Conscience, Morality, Will, Judgement, Lifestyle, Authoritative Sources and Society, Culture, Global Village, and the Christian Individual

by koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungbook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

11 July 2010

In January this year, I wrote an essay on "Conscience, the locus of perfection for LaRondelle". The opening paragraph applies:

"Prof. dr. Hans La Rondelle wrote his doctoral under G. C. Berkhouwer with the main topic, perfection. The topic is a silver thread throughout the Bible. It is the core of Bible and is in turn connected to nearly all thinkable topics and categories of systematic theology. Systematic theology is not philosophy although man is thinking when categorization of the Bible takes place. Systematic theology is not a second Bible outside the Bible. It is thinking doctrinally inductively towards some helpful systems created deductively. The best system is the one that closely answers and echoes the Bible and does not contradict the Bible at all. It is one that is affirmative and not suspicious. If it is suspicious, it is no longer representing the Revelation of God but rather that of the snake in the Garden of Eden who spoke to Eve in Genesis 3."

Hannah Arendt is a celebrated lady who wrote a number of books on the same topic, except she did not consider the topic in the context of the Bible. What we will do is going further than Arendt, since there are other aspects equally important which she did not pay attention to. It is one thing to discuss with utmost care aspects of humanity below the transcedental region and it is quite another to include that region, especially when the transcedental is more important than humanistic region below it.

In 1978 Hannah Arendt wrote the book The Life of the Mind which was edited by Mary McCarthy. She saw the ongoing dialogue between me and myself from the angle of various components of the being: the mind consisting of a conscience and morality in tension. Conscience prescribing to the mind and morality calling for non-participation. This was in Volume I and in Volume II she focussed on the aspect of the Mind and Willingness. The one Volume that she did not complete was the role of Judgement but two scholars edited articles about it (Jerome Kohn, Ronald Beiner).

All we can say is, nothing new under the sun.

The Bible is very clear that the conscience is the region in the mind where the Transcedent can communicate with man. It is the voice, normally echoeing your own, where the Holy Spirit is enviting, prescribing, guiding, teaching one and convincing one into proper action in society. That actions is to glorify God who is the Creator and Savior, taken the history of salvation and origin of sin into proper context. Anthropology which is a proper understanding of ontology, epistemology, method and deontology of humans, cannot stand or operate by itself. It needs outside sources to define it and operate towards, otherwise it is self-created and leads to selfdestruction since it cannot answer man's quest and yearning for another alternative than the now. The transcedental, God's Revelation to mankind through his 66 books of the Old and New Testaments are imperative towards a proper design of anthropology and its understanding.

Look at Arendt's theories (since she wished herself to be called a theorist), did she consider the role of lifestyle on the conscience and moral zones of the mind? Lifestyle is the feeder of the conscience and a feeder to the morality center in the mind. Consider conscience as a traffic light with red, yellow and green then it plays daily a constructive role in positively inviting a person to act according to the guidelines of the Spirit. The Spirit can speak in vacuo but mostly it choses the already given and designed Word of God (canon) through which it reminds, speaks, proves.

Conscience, we have to remind Arendt, is fed by one's existence and lifestyle. Morality is also fed by one's existence and lifestyle. Moving the focus away from the mind for a moment to lifestyle and existence per se, lifestyle needs authoritative sources otherwise it cannot exist properly.

Authoritative sources are enwrapping lifestyles and this places a blueprint on the mind that would either weaken the conscience or strengthen it. It is not known if Arendt understood this important aspect of ontology? It is almost a case of you vote what you eat. You speak what you watch. You laugh what you read.

Authoritative sources that feeds the conscience and morality of the mind of the individual in society, can be of two groups: transcedental designed sources and humanistic designed sources. Whichever of the two, these sources, and we will list them below, are prooftexts to the mind, packing the conscience and morality with "wise thoughts, wisdom, best ideas, best values, highest and noblest things done" so that these examples serves the human being finally in his conscience to act, to will, to judge and the moral view of it.

Ever saw people talking to themselves? That is the conversation between me and myself. Inside their minds there is their own voices they hear. People think in their own voices.

The mind is not static but a lump of clay that moves this way or that way within limits (preventing it from breaking apart or disintegrate).

Arendt brought forward the concept of novility, meaning that something new can be created or produced. Truly the mind has this aspect of novility. Change is possible. No human, says the Bible is stranded on his own genes, environment, personal history and the like.

The Bible also brings the aspect of memory to the fore. Memory is also in the mind and serves as the reminder of one's own personal history and index of owns own actions and thoughts, desires and mishaps of the past. God saves the individual of all his mishaps in the past but He does not remove the memory from him/her. Memory is there to keep us humble, on our knees, daily asking for forgiveness, daily linking up with God in a relationship. It is not a case of saved, lost, saved, lost, today saved, tonight lost, tomorrow saved, tomorrow night lost. Not at all. It is also not a case of saved and any lifestyle will go, no change. Salvation is change of status but also change of lifestyle. This Satan hates and he works through the memory to remind the person how bad he/she was in the past. He pulls those memories into the person's now, this moment, and frames those events pointing fingers and haunts the person that he/she is hypocrytical "cause look how bad you were". All Christians suffer from this post-salvation memory reminder. God may also use memory but it will always be in the context of showing your bad with extending your solution for the now. Sometimes He will remind you of your bad past but also remind you how He saved you and changed you to give you courage, positive motivation and encourage your conscience to take positive actions in society.

Arendt may not have mentioned it, but the lifestyle is fed by these authoritative sources that we know of today: transcedental sources like the Bible [canon of the Old Testament, canon of the New Testament, canon of both the Old and the New Testament]; humanistic sources like movies, poems, reason and logic, internet since 1980s, mass experiences [disco, patriotic performances, state public functions, sports fever] bringing ecstatic exitement to the mind and can make the person addicted. There are other religions canons that also serve as a feeder to their conscience and morality. Authoritative sources are like prooftexts to the mind. What does it mean? It means that the text proof to the mind that this is the highest perfection, highest ideal, the best way, the best action, the noblest action, the right way.

Arendt did not say it but prooftexts enwraps the lifestyle of each individual and this serves the conscience and the morality center of the mind but also is interactive, the person now makes adjustments according to the prooftexts in his/her life. They change or adapt their lifestyle accordingly. They become vegetarians since they read that the Creator says in Genesis 1-3 that humans should eat from the fruits, plants and nuts and grains. They refuse to drink alcohol since alcohol is talked of negatively in the biblical canon. They change their day of worship from Sunday to Saturday as Sabbath since the biblical Canon explicitly and consistently expresses that Saturday is the seventh day for worship. They refuse to smoke since it will destroy their lungs the same way as city pollution does. They refuse to join labor unions or civil rights activists since the Bible does not give any prooftext towards that approach and in fact, condemns such actions expressly. They refuse to eat pig, dogs, frogs, snakes, snails, lobsters, pebbles, sharks, barbers, ducks, because their prooftext is Leviticus 11 that does not permit these creatures to be consumned as fit for lifestyle. They decide to keep the whole Saturday from Friday evening until Saturday evening as the Sabbath for rest and not only the worship hour in church. They refuse to work as farmer in the field on this day. They refuse to work as doctor in his clinic on this day except in emergency cases.

The enwrapping authoritative source helps the lifestyle to sort out in the experience likes and dislikes. Some say that they do not hate anyone or anything. Wrong. They may have likes and less than likes, if not hate. But there is this staircase of likes. So what will happen?

These staircases of likes and dislikes on the basis of the forceful impact of the authoritative sources, will enwrap the lifestyle and will feed the conscience and the morality. The likes will be a green light to the person as traffic light in the conscience and the dislikes will be a stop sign in the morality center barring the person from participation. 

Reason is then considered by the person that which his conscience consider proper. Logic is considered as that which his morality center weighs as the mathematically best answer to a problem. Logic may not be part of morality but it plays a part in the zone of the mind where concepts of "perfection, right, good, correct" is stored. It is the modus operandi of the mind to convince the mind with prooftexts established with lifestyle and experience and memory thereof, that a particular action is the best option to follow (conscience) and another should rather be avoided (morality center). This is how the mechanics of judgement work. Arendt could not finish her work on judgement but in our estimation that is what judgement and the mind has to do with.

When we come to the individual acting in society and culture, the biblical enwrapped lifestyle of the individual is constantly revising. Revising nutrition suggestions, menus, what is proper to watch on television and what not, what is good to go to and where not, what is harmless culture and what is not. The biblical enwrapped lifestyle individual is constantly revisionistic of culture. Culture is not all good and innocent pillars of society. Whether it is historical, whether it is popular, whether it is functional, if it is in contrast with the authoritative source of the individual, there will be revision. Hypocritical is where an individual knows the authoritative source says no, but the individual is willing to do it contrary to the prooftext. This is diluting the lifestyle and in so doing the person is diluting his/her conscience and center of morality. The logic becomes scew as well as the reason.

Damage control of a scew situation is going back to a proper reading of the authoritative sources and bringing it in line with that source. The blueprint for proper action lies in a biblical authoritative source transcedental, thus outside humanity. A perfect God spells out perfection and requires perfection. Anything less than the Bible will result in a humanistic enterprise filled with human frailties and weaknesses.

Human nature has to be properly evaluated in the light of the Bible otherwise one will have weird views of pluralism, inclusivism, harmony, self-perfection and the like. The only proper pluralism is biblical guided pluralism and the only proper inclusivism is biblical guided and defined inclusivism and the same can be said about harmony and perfection.

Historical past of societies and the modern age are two magnets that pull together the interests of humans. The historical past appeals to individuals and they transform the appeal to demands and makes it prescriptive part of culture of a particular society. Modern age is also a magnet and has also an appeal that becomes a self-convinced prescription in individuals minds known today as populism. Popular culture is sometimes in conflict with historical culture. When a society is relatively exclusive of other societies it is less filled with populist elements. Modern age creates a global village in which we are dealing with mass-societies and mass-culture. Mass-culture makes inroads into cultures and inroads into all societies around the world. A kind of "universal language" is inherent in mass-culture and the appeal is universal. Music is such an example. Art as well. Sports also. Religion can also be. When the appeal comes from evangelism or missionwork, or sports, or music, the society and culture that is historically focussed on nationalism, suddenly experience inroads and fusion takes place or hybrids are created. This is novilty. It is a new creation in culture. Individuals reacts different to these inroads. That is how generation gaps are created. Historical culture appeals to the older generation and modern populist inroads appeals to the younger generation. It is not new in our day and age. This has been the mechanism of culture for over 6000 years of this earth's existence. Ever since Adam this was the role of culture and society and mass-society and mass-culture. Think about empires and societies. Sumerian Empire, Akkadian Empire, Neo-Sumerian Empire, Amorite Empire, Kassite Empire, Egyptian Empire, Assyrian Empire, Babylonian Empire, Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire (Papal domination), and since its fall in 1798, the growth of the American Empire. Studying anyone of these periods will bring the same results. Inroads from other cultures, multinationalism, pluralism, hybrids, sharing of ideas.

For every generation over 6000 years God had something to say about Himself and salvation. Not all these books that served as their authoritative texts by Him, found their way into the current canon enough for our generation. But, we know from the sources of Moses in Genesis 5:1 that he used a book of Adam.

What makes our day and age since 1980 different than any other empire before, is the role of internet making inroads everywhere, anytime. Revisionism is not something that needs to happen. It is happening continuously. People change. Peoples views, lifestyles, hopes and dreams are changing. The speed of the change is sometimes surprising. The internet is also an authoritative source. The best internet is the Bible since it consist of 66 books written by more than 40 authors over a period of 1500 years intending to speak in harmony about all topics necessary for existence. The internet consists of good things mixed with data of conspiracies, junk, spam. The individual needs to be daily tapped into the Word of God to properly decide what to do with the data of the internet. If the data do not match the Word of God, it is thrown out as spam.

It is not first denoted by Hannah Arendt that man's loneliness is neither isolation and solitude as mass-man, it is also seen in Job 5-7 already indicated by Moses in 1460 BCE writing in Midian (see Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture: It's Social and its Political Significance" page 202 "all the traits that crowd pscyhology has meanwhile discovered in mass man: his loneliness - and loneliness neither isolation nor solitude -" [see online sources for the actual lecture in pdf file format]).