Truth in the Inward Parts

on the difference between conscience and the heart

I’m a little lost and wondering if you have any thoughts about making a distinction between the conscience and the heart. In Being Transfigured you argue against pietism and its proclivity to emphasize the conscience (how we feel about sin). But in a recent teaching on trauma and healing you talked about trusting our hearts (Ps 16) as the way God speaks to us. Do you think there’s a distinction to be made between the conscience and the heart? Or is the “heart” the “conscience” rightly ordered?

Cameron Combs sent me this question the other day, and I thought it’d be worth sharing my response, if only to spark some new lines of reflection.

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Karl Rahner defines conscience as “that element in man's experience of freedom which makes him aware of his responsibility,” and suggests that “the biblical term for conscience is the heart, in which God's will is written (Rom 2:15).”¹ To have a pure heart, he says, is to “act out of inner conviction.” And that acting out depends upon the assumption of responsibility—to God, self, and the communities one belongs to—and the “obedient acceptance of the reality which is prior to freedom.” He admits that what he has said does not “settle the question whether in fact the conscience adequately recognizes truth”; for the conscience to be truthful it must be awakened by divine revelation and trained through moral and theological formation. Said differently, moral awareness and conviction are not “naturally” good, so, without grace, the witness of the conscience is finally unreliable. The heart must be converted and trained to love as it ought. Conscience must be freed in order to be freeing.

Joseph Ratzinger, commenting on Gaudium et Spes, speaks of conscience as transcendent: “It is the law written in the heart by God, the holy place in which man is alone with God and hears God’s voice in his innermost center.”² In a 1991 keynote address at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, however, Ratzinger draws attention to the story of the Pharisee and tax collector in Luke 18:9-14 in order to illustrate a contrast between a living conscience and a dead one:

The Pharisee no longer knows that he too has guilt. He has a completely clear conscience. But this silence of conscience makes him impenetrable to God and men, while the cry of conscience that plagues the tax collector makes him capable of truth and love.³

From this, Ratzinger concludes that Jesus can reach and touch sinners, but not the “righteous,” because they are “hiding behind the screen of their erroneous consciences,” so that their hearts no longer accuse them but justify them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer takes a similar line—but takes it further than Ratzinger would take it. As a natural faculty, conscience is born of the attempt to justify oneself, so that self-judgment is an act of faithless autonomy. As Clifford Green explains, conscience for Bonhoeffer is the voice of “sinful self-reflection… [and] in no way the voice of Christ.” Conscience is actually opposed to faith, for faith “looks solely to Christ (actus directus) and away from the self.”⁴ In the end, then, to be saved is to be freed from self-awareness and self-justification into Christ-directed (in both senses of the term) love for God and neighbor.