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The importance of indigestion: conscience as both judgment and feeling

 Glen Scrivener did a brilliant piece a while ago on gendercide:



The point was - doesn't the selective termination of girl babies just give you at least a bit of an icky feeling? Isn't there something gut churning? Don't you feel some sort of rising nausea? Sure, you can quell it with some indigestion tablets but there's something in your initial reaction that's true and real. 

The Bible talks about conscience as having two aspects. One is judgment - e.g. Rom. 2:15 - the conscience bears witness, accuses, defends. It is a function of the mind, a miniature courtroom. The other aspect is feeling - e.g. 1 Tim. 4:2 - a sensitivity that can be seared as with a hot iron. It is a matter of the heart and right affections.

Both these aspects are important and inextricably linked. The judgment aspect means this is about evidence and truth. Without this it is pure emotion and sentimentality. It is possible to feel wrongly. We need to have our consciences 'educated' - aligned with truth and reality, through the light of God's Word. But we also need the aspect of feeling rightly. We are not just machines making right calculations about things. As Jonathan Edwards showed, affections are the greater part of true religion. It's vital that we love good and hate evil, are revolted by sin and devoted to Christ. This was what the Old Testament commended and the New Testament secured by the Spirit of Christ - a circumcised heart - an end to the calloused, hard, unfeeling heart; a new sensitivity that mourns when it should mourn and rejoices when it should rejoice. 

All this is to say that feelings matter. This is the way conscience 'works' - it makes us not only know but also feel a sense of wrongness. And that sense is often in the gut. That's where the ancient and biblical world often located emotion and particularly feelings of distress over wrongness. The Greek word splanchnon - meaning literally the internal organs of the abdomen - is often translated 'compassion' in the New Testament or 'tenderness'. Even in modern English we might say we were 'gutted' or talk about something awful as 'stomach churning'.

But here's the problem - the more you suppress your conscience, the more you ignore the feeling and act against it, the more calloused / seared / unfeeling your conscience becomes.

And here's the thing I'm wrestling with. In the last couple of years there seem to be an increasing number of issues where I can't put my finger on it exactly or work out all the arguments or bring out an overwhelming number of peer reviewed scientific papers but... "it just doesn't feel quite right."
  • When you can't welcome someone with a smile and a handshake or comfort someone with a look of sympathy and a hand on the shoulder, because you're masked and distanced... there's something that just doesn't feel right.
  • When teenagers (from an Aboriginal community) are sent to an internment camp simply for being 'close contacts', test negative, climb the fence and escape, are hunted down arrested, sent back to internment and threatened with 'consequences' [Independent, December 2021]... there's something that just doesn't feel right. 
  • When a prophylactic is produced using a cell line from the kidney of an aborted baby girl... there's something that just doesn't feel right. 
  • When a minority, who do not consent to be injected with said prophylactic against their conscience, are treated differently, locked down, bullied... there's something that just doesn't feel right. 
  • When government reach extends to supervising and reserving the right to control the movement and medication of its citizens... there's something that just doesn't feel right.
You can use sophisticated scientific and philosophical arguments to explain why some or all of these examples are fine, acceptable, justifiable, right, even vitally necessary. Maybe that's right. But isn't there something gut-unsettling and disturbing here? Have we acknowledged and examined those feelings in the light of God's Word? Are we talking about them with godly brothers and sisters? Or are we just suppressing the nausea? 

How long can we safely do that?

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