God talk

05 06 2021 John Calvin pages 181-182 from Bavincks Reformed Ethics edited by John Bolt Calvin Conscience is a sense of divine judgement which is somehow joined to the human being. The human cannot escape this judgement.   The human being cannot escape this search light for good or ill.   A person cannot run and hide from the truth of their actions.   This conscience search light on his or her inner truth moves to the point of conviction. There is no escape. Bavinck writes from Calvin’s words Conscience provides; “an awareness which hales man before God’s judgment” and “is a sort of guardian appointed for man to note and spy out all his secrets that nothing may remain buried in darkness.” (Pages 181 and 182 Reformed Ethics edited by John Bolt) So, what is a guardian.   A guardian is there to protect you from harm.   Therefore, I think the conscience helps us to steer a correct course in our lives and it is a lot more powerful than courts. Accordingly, this ‘spy’ doesn’

  taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrus_van_Mastricht   Our question is: What do the Protestant and Reformed Traditions teach us about the conscience? Herman Bavinck gives us an outline on pages 181 – 189 in his Reformed Ethics edited by Bolt.   So, what is the main idea? As usual Bavinck gives us a summary on page 189: ““Van Mastricht provides us with a nice brief summary overview of the preceding: “Conscience is the judgment of humans about themselves, insofar as they are subject to God.” It belongs to practical reason and judges according to a syllogism: the major premise is the syntérésis; the minor premise, the syneidésis; the conclusion, the krisis. The first one is law, the second is witness, the third is judge.”” A Historical Digression Before looking at Van Mastricht’s summary: Who was he and why does Bavinck quote from him? Wikipedia says about him: “Petrus (or Peter) van Mastricht (or Maastricht) (1630 – February 9, 1706) was a Reformed theologian.

  Bavinck really understood the Church Fathers and the scholastics.   In that case, what did the Church Fathers and scholastics understand about the conscience? (Bavincks summary on page 180. Reformed Ethics, edited by John Bolt) “Those conclusions—that is, the functions of the conscience—are threefold: (1) to witness, whereby “we recognize that we have done or not done something,” thus, merely consciousness;(2) to bind, or to “judge that something should be done or not done”; (3) to incite, whereby “we judge that something done is well done or ill done, and in this sense conscience is said to excuse, accuse, or torment.”70 Conscience, therefore, is always a “concluding knowledge,” a derived, applied, subsequent knowing.” So, for the church fathers and scholastics the conscience has three aspects. 1.        Recognizing we have done or not done something (consciousness) 2.        To judge or not to judge something done or not done. 3.        The part of us that judges wh