person of Jesus. Christ must becomes our conscience.

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