Stuck Statements and the Sticky Situation of Conscience Formation

We left our last post acknowledging that even if I had a talking cricket in my pocket, listening to conscience is difficult.  And now I will add that forming it is no simpler.  The aspect of conscience that O’Connell called conscience/2 is able to be formed.  What this means is that in the case of the pro-life/pro-choice drama, two people’s conscience can be formed in radically different ways.  What this also means, and I’m looking at you, reader, is that your conscience can be malformed, and wrong! *JUDGMENT*

Ok no judgment here, because my conscience tells me it’s impolite to judge other people.  But we don’t have to look too hard to find a person or a group of people whom I bet you would agree have been malformed.  Take Westboro Batpist Church as an example.  Some folks may agree with their underlying doctrine.  But I think that most people who read this blog would agree that protesting at someone’s funeral while holding up signs that say “God Hates Fags,” is an egregious form of disrespect and, to put it mildly, blasphemy.  Talk to a member of the church, and they’ll tell you they are only doing what God desires.  Persons and group of people can have consciences that are radically malformed.

One of the key questions for theological ethics is “how do we form our consciences well?”  Where can this floundering moral being find guidance among what seems to be conflicting pools of moral wisdom?   The most basic place to find guidance is in our own experience.   Once, while walking through a park, I saw a little boy enjoying his vanilla ice cream cone.  Then some rambunctious teenager walked by and knocked it onto the ground.  Seeing the little’s boy’s face, and the ache in my gut as I empathized with him, teaches me more about morality than hearing the statement, “Its rude to ruin someone’s afternoon treat.”  That’s not to say that the statements aren’t good, and that they don’t help us out.  “Thou shall not kill.”  Dead on, right?  (get it)  Statements are good, and point us to the good, but they are limited.  For example, in the midst of a moral crisis, how often do you scroll through lists of statements to inform your choices?  Additionally, statements are stuck.  Oh yeah, I’ll say it again, STATEMENTS ARE STUCK.

Statements are stuck in a lot of things and as a rule of thumb, if its stuck in something it can only be so useful.  Speaking of the rule of thumb, that illustrates this idea perfectly.   One of the origins of that phrase comes from a moral regulation that helped to curb spousal abuse.  In the 1700s a judge ruled that a man could legally beat his wife so long as the object used was less than the size of his thumb.  So the “rule of thumb” is stuck in a historical situation.  The situation includes the time period (1700s), world location (the west) the cultural norm for the family (its ok to beat your wife), a judicial process, on and on and on we could go to develop the historical situation.  Well the rule of the thumb is not really helpful anymore.   The statement is stuck.

Another statement that is stuck, but is notorious  for people trying to get it unstuck is Leviticus 19:28, “You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the Lord.”  Raise your hand if you think that Moses had in mind that the Israelites may walk into “Ink Assassins” on the corner of 26^th and Peach St., and get “Mom” tattooed on their arm.  Probably not, as tattoo parlors were few and far between in the promised land.  They’d have to go find a group of people who use tattoos as part of the worship of their god, or find a prostitute whose profession was identifiable by her tattoos.  Getting a tattoo to honor a foreign god is a little different than memorializing your mother.  The point here is that the statement is stuck!  Don’t try to unstick it or else you will misrepresent the statement.  Ok you have issues with me suggesting that a biblical statement could be right in one situation and then wrong in another.  Let’s look at another one (tough crowd around here).

Leviticus 12:2,3: “Tell the Israelites: When a woman has a child, giving birth to a boy, she shall be unclean for seven days, with the same uncleanness as during her menstrual period.  On the eighth day, the flesh of the boy’s foreskin shall be circumcised.”  That’s a pretty straight forward statement.  When you have a baby boy, circumcise him on the eighth day.  If you are a St. Paul reading Christian you would know that Paul is not keen on circumcision.  Check out Galatians five.  So the bible makes a statement that men should be circumcised and then later the bible says we should not be circumcised.  Either 2000 years of Christians have missed this obvious contradiction OR my basic suggestion was right, statements are stuck, and a moral statement could change and be wrong, even if it’s from the bible!

In class we discussed a situation brought up by O’Connell.  Imagine being in Nazi Germany, and harboring a Jewish family in your basement.  Soldiers knock on your door and ask, “Are there any Jews inside?”  What do you do?  We could start scrambling through a list of statements to see if we could lie.  We would quickly learn that we shouldn’t lie.  So either give up the family (and probably get you and your own family killed) or lie.  I’d go for the lie myself.  O’Connell has more to say about this, but for now let’s simply acknowledge that the statement “Do no lie” is limited because it tends to get stuck in ideal situations.   I believe that in the Nazi situation, “You should lie” more aptly applies.

Sheesh, after all that it appears we are still floundering with consciences that could be wrong, and moral statements that could change!  We are not any closer to finding a moral guide that could help form conscience/2 (other than experience).

So what do you think about all this?  How do we navigate limited moral statements that contain wisdom in one age, but lack wisdom in another?  Where do we turn and how do we form our consciences?