Thoughts on conscience, iv

Don't get me wrong: our rationality, intelligence, and experiences are definitely gifts from God. But throughout salvation history, God's children have tended to put their faith in the gift rather than the Giver, and it has always caused trouble:

• In the beginning, Adam and Eve put their trust in the fruit of the tree rather than in the loving creator who instructed them to avoid it. I believe it is no accident or coincidence that the original sin involved the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Salvation history is replete with our self-deterministic missteps. Even if the story of The Fall were a mere fable, it would be the most insightful one ever told
  
• The children of Israel came to worship the bronze serpent which God instructed Moses to make to heal them from the deadly bite of the fiery serpents
• Even thousands of years ago we overvalued our own intelligence; why else would God warn through Isaiah that "as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts"
• Today, we have rampant materialism, alcoholism, and hedonism, in addition to rationalism and experientialism, not to mention the predominance of relativism - I'm sure we could come up with many more such "isms"
• Spiritually, some invest too much effort into seeking signs and wonders, or some form of spiritual high
  

Each of these represents an overzealous embracing of some category of God's good gifts. For each example above, its opposite would be the utter rejection of the gift (these lists may not correspond point-for-point . . . ):

• Refusing to consider issues of right and wrong, just going along by inertia
  
• Rejection of sound medical care or other healing
• Dismissing intelligence, rationality, and experience, blindly following what I’m told to do by some “authority,” and forcibly imposing my views of morality on everyone else
• Disdaining all comfort and pleasure
• Insisting there must be a rational physical explanation for everything, and refusing to believe God is at work in any tangible way
  

With every gift God has created, a healthy perspective seems to be somewhere in the middle, with room to err on either side. So it is with conscience. At one extreme lies Pharisaic legalism, emphasizing conformance to every jot and tittle of the law (church teaching, etc.) even at the expense of love, compassion, and mercy. At the other is our ability to rationalize whatever it is that we really want to do. In each direction lie many gradations.

And yet the Church teaches us that our conscience is to be our primary moral guide. She doesn't really want to encourage us to act independently, but only insofar as we agree with Her, does she?

I believe we’re getting there . . .