Last week we discussed the “secret” to getting along with one another in church: holding all our opinions and judgments with open hands and with a kind of levity and lightness; recognizing the Lord has the Last Word on all things.

This week is a kind of part two to last week. In 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 Paul teaches us the key to taking our judgmental hands off of our neighbors and ourselves. It’s a liberating message; truly good news! You don’t have to carry the burden of being the final judge and arbiter of others or even yourself. In Jesus we find that freedom.

The key, as Paul outlines it, is to recognize that your conscience (that part of you that acts as the judge of all things, adjudicating between good and evil) is not God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it, our consciences bring about disunity with God, our neighbors, and ourselves. It attempts to make us “gods against God.”

Bonhoeffer says:

Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men.

We have to have the ability to make a distinction between our conscience and the final judgment of the Lord Jesus. Paul is clear that the conscience is involved in “pre-judice” (literally, judgment “before the time, before the Lord comes”). Judgment of others and ourselves “before the time” is prejudice, and we must recognize the provisional and secondary nature of those judgments. They are not the Last Word on anything.

But there is another key distinction we have to make between the conscience and the heart. The heart is the very center of who you are which is made by God, and is a good thing. The heart is the place where God speaks to you. (See this insightful lecture from Chris Green for more on the heart.)

The problem we come up against is that we have hard hearts—hearts of stone—which are insensitive. Having a heart of stone makes it so that there is no space between your conscience (the judgmental faculty in you) and your heart. You become your judgments and your judgments are final. They are God’s judgments.

The promise, as Ezekiel puts it, is that God will give us a new heart to replace the heart of stone. By his Spirit God gives us fleshy, tender hearts that are sensitive to his speaking.

A tender, fleshy heart provides space between you and the thoughts that occur to you from the periphery of your awareness, between you and the emotions that bubble up from within, and between you and your conscience, your prejudices (pre-judgments) that come to you without reflection. The tender heart God gives allows for a deeper self-awareness, which is intimately connected and intertwined with God-awareness.

John Calvin explains this intertwining of self-awareness and God-awareness like this:

Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.

The key is to have a heart that can pay attention and name the thoughts, emotions, and prejudices that come to you.

Diagram 1: In the “I-It” way of relating to others the “I” is in total control. Everyone else is made into an “It,” an object or a tool for the “I” to use. There is no genuine personhood granted to the “It.” It is the relationship of a master to a slave. It is possession. The “It” has no agency. The “It” has no voice; no ability to say “No” to the other.

Diagram 2: In the “I-You” way of relating we have genuine personhood on both sides. I am an “I” and you are an “I.” This begins in the ability to say “No” to another person. The “No” provides the other with a limit or boundary that they bump up against which lets them know they are dealing with another person, not an “It.” That limit teaches us that we are not God. We are limited. Our judgments are not God’s judgments. And it is Christ who makes possible the genuine relationship between “I” and “You.” He is the space between us that we must leave to others if we are to have a true relationship with them because his word is the Final Word.

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