Is our Conscience Infallible?

I’ve been wanting to write about the human conscience for a while now because of the hard lessons I’ve learned about it over my lifetime.  

Growing up Christian, I tended to think that conscience is law.  That to not follow conscience is tantamount to disobeying God.  The truth about conscience; however, is more complex than that. 

The human conscience is a good thing and listening to it is often a wise thing to do. Even in Christianity, however, we must acknowledge that our conscience has been affected by sin entering the world. 

Therefore, conscience alone is not infallible; it must be formed and informed by the Word of God.  In other words, the conviction of the Holy Spirit is not always synonymous with the feelings of our conscience.  

Consider this Scripture: “…for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.” 1 John 3:20.  

On this passage, Charles Spurgeon comments: “Sometimes our heart condemns us, but, in doing so, it gives a wrong verdict, and then we have the satisfaction of being able to take the case into a higher court, for ‘God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.’”

Revelation 12:10 also reminds that the devil is called the “Accuser of our brothers and sisters” and he “accuses them before our God day and night”.

Professional Counselor, Ed Welch, runs into faulty consciences often in his practice. He warns, “Don’t forget that your sensors for guilt and shame are fallible. They can be silent when they should say something, and they can also sound false alarms.” (Shame Interrupted, p.11)

You don’t have to be a Christian, though, to suffer from a faulty conscience. While most consciences are healthy and well worth listening to, there are exceptions.  On one extreme we can consider the sociopath, who has little to no conscience nor cares much for how other people feel. 

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have people like me, who suffer with Moral OCD (or Scrupulosity). This condition denotes a highly overactive conscience that can lead its victim to great internal pain and outward awkwardness. 

Alan Noble, an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, writes about his Scrupulosity:  “What nobody told me was that your conscience, or what feels like your conscience, can be entirely mistaken through no fault of your own. Just like it’s possible to feel no guilt when you should, it’s possible to feel guilt or anxiety or shame over things that you shouldn’t feel bad about at all. Nobody told me how your mind can be your own worst enemy. How it can fixate on imaginary sins.”

My hope is that this will reach the person who is battling with an faulty conscience – whether it be a small problem or a clinical condition – with the hope that your conscience is not the be-all and end-all of your life. For the Christian this means that, through the Word of God, the Holy Spirit, input from our brothers and sisters and even professional help, we can find freedom. 

The Gospel tells us that we are all actually all guilty before God but we can be, in Christ, fully redeemed and have “no condemnation” (Romans 8:1)