Moral Conscience and the Experience of God

Abstract

I am making a systematic theological point about the relationship between moral conscience and the experience of God. While the same theme may be taken up as a moral theological question, my intention is to explicate in part the meaning of ‘God’ as implied by the Christian witness of faith, and so I am approaching the theme as a systematic theologian and not from the perspective of moral theology. That is, I intend to ask primarily about the significance of moral conscience for understanding our experience of God, and not vice versa.Clearly the phrase ‘the experience of God’ is systematically ambiguous, and I will argue that the term ‘moral conscience’ or ‘dictates of conscience’ is also systematically ambiguous, and that recognition of this ambiguity helps us resolve a cluster of philosophical and theological problems that accompany any assertion that moral conscience is a mode of the experience of God. (‘The experience of God’ is also grammatically an ambiguous phrase, of course. Here I will be using it as an objective genitive unless otherwise indicated.)My central hypothesis is that the experience of moral conscience is a primary mode of the experience of God, if not the most important mode. This hypothesis is hardly without controversy: at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when D.F. Schleiermacher argued against any simple identification of moral conscience and religious experience, it has been recognized to be complex and problematic. Schleiermacher wrote in 1799 that religion ‘must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs’ (Schleiermacher, 31).