The Aim of Our Charge A Good Conscience- Part 1

Transcript (edited for readability).

I bring you grace and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. It's a great joy to be here with you this afternoon, and to see so many familiar faces. Please excuse me if I recognize the face but don't remember the name — I'll need to look down. But you won't be able to know my name, because I've got it here in small print. Which is the way it should be. I bring you greetings, too, from my wife, Claire, who would have been here, as Hal explained, if not for the fact that her mother is in her last days. I also bring you greetings from Pastor John Henderson, the Bishop of the Lutheran Church of Australia, and my colleagues from Australian Lutheran College.

Every now and then, when people find out that I'm a doctor — and it happens that they are too — their eyes light up, and the usual question is, "Well, John, what kind of a doctor are you?" Now, that puts me in a bit of a quandary, because if I say I'm a doctor of philosophy, which technically I am, they think I'm an egghead. If I say I'm a doctor of theology, they have a blank look on their faces. Oh, and then they say, "Oh, so you're interested in rocks, are you?" So I tell them I'm a cardiologist. Which is what I am. And which is what each of you pastors are. More about that in due course.

To summarize everything I'm going to say this afternoon and tomorrow morning and afternoon, however long it takes, in two sentences: a good conscience is a foretaste of heaven; a bad conscience is a foretaste of hell.

Now, this afternoon I want to deal with the first part of your handout, in two sessions. So, midway through that first part of the handout, we'll have a pause, and I'll better keep track of the time too.

What's our purpose? Or, for those of you who are pastors, what's the aim of your charge as a pastor? I put it to you that the goal of all people who are in ministry, whether they are pastors or lay workers, is to deliver a good conscience to people. That's the goal of your ministry, whatever it may be.

Just a few weeks ago, I had to visit my doctor, who's a wonderful Lutheran lay theologian, to get my ears syringed — I had a buildup of wax. And it seems to happen every time I either am about to go overseas or am overseas that my ears get blocked. I don't know if there's some spiritual significance in that. But I visited him. It wasn't too bad, but I didn't want my ears blocked when I came over here. And he wanted to know what I was talking about, so I explained that I was speaking at Doxology, which he knows about and values very highly, about conscience — and his ears pricked up. We had a lengthy, far too lengthy conversation, which, thankfully, he didn't charge me for. He charged the government. And as we talked, he got going, and he said, "Look, John, one of the problems I face almost every day is that most of the people who come to see me should be seeing somebody like you. Most of them have a bad conscience. I can't deal with it, for ethical reasons. And even if I did raise the issue with them, they would clam up, and that would be the last I'd see of them."

Which reminded me of an episode that happened about fifteen, twenty years ago. I was at a family Christmas celebration — extended family. There was an uncle of my wife's — I'd better not name him — who was there, and we got talking over a beer outside. It's summertime, and it's quite hot, so we do quite a lot of drinking over Christmas. We were having a beer together, and he kind of edged me aside and opened up to me. He repeated what my doctor had said, but he added a few more things. He was an old man then, about to retire. He said, "Look, John, I can't take it anymore." A few months earlier — about six months earlier — there had been a bit of a scandal in the family because he'd had a breakdown. Nobody knew what had happened or what kind of breakdown it was, but he'd had a breakdown. He said, "Look, I can't stand it anymore. Most of the people who see me should be seeing somebody like you. But that's the last person they would ever dare to visit, let alone open up to."

Do you realize that we live in a society — this is my estimation of Australia, I don't know what things are like in the US, but I think it's probably worse here — which has, individually and collectively, a bad conscience? And it doesn't know why it has a bad conscience. The more it tries to get rid of its bad conscience, the worse it becomes. And I say "we live" as a nation because it's not just at an individual level — it goes all the way up to the political level, the public level. Just about three years ago, we had a very important national event in which the Prime Minister of Australia, together with all our political leaders, publicly apologized to the Aboriginal community for the treatment we had dealt out to them — a public apology for things the nation wasn't doing now, but had done in the past. It's as if your country apologized for slavery, which doesn't exist anymore.

It's a problem that pervades our society, and I don't think you can understand what's going on — I don't think you can understand what Obama's doing, and what's happening in Congress — unless you see that the issue is connected with the issue of conscience. That's my reading, anyway.

Okay, our charge is to deliver a good conscience. Now, as I said, I'm a cardiologist. I'm a doctor — not just a doctor of theology, but a spiritual doctor. Now, what's the charge of anybody who's a doctor? I know this fairly well because I've got two sons who are medical doctors, physicians. Well, it's quite simple. The charge of a doctor, the mandate of a doctor, the commission of a doctor, is to prevent sickness if possible and promote good health. That's the positive side. Negatively, it's to diagnose and treat sickness.

Now, anybody who's involved in spiritual work is involved in something like this. A pastor's charge, a pastor's responsibility, is similar to the doctor's. Pastors are involved in cardionomics. Now, that's a fancy Greek-derived word for the knowledge of, or the science of, the heart — not the heart physically, but the heart as the center of a human being: the human spirit, the human soul, the human conscience.

What's our task? It's to deal with spiritual sickness. The whole world, every human being, is spiritually sick. Some of us are on the way to recovery, but none of us have fully recovered. The church, if you like, is a hospital. The leaders of the church are the medics.

Now, what's the symptom of our spiritual sickness? You know, when you go to visit a doctor, the most important thing he does is the diagnosis — he diagnoses the symptoms. He asks how you've been feeling, what's wrong with you, what's been happening, et cetera. There's one simple symptom — whereas there are many symptoms in medicine, there is one simple and yet immensely complex symptom for spiritual sickness — and that's a bad conscience.

And what's the treatment? Whereas the doctor has many different ways of treating many different diseases, we have basically one way of treating spiritual sickness: the Word of God, together with the Spirit of God. In fact, the thing we use for diagnosis is also the thing we use for the treatment of spiritual sickness — the Word of God, and the Spirit of God through the Word of God.

There's a call in the New Testament, and in the church, for all pastors and all church workers to become experts in matters of conscience. If I have one aim for myself as a pastor and as a Christian, it's that I know my own conscience, and am therefore an expert at dealing with and treating the consciences of others. You see, there's no shortcut. You can be a good doctor without being sick yourself and experiencing the treatment of your own sickness. But you can't be a person who's an expert in pastoral care without yourself understanding, knowing, your own conscience. Your own conscience is part of your training to offer spiritual care to others.

In fact, over the years that I was at the seminary, assessing people for readiness for ministry, that was one of the criteria I would employ: to what extent was this candidate for ministry on the way to becoming an expert in his own conscience, and in that way, in the conscience of others.

There's an amazing claim in the Letter to the Hebrews, which means a lot to me. At present, as Hal said, I'm writing a commentary on Hebrews, and toward the end of the letter, the author of Hebrews — who's obviously a pastor, we don't know who he is, but he is a pastor, that's clear, and the letter is a sermon — says this about himself and all other pastors. Notice the "we" — that's the ministerial "we": the apostles, all pastors, all people involved in ministry. He says, "We" — pastors, we people involved in spiritual care — "are sure that we have" what? A good conscience, "desiring to act honorably in all things." "Honorably" could also be translated "expertly," or "well" — it's literally "to act well in all things."

Notice here that a good conscience comes first; ministry comes as a result of it. If you have a good conscience, then you will be good at ministry. That's the basic qualification for ministry.

Now, for many years, the issue of conscience had fallen off the agenda — first of all out there in the world publicly, and then the church, which stupidly always copies the world and is about a generation behind, dropped conscience from the agenda too. I don't know exactly when, but sometime after the Second World War. And if you scan the literature, you'll find very little of substance from theologians, and pastoral theologians particularly, on matters of conscience.

However, it's back on the agenda now. And who's put it back on the agenda? Not the church, but the world. It's President Obama who's put it back on the agenda for you, in a big way. And it's begun to be back on the agenda in a big way in the church too. I see what's happening in the US from a long distance, and the telescope's not very good, so it's not always clear to see what's going on. But for me, one of the most scandalous documents to appear here in the recent decade — more than a decade ago, actually — was the 2009 statement on human sexuality, "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust," from our fellow Lutheran brothers and sisters in the ELCA. It's a scandalous document, and I don't want to tut-tut about it, but what it's done is put conscience back on the agenda — if not the right understanding of conscience, then by the typical postmodern distortion of reality. You use the old labels, but you gut the content from inside.

Well, that statement from the ELCA is not unique — it merely articulates the postmodern challenge to the traditional understanding of what conscience is, and particularly the way Christians understand conscience. You see, we've always understood that the human conscience is bound by something outside itself — namely, by law. And within the church, it's bound by God's Word. So God's Word binds our human consciences.

Well, they use that terminology, "conscience," and they talk about the "bound conscience," and they use it to justify homosexuality. Once again, a slippery word, because the issue is not homosexuality but sodomy — anal intercourse and oral male intercourse. It's not the condition but the activity. They justify homosexuality with the dubious appeal to conscience. Now, so many Lutherans are so badly catechized that as soon as they hear the word "conscience," they say, "Oh, if it's conscience, then it must be good, it must be right." They speak about the "bound conscience" of those who approve of homosexual intercourse — the bound conscience, a good old Lutheran word. Not just Lutheran, by the way — it's Catholic and Episcopalian too.

They speak about the bound conscience of those who approve of homosexual intercourse. And what's the conscience bound by? By the sincere faith of those who hold sincerely held beliefs. So let's say I'm a gay person. I sincerely believe, in my own conscience, that it's okay to practice anal or oral intercourse with another man, and I am sincere — not just is my faith sincere, but it's sincerely held. And so there's the basic understanding that any or all beliefs — it doesn't matter what they are — bind the conscience, which, if you look at it closely, is patently absurd. Hitler and Stalin were sincere. They were quite sincere. They held their beliefs sincerely. They were sincere beliefs, but that doesn't make fascism or communism right. We've lost our ability to think clearly.

So the conscience is bound by beliefs, and those beliefs are the norm for the conscience, rather than God's Word, let alone His commandments. And it's far worse than that, because they also demand respect for the conscience-bound beliefs of the neighbor. Okay? I'm a gay person. I not only want recognition of the fact that I am sincere, but I demand that you respect me, and that you approve of what I'm doing. Since it's a matter of conscience for me that I'm a homosexual, and it's okay, then you must not just tolerate me, but you must recognize me and approve of me.

Now, what's being articulated here is a very common position in our society, where what matters is sincerity rather than truth. The important thing is that you have the right motivation. The motivation to do something makes something right. So as long as you have the right reason for doing something, or the goal is good, then it doesn't matter what you do — you are justified in doing it. And the presupposition of this document from our fellow Lutherans is that the voice of conscience, basically, is the voice of God. The conscience is no longer bound by the Word of God.

Oh — let me come back to that positively. By the way, as we go, because I realize we have a lot of lay people, and people here for whom this may be rather difficult: if you don't understand anything I'm saying, please put up your hand and I'll try to clarify. I'm aware, too, that I'm covering a huge area in a very short space of time, and you need to do a lot of gap-filling to make sense of it. So don't be scared to put up your hand and say, "Now, what do you mean by that? I don't follow you," or whatever the case may be.

Now, for us Lutherans, the foundational text — the classical text, what the dogmaticians used to call the sedes doctrinae — the foundational text, and the way it works, is from Paul's first letter to Timothy, chapter one, verses three to seven. First Timothy 1:3–7. I'll read it to you. It's quite a long passage, and you may want to go back to it to make full sense of it.

This is what Paul says to Timothy, whom he sent to Ephesus to straighten out the mess in the church there. Timothy is like a young pastor who just graduated from seminary and is faced with straightening out this dysfunctional congregation. And Paul, therefore, writes the letter for him to take along for his own benefit, so he knows what he's required to do, but also to present to the people and say, "This is what Paul told me to do, or to say."

And right at the beginning, he has this to say — this is the framework for the whole charge that he carries. Paul says, "As I urged you, remain in Ephesus" — stay there for a while — "so that you may charge certain persons" — notice, he doesn't name them, so as not to shame them — "so that you may charge certain persons" — you know who they are — "not to teach any different doctrine" — than the doctrine Paul taught, is understood — "nor devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God, that is by faith. The aim of our charge" — here comes a surprise; I would have expected the aim of our charge to be faith, but he says, no — "the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a sincere faith."

Do you see there — conscience between pure heart and sincere faith? So once again, the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.

"Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding that the law is not laid down for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and insubordinate, the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and sacrilegious, for those who strike or murder their fathers and mothers, for murderers, adulterers, sodomites" — that is, male homosexual practitioners — "liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the healthy," or sound, or healing, "teaching that is in keeping with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted."

Now, what's the situation of Timothy? Well, Paul's sending Timothy to deal with a troubled congregation — the congregation in Ephesus — which is faced with a lot of the problems that you face, and that we face in Australia. You could almost lay it right on top of some of our congregations. First Timothy is Paul's written brief to Timothy for his visitation, to sort out the chaos in this conflicted congregation.

Now, the broader task — he's not just straightening things out, but more broadly speaking, as a pastor, his broader task is the stewardship that comes from God, that is by faith. Now the word "stewardship" here is the key word. A steward is a housekeeper, a person who keeps a house. We get the term "economics," and "home economy," from this. Economics has to do with housekeeping. The picture is that the church is God's household, God's family, and pastors and church workers are stewards — people who are in charge of God's household. They look after the house, and they manage the resources of the house. But instead of the resources of the house being food and money, the resource that pastors and church workers use is faith. It's the stewardship from God that is by faith. It has to do with faith and the handing on of faith. So it's the responsibility of leaders in the church to keep the faith, to share the faith, and to hand on the faith to all the members of the household — to take care of it, to act as custodians of the faith.

Now, the charge that Paul gives to Timothy — the details of the charge — you'll find in chapter 2 through chapter 4, verse 5. We don't have time to read it, but if you're interested, that's the actual written charge of what he's expected to do.

The basic problem Timothy faces is false teachers in Ephesus. It's not so much the moral immorality in the congregation, of which there's plenty, or even the conflicts in the congregation — the basic problem is false teaching. And the main false teaching is the practice of religious speculation about origins, rather than the handing on of the creed, if you like — the basic articles of faith, the apostolic faith. It's about origins — it has to do with Genesis one, the origins of things, and genealogies. Genealogies have to do with the origins of things. If you wanted to put the closest modern analogy to this, it's something like the theory of evolution, which says that the origin of something determines the way things are.

These teachers not only tried to construct a large worldview and ideology based on the origins of things, but also used the Old Testament law, the ritual law, to promote higher levels of consciousness. Now, the basic thinking here is one that's very common out there in your society and my society. Everybody's spiritual — have you noticed? Everybody's into spirituality. And, by the way, I won't say this too loud, but some of the kind of spirituality that's problematic is being promoted here in this center — that's just an aside.

Now, the whole notion is that through certain practices, negative and positive, you can go from lower levels of physical, carnal consciousness to higher levels of consciousness. And the ultimate goal — usually they spoke of seven levels of consciousness, because that's the perfect number — seven levels of consciousness, and you advance from one level to the next until you reach divine consciousness, where your mind is attuned to the mind of, whatever it is, the cosmic mind, or the mind of God. So the aim was to achieve divine consciousness — that your whole consciousness, not just your mind, is attuned with the divine consciousness.

And two of the key parts of their teaching were to prohibit marriage, and certain foods like meat, because they were spiritually unclean. So you avoided marriage because sex made you more carnal and polluted you, dragged you down physically. So through the practice of celibacy, you overcame the pull of the body and the corruption of the body. You avoided eating meat — you were vegetarian. Now, through these means and others, I won't fill in all the details, the aim was to escape a polluted world. People in the ancient world were obsessed with pollution and living in a polluted environment, very much like the way many of our fellow citizens feel that we live in a polluted environment now. And you've got to overcome this dirt, this uncleanness, this pollution.

What they practiced was a misplaced and misguided quest for spiritual purity. Purity is good, and spiritual purity is good, but the spiritual purity they were aiming for was not spiritual purity at all. And in the quest for spiritual purity, they repudiated the basic teachings of the faith, which, they said, were for the lower level, ordinary Christians — carnal Christians who really believed stupid things like that Jesus, that God, actually became a human being, and died a physical death, and rose from the dead, and that we're going to rise physically from the dead, and God's going to redeem the whole physical — oh, yuck.

They repudiated the basic articles of the faith, and they repudiated a good conscience. And Paul says that their faith, therefore, was shipwrecked, because they rejected faith — and here's the important term — they rejected faith and a good conscience. So, for Paul, it's interesting: the issue was not basically to argue theologically, or ideologically, or philosophically, but he focuses on the issue of conscience, and he says people go into this because they have what? A bad conscience. And in this way, they hope to escape from the grip of a bad conscience.

Now, Paul talks about this as "our charge" — notice the word "our" there. It's the charge that Jesus gave to Paul and all the apostles, that Paul gives to Timothy, and Timothy now gives to the church. So it's a charge, a commission, that Paul has from Christ, and that he wants Timothy to hand on to the church. And it's our charge too.

He makes it quite clear that the goal of your faith, and the goal of your work in the church, your ministry, is the promotion of real, genuine love. That's the goal — love. But love, for Paul, is not defined in our emotional terms; it's defined in terms of the Ten Commandments. I don't know whether you realized that we have a summary of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, in verses 9 and 10 — you can work it out for yourself. The first list has to do with the first three commandments, and then there's a list from the second table of the law.

And Paul makes the point that the law is used rightly when it's used for sinners rather than the righteous. The law is not given in order to reach higher levels of spirituality, for us to use as a ladder to get up to God, but the law is meant for people who are caught in sin. Paul's concern, therefore, is not to deal with the problem using the law, but to use the gospel for sound teaching. Now, "sound teaching," for Paul — sound doctrine — has to do with healthy teaching, healing teaching. So once again, here you see Paul speaking in medical terms. People have a sick conscience, they are spiritually sick, so you need to distinguish rightly between the law, the Ten Commandments, and the gospel, which is sound teaching, to deliver a good conscience to people.

Sound doctrine is very closely connected, in Paul's pastoral letters, with sound-mindedness, which is usually translated as "self-controlled," self-control. If I had time, I'd like to spend a lot of time unpacking what was meant by sound-mindedness, or healthy thinking, healthy mentality. Now, healing teaching is the right application of the law, of God's law, according to the gospel. Just listen once again — he lists all the people who break the Ten Commandments, and he says, whatever else is contrary — I'd expect him to say "to God's law," but he says — "to the healthy teaching that is in keeping with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted." So he tackles, for example, the issue of homosexuality there, not from the law, but from the gospel. He says that's contrary to the gospel. The gospel of the glory of God is the gospel that gives sinners access to God's glory, God's hidden presence with His people in the church.

And later on, in the same chapter, he gives a very simple summary of the gospel. He says, Christ Jesus came into the world to do what? Save sinners. And saving sinners has to do with a good conscience — that has to do with faith, that has to do with love. The fruit of a bad conscience is feigned, or hypocritical, faith, and a lack of love, lovelessness. On the other hand, the fruit of a good conscience is love.

Now, love is the product of three interrelated things, in ascending order. First of all, Paul says, the love that issues from a pure heart. Now, "heart," in the New Testament, is not just the seat of the emotions but the whole inner self. It's very closely related to the modern notion of the conscious mind. So the heart has to do with our sensing, our perception, our thinking, our feeling, our imagining, our desiring, and our judging.

Now, what we are stained with — our problem — is not that we are polluted physically because we live in a polluted world, but that we're polluted inwardly, because we live in a fallen world. And therefore we need cleansing from the stain of sin, from inward pollution. Now, with the cleansing of the heart comes a good conscience — it's the result of a pure heart, and a good conscience results in our having the ability to assess ourselves rightly before God and in God's sight. And the result of that is sincere faith, which comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and an unfeigned — leading us to a sincere faith. It's sincere, it's not hypocritical, it's not feigned — it's authentic, it's real, it's genuine. But not in the modern sense — it means not that we trust rightly, but that we trust in the right thing. We put our faith in Christ and His Word. We're honest with God. We trust His Word. We're honest with Him about Him, about ourselves, and about our standing with Him.

So notice the close connection here of faith and love with a good conscience. Now, that's a bit heavy — I want to focus now on practicalities.

A little bit later in his letter to Timothy, Paul gives the basic qualification for a person to become a deacon. Now, a deacon in the early church was a little bit different from our deacons — a deacon was a person who was a bit like a trainee, or a seminary student, somebody who was, in a practical sense, being trained for ministry. So what's the basic qualification for a person to become a church worker? What's the basic qualification for a person to become a pastor? What are you going to look for?

Paul emphasizes a few very practical things, which I don't have time to deal with — negatively, among other things, he says you must avoid greed for money, and love of alcohol. But positively, a person who wants to become, or who is going to be called to become, a pastor or church worker must hold — and listen to this marvelous phrase — must hold the mystery of the faith with a good conscience. Now, those two things go together. Faith has to do not with a series of facts or doctrines, but with mystery.

What's the mystery? The basic mystery is the presence of Jesus, God and man, in the church, with His people. Jesus as the bridge between heaven and earth — that's the key mystery. Jesus, who links heaven and earth. Jesus, who, in the Divine Service, brings heaven to us and brings us to God in heaven. And you have no access to that mystery except through — I would have expected Paul to say "through faith" — but he says, a good conscience. So if you have a bad conscience, you have no access to that mystery. If you have a good conscience, you have access to that mystery. There's a lot there I'd like to unpack if I had time.

Well, to put it quite simply: what's my aim as a Christian and as a pastor? It's this. My aim is to live every day in God's presence — in the presence of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — with a good conscience before God, and a good conscience for the people around me. So that's my aim. Not to be a good person, a morally good person; not to be a good pastor; not to be a good Christian; but to have a good conscience. That's my aim, and that should be the aim of all of you.

And how do I get a good conscience? I receive a good conscience — I don't possess a good conscience. I receive a good conscience every Sunday when I go to church. And that means, too, that as a pastor, whenever I take a service, I quite deliberately and consciously do so in order to deliver what to people? A good conscience. Everything in the Divine Service, in your service book, is meant to deliver — not doctrine, but a good conscience. And if it delivers a good conscience, it delivers good doctrine. It's for the delivery of a good conscience.

Likewise, every pastoral act I perform is to bring a good conscience, to deliver a good conscience to the people I deal with. So if I go on a home visit or a sick visit, I do that not to load guilt on people, but to deliver a good conscience. I visited my mother-in-law just before I left Australia — what was my aim as a pastor for her? It was, in a very simple way, to deliver a good conscience to her. Every baptism I perform, every confirmation class I teach, my goal is to deliver a good conscience. Every wedding — now, it hasn't always been the case, but now that I'm a little bit wiser than I once was — all the instruction I do to prepare people for weddings is to deliver a good conscience, and, in God's name, every couple these days needs that. Every funeral I perform is to deliver a good conscience, and funerals are very important in this, because the wages of sin is death. So you can rightly assume, if you don't know anything else about your congregation, that at a funeral all of them will have a bad conscience. And you need to be very careful, as a cardiologist, to get that right, and to deliver a good conscience to them.

Every Bible study I take, every class I teach, even at the seminary, is to deliver a good conscience. I had an amazing experience — this was last year, not this year — I was called to teach a liturgics class. I'd taught it before I retired. The group of students I had academically were one of the least promising groups I've ever had. And yet, spiritually, they were one of the best classes I ever had. Why? Because right throughout the liturgics class, whenever I honed in and said, "What's the purpose of this? What's the purpose of the invocation? What's the purpose of the absolution? What's the purpose of the Kyrie? What's the purpose of the readings?" et cetera — I homed in and said: a good conscience, a good conscience. They really responded in a way I had never, ever experienced before. And they grew, in that liturgics class, in a way I'd never seen a class grow spiritually before.

Every devotion I give, I aim to deliver a good conscience. Every session of counseling, whether formal or informal — my goal, mind you, I don't always achieve this, but my goal is not to burden people with greater guilt, but to deliver a good conscience.

Now, my basic aim, therefore, as a pastor, is not to appeal to people's emotions, not to appeal to their desires, not to appeal to their intellect, or their vanity. My aim as a pastor is to appeal to their conscience — to aim for the conscience, to appeal to the conscience, in everything that I do. To aim the Word of God, which I have, in everything I say and do, at their conscience. Which is what Paul says — he says, "We refuse to practice cunning" — that is, good psychological and sociological expertise — "or to tamper with God's Word, but by an open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to" what? "To everyone's conscience, in the sight of God." He speaks the Word of God — but he speaks the Word of God not to the intellect, not to the imagination, or whatever, or the emotions, but to the conscience. And did you notice what he adds there? He says, "in the sight of God" — in the presence of God. It's not as if God were merely there keeping an eye on me, but because God is there, he addresses the conscience.

Now, to summarize what I've said thus far, I have two pictures of myself as a pastor. On the one hand, I'm an economist — "economist" means a housekeeper. I'm a steward of the house of God. I have nothing of my own, but I manage God's resources — the resources that are given to me in the faith I have received. So I'm a housekeeper. I manage the household of God. I manage the affairs of God, the business of God, and I use whatever I have to promote faith and love. And I can't promote both faith and love without connecting both faith and love to a good conscience. What's faith meant to deliver? A good conscience. And unless you have a good conscience, no matter how lovey-dovey people are, and how warm and affectionate people are, you will not deliver love to them — not God's love. You'll deliver human love, but you won't deliver God's love to them. So faith and love are closely connected with a good conscience, and inseparable from it.

Secondly, I see myself as a doctor. As I said earlier, I'm a cardiologist. I'm interested not in what people look like, or do, or say, but in their hearts. Now, the problem is that I, as a human being, cannot see into the heart of any human being. The only one who knows human hearts is the Lord God — even the devil can't see into the hearts of human beings. Only God sees and knows human hearts. But my task as a doctor is to deal with the human heart. And the only way I can do that is with God's Word and the Holy Spirit. My aim as a cardiologist is to bring healing — not to the body, although that may happen; not even to the soul or spirit, though that may happen too — but to bring healing to the conscience, through the right teaching of God's Word as law and gospel.

Now, let's see how I'm going — yes. Just one more thing before we have a break. I've been using the term "conscience," I don't know whether you realized, without making any attempt to define what it is. And that's a problem, because if you consult dictionaries and so on, you'll get a reasonably different definition each time — but that's only the way the word is used, rather than the reality. It's very difficult to pin down exactly what conscience is.

But here goes — we start off with Father Luther. He has this to say — and, by the way, this is not just Luther's answer; Thomas Aquinas would agree with him on this, and so would Augustine, and so would the early church fathers. He says the conscience is not the power of acting — it's not the ability to do something, the competence to act — but it's the power of judging. Judging, assessing. Now, that's the key thing. Conscience has to do with judging, assessing. "Its proper work," as Paul says in Romans 2, "is to accuse or excuse" — to cause one to stand accused, or absolved; terrified, or secure. Its purpose is not to do anything, but to speak about what has been done and what should be done. And this judgment makes us stand accused or saved before God. So it has to do with assessing what we've done, and assessing what we should do. Now, he says, it's not the competence to act — it doesn't enable us to do the right thing or fix up what's wrong, but it assesses. It judges what's wrong and what should be done.

Now, one of the problems we have is that in our society today, people talk a lot about conscience, and they're all very ready to invoke conscience, particularly here in North America. It would be interesting just to Google "conscience" and see what you come up with — you'd be surprised what a multifaceted beast it is. If I get it right, the basic postmodern definition of "conscience" is to equate it with self-esteem. So self-esteem is good conscience. Self-esteem means feeling good about yourself. So I have a good conscience if I feel good about myself and what I've done. A bad conscience is to feel bad about yourself. So it is self-esteem. And the promotion of right and good and healthy self-esteem is the goal of therapy — this comes out of the influence of psychology. And it's the new goal for education, and, worst of all, for worship. You could go out and look at the billboards of churches here and see how many of them are promoting, basically, self-esteem as the goal of worship.

It's interesting and shameful that a Lutheran school very close to where I live, a short while ago, employed a wellness counselor rather than a chaplain. And the goal, the terms of reference, was that it was to promote people's self-esteem and well-being. That this is happening in the church shows the problem we have.

Now, the problem here is that most people in the Western world, at least publicly, confuse emotional mood with spiritual state. So the mood you're in is equated with, is identified as, your spiritual state. In this way of thinking, guilt and shame are bad feelings that have no positive value, no positive worth, and so must be eliminated from the conscience. So guilt's bad, shame's bad, okay — it makes you feel bad about yourself, so let's get rid of it entirely.

David Yeago, who some of you may know, a very prophetic Lutheran figure here in North America, has quite insightfully said that bad feelings are the hell of the postmodern middle-class world, and the loss of self-esteem is its damnation. In other words, what do people fear most of all? Loss of self-esteem, or bad feelings — feeling bad about yourself — and the loss of self-esteem is their damnation. Yeago: Y-E-A-G-O, David, Y-E-A-G-O.

Now, it seems to me that in Australia we have a whole new public religion being promoted, and it has four dogmas. First of all, the negative dogmas — what's wrong with the world? Well, two basic sins. The first sin is sexual frustration, and the second sin is environmental pollution. I'd like to draw up a Ten Commandments of postmodernism. So the two basic sins in our postmodern world are sexual frustration and environmental pollution, and the two positive goals are sexual fulfillment and the restoration of ecological order, cosmic order, by the elimination of human, global pollution.

Now, what's interesting — I was playing around with this, and then a little while ago I Googled the goals of our Greens party in Australia, who were in coalition with our last government, and they're not just concerned with issues of the environment and pollution, but, more prominently, with issues of sexuality and gender definition. So they'd basically put together, as far as I'm concerned, a statement of values — the dogmas of the postmodern world. So the new form of salvation comes not from self-righteousness, but from carbon righteousness. I've noticed, among the intellectual elite I associate with, when I deal with intellectuals, that they tend to out-carbon-righteous each other, trying to promote their self-righteousness as far as carbon, in environmental terms. And the basic axiom I've heard again and again is that God wants what from me? God wants me to be happy. So God wants me to get rid of environmental pollution, and God wants me to be happy. And the two are somehow interconnected.

Let's take a break, and then I'll pick up and do the second half after the break.