Introduction

Two Risks of Calibrating the Conscience and Why Pastors Must Do It Anyway by Taylor Hartley

 Part 1: How the Conscience Works

Calibrating the Conscience by Matthew Bingham

Conversion and the Conscience: How God’s Grace Makes Us Clean by Colton Corter

How Do I Keep My Conscience Clean? by Allen Duty

The Forgotten Spiritual Discipline: Introspection by Mike McKinley

Considering Our Backgrounds When Shaping Our Consciences by David Wissel

The Conscience as Precursor to the Last Day by Rob Kane

Part 2: Pastoring and the Conscience

How the Strong and the Weak Get Along According to Romans 14 by Daniel Stevens

How Far Does an Elder’s Authority Go? by Jeremie Rinne

When Elders Disagree: A Biblical Framework by Phill Howell

Pastoring the Pestering Conscience by Trent Hunter

Pastoring the Scrupulous Conscience by Michael Lawrence

How an Elder’s Character Informs Members’ Consciences by Aaron Menikoff

How Church Discipline Informs Members’ Consciences by Juan Sanchez

Preaching to Calibrate the Conscience by Joel Kurz

Can I Bind the Conscience More in the Counseling Room Than in the Pulpit? by Deepak Reju

Church Member—Seek Counsel! by Brian Parks

Recovering a Biblical View of the Conscience in a Psychologized Age by Dustin Williams

Calibrated Resistance: A Biblical Blueprint for Obeying and Disobeying Authority by Paul Alexander

Part 3: History of the Conversation

Luther and a Conscience That Wrestles with God by Stephen O. Presley

An Echo of Coming Eternity: Richard Sibbes on the Conscience by Jon Pentecost

Second Only to Preaching: William Ames’s Call for Casuistry to Calibrate Consciences in Pastoral Ministry by Ben Robin

How the Reformed Tradition Helps Us Grow in Our Moral Reasoning by Mark McDowell

Reformed Scholastic Theologians on Conscience by Tyler Wittman

Part 4: Book Review

Might the Conscience Be the Key to Your Church’s Unity? by Paul Alexander

Editor’s Note:

Talk of “calibrating the conscience” often comes with two pastoral concerns: legalism in one corner and moral liberalism in the other.

Legalism
Legalism occurs when people (often pastors) require what the Bible doesn’t. Think of a church mandated dress code that exceeds what the Bible calls “modesty” (1 Tim. 2:9–10); or consider—community-wide bans on PG-13 movies or tattoos or specific kinds of beverages or Halloween-themed lawn ornaments from Walmart. You may laugh at that last one, but anyone who grew up in fundamentalist circles knows what I’m talking about. In each of these cases, pastors wrongly calibrate (or bind) their members’ consciences. They go further than God’s Word does.

Now, wrongly binding a conscience risks many things, but let me name a few.

First, it risks making pastoral authority equal to biblical authority. The Bible says Christians are to do A, B, and C. You think D and E would be useful additions. Therefore, you make your members do A through E. In doing so, you conflate God’s authority with yours. You not only teach your members to do the same, but you also establish a “what the pastor says goes” church culture.

Second, wrongly binding implicitly teaches works-based salvation. The Bible says that nothing pleases God apart from faith (Heb. 11:6), but legalism moves the goalpost from faith to one’s personal track record of rule following.

Third, by requiring uniformity in thought and practice, wrongly binding tends to relieve members of their biblical burden to love one another despite conscience differences.

So, pastor, don’t over-bind. Don’t require what God’s Word doesn’t. Leave their consciences free and teach them to love one another in those places of freedom.

Moral Liberalism
Enough on over-binding. What about moral liberalism? Moral liberalism occurs when pastors deny biblical precepts in the name of freedom.

Not all moral liberalism is created equal. It’s one thing for a pastor to fail to encourage modesty from 1 Timothy 2:9–10 and quite another for him to allow an unmarried cohabiting couple to join his church. In both cases, the pastor leans into liberty by softening the Bible’s imperatives, though the latter is worse. Still, both his silence and inaction effectively tell his members that God is not concerned about these matters.

Now, it’s time to be honest about this issue of Church Matters. For at least two reasons, we’re slightly (call it 60 percent) more concerned with moral liberalism than we are with legalism in this issue.

First, moral liberalism is more prevalent today among self-identified Christians than ever before. Christians in their twenties, thirties, forties, and even fifties have been inundated with pragmatic Christianity, which underplays sin and its severities. The result has been the triumph of an easy-believism gospel that sings lullabies to the conscience while the whole person teeters at the gate of a very real place called Hell.

Second, many Christians make the dangerous assumption that if the Bible doesn’t explicitly forbid something, then God must accept it and even approve of it. “Does the Bible say that reproductive technology, or AI-generated companionship, or putting pronouns in the signature line of an email is a sin? No? Then these things are okay, right?” The method short-circuits moral reasoning.

It’s true that Father Abraham may not have debated the pros and cons of ChatGPT. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Bible has nothing to say on how to employ AI for human flourishing and limit it where it’s dangerous. Instead, with issues like these, we must bring to bear all that we know about God’s character, law, and wisdom. In some cases, we must collate references from across
Scripture to see more clearly how God would have us proceed.

No doubt, biblical, moral reasoning is hard work, and it requires a whole Bible. How will church members know how to do this work as they face life’s thorny conundrums? You, pastor! You’re essential to helping your members know what God requires. So, teach, preach, and disciple with an eye toward correctly calibrating your members’ consciences that they may learn to obey the Lord in faith. In A Quest for Godliness (1990), J.I. Packer spilled ink for an entire chapter on the Puritan conscience. After an initial summary of their zeal for keeping a clean conscience, Packer turned his attention to the living and asked:

“Are evangelicals noted these days for goodness and integrity? Are we distinguished in society for sensitiveness to moral issues, and compassion toward those in need? Do our preachers, earnest and eloquent as they may be, win for themselves the name that God gave to Noah—“preacher of righteousness” (2 Pet. 2:5). . . . We profess our anxiety to keep clear of legalistic bondage, but are we not in much greater danger of Antinomian license? We rightly repudiate the common view that doctrine does not matter so long as one is upright in life; but if we let our reaction drive us into the opposite extreme of supposing that one’s life does not matter so long as one is theologically “sound” (“a good Calvinist,” we say) then the beam in our own eye will be worse than the mote in our brother’s.”

I would contest that Packer’s line of questioning is even more necessary today than it was thirty years ago. We need pastors who trumpet God’s Word and bind their members’ consciences to it. We need pastors to teach on God’s law and on a Christian freedom that is more robust and real than the popular soup that sees not sin. Lord willing, this issue of Church Matters will equip you, pastor, to do just that.

—Taylor Hartley