Bound Conscience, A Pastoral Calling

In episode 3 of the podcast Learn and Discern, our host Mitch McCartney discusses the concept of "bound conscience" with Professor Tim Wengert. Originating from Lutheran Reformation history and biblical tradition, this framework aims to foster pastoral care and mutual conversation amidst disagreements. Wengert explores its application in the ELCA's 2009 social statement on human sexuality, emphasizing the need for respectful dialogue to address polarization and ensure differing voices feel heard. Listeners are encouraged to visit elca.org/reconsiderations for more information.

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Learn and Discern. I'm your host, Mitch McCartney, and today we are here talking to Professor Tim Wangert. Pastor Wangert is Professor Emeritus of Reformation History at United Lutheran Seminary at Philadelphia. He's the author and editor of more than 20 books, including Martin Luther's Catechisms Forming the Faith. His translation of the small catechism is used extensively throughout the ELCA. And as I understand it, you're an interim pastor at Pompton Plains in New Jersey. Is that correct? Yep, it is. We give a shout out to Pompton Plains today. They'll love that. Thank you very much. So today we're here to talk about bound conscience, which is one of the central things that came out of the 2009 um study on human sexuality. And I should note, um, you were a member of the task force that helped develop the social statement on human sexuality in 2009. Uh so there's a quote by Vincent Van Gogh, and I'm going to paraphrase it to modernize it for today, but it's conscience is one's compass. Um, how do you define conscience for purposes of what we're talking about here?

SPEAKER_01 1:18

That's actually not a bad definition that uh dear Vincent gives. Uh, but um it's interesting to see how the Lutheran reformers use that word. Um, as with the word body and soul, they think of that as designations of the whole person. So the body is the whole person in this world, the person you see. The soul for them is the whole person before God. And the conscience, then, becomes uh the whole person before God's commands. Uh, and therefore, it is really the compass is not the person, but is rather the commandments of God that guide the person. Uh, that kind of inner uh sense of what's right and wrong, uh that uh even Saint Paul says the law is written in our hearts, and so that's the conscience. Now there are other definitions as well, and this differs somewhat from the medieval definition, which we still hear around there, around today, and that is um where it's just a part of the soul, some little part. Uh, and uh sometimes you have, you know, the descriptions where you have a good angel on one side and a bad angel on the other, and they're whispering, telling you what to do. Well, uh, I think this is more uh profound than that, and it's not just a matter of somebody saying, well, I'd rather do this than that, but it is it is the whole person standing before God's commands.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

So then when we talk about bound conscience, are we what are we talking about being bound to? Is it bound to what, bound to whom? How does that compare to making my own moral judgments? Are we bound to ourselves? Are we bound to God, scripture, community? What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Um, that's a good question because uh the fact that a conscience is bound, first of all, is is actually a very old Christian um category. So that when, for instance, Martin Luther first uh appeals to his conscience, it was something that his opponents would have recognized as a legitimate category. That is to say, that a person needed to be convinced otherwise than what they, using their experience with God's law, thought was right or wrong. So um uh that's maybe the first thing to say. This is an old category. Um and the sense of the conscience being bound is what happens when a person cannot imagine in their own life of faith any other uh um course of action than what they see before them. No, this really is right. And I don't mean folks that just say, you know, my way or the highway. Uh that's not what we're talking about here. This is a an inner thing, and it's it's always comes across as a real struggle for the person. You don't want to go against other people who have different views, but nevertheless, here's uh where you stand with regard to this or that um in what we're talking about today, ethical uh dilemmas.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

That's that's fascinating because I think there's this concept called moral injury that is a psychological concept of I feel this tremendous guilt for not helping prevent something that really violated my conscience, for not preventing harm that I may perceive. How does that play into this?

SPEAKER_01 5:13

It is a, I would say what you're describing is a consequence really of what happens when one's conscience is in somehow in opposition to what other people, particularly what other leaders, uh rulers, are saying about a particular issue. Um and it's not always easy to know what to do in that situation, not just for the person who may feel uh that their conscience has been violated, but but also for the person encountering then someone whose conscience is bound. Now, maybe I should add another thing, uh, and that is that the person themselves who may have a bound conscience in the final analysis cannot determine that, at least not for the reformers. All one can do is make an appeal to the other people in the room. To uh, in Martin Luther's case, it is to the Pope or to his bishop and so on. In other cases, it'll be uh people appealing to the leaders in uh Wittenberg, saying, no, our conscience is bound. But you can't determine that. Luther was very worried about people becoming their own judges. That is, taking matters into their own hand. And actually, in uh in common law, particularly, uh, English common law, I know this from my father, who was a lawyer and a political scientist, we uh we really do uh uh worry about uh a judge, for instance, judging his or her own case, or even being a witness in that case. Uh so that's always uh Luther's worry on ethical matters, is that we kind of take matters into our own hands and say, well, God died and left me in charge, and therefore I'm gonna do this and that. So it turns out that it is the person can only make an appeal to that other person who's in authority. Would you please respect the fact that my conscience cannot do or uh what you say or must not do what you're commanding?

SPEAKER_00 7:31

So there have to be examples, stories that we can relate to from scripture in contemporary times that can examples we can give of bound conscience and how it's been used. Where let's start with scripture. Um, what what kind of examples can we talk about where bound conscience came into play?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

There are two examples in scripture, uh, both from Saint Paul. The one is in uh 1 Corinthians 10, and the larger one, the longer one, is in Romans, uh chapters 14 and 15. And there uh uh Saint Paul makes the distinction between the strong and the weak. And the particular issue was a very important one for that day, namely, could a Christian in good conscience eat food sacrificed to idols? And when we first started on the uh the sexuality task force to talk about the question of the division among people in our church about this issue, um, I think I may have been one of the first, there may have been someone else as well, who said, Well, we have this example of tension over the question of uh of uh food sacrifice to idols for St. Paul. So why don't we talk about the strong and the weak? Immediately uh it was brought to my attention that that was not at all the best language to use in this situation because you're calling somebody weak, and already the conversation then is is somehow twisted. Now, if I were Saint Paul, I could do that, but I'm not. Um but then it did occur to me, um, because I'd been teaching this for years already, uh, that there is this category of the bound conscience, very much the same as what Paul encountered, people who were scandalized that their fellow Christians would eat this kind of food, even though Paul agrees that idols are nothing. So, you know, in that sense you could do this, but for the sake of the person's conscience, we have to rethink what we do. So um I came up with the notion of the bound conscience. The first place in Lutheran history, then, that it's used is uh with uh an interview that um uh Martin Luther had in 1518, October 1518, before uh Cardinal Cajetin, as we say, Cayetan. Uh his mother called him Tomas Tommaso De Villo. Take your pick. But Cardinal Cayetan uh was interviewing Luther in Augsburg, and he was the papal legate, he was the direct representative of Rome. And this is in some ways the first and in some ways, even the only time that Luther now is actually getting his case heard before Rome, which is what he had pled for. Um his uh his elector, uh uh Frederick had arranged this, his prince had arranged this meeting. This is one of the things that Luther says to Caetan when Caetan wants to convince him that you cannot say that we are justified by faith alone. And so I'm quoting now. For those of you who want to look it up, Luther's works 31. For this reason, most reverend father in Christ, since you are blessed by divine favor with unusual gifts, especially with a keen judgment. This he's talking now to Chaton, who was really a tremendously brilliant man, I humbly beg your Most Reverend Highness to deal leniently with me, to have compassion with my conscience, to show me how I may understand this doctrine, justification by faith, differently, and not to compel me to revoke those things which I must believe according to the testimony of my conscience. As long as these scripture passages stand, I cannot do otherwise, for I know that one must obey God rather than mortals. And there Luther is calling on Acts 5.29. May it please your highness to intercede with our Most Holy Lord, Leo X, in my behalf, so that he will not proceed against me with such stern rigor that he cast my soul into darkness. For I seek nothing but the light of the truth, and am prepared to give up, change, or revoke everything, if I am informed that these passages are to be understood in another sense. However, I do not want to be compelled to affirm something contrary to my conscience. That really is the first one. And I used to use that all the time in one of my lectures on the Lutheran confessions when we got to talking about the 95 Theses and the origins of the Reformation. And when I would talk about it, I very often used an example from my own pastoral ministry. I had a woman in my congregation, a dear, dear woman, who uh had gotten involved in a group of Lutherans, and the way she understood what they were saying, uh, to me at least, seemed to be that everybody in our congregation, our little rural Wisconsin congregation, should be speaking in tongues. And she also was very uh much against the idea that one received the Holy Spirit in holy baptism. Well, what what was I to do in that situation? Because it became very clear to me that her conscience was bound. That is, she was deeply committed to this way of looking at things. Now, on the one hand, I had to say, no, that's not the way we're going to do it here. But on the other hand, I had to respect her conscience. And all I could do was sit at her kitchen table and talk to her about the meaning of baptism, about Bible verses that either bothered her, or Bible verses maybe she didn't know about. That's all a pastor has. Really, nothing more. You can't just say, Well, I say, or Martin Luther said, or something like that. For that person, you have to be far more um uh sensitive, pastoral. And that's really uh what Luther is begging for. So that's the first example.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Learn and Discern is a podcast of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and accompanies the study Conscience and Conversation, a study of the ELCA's reconsideration of the social statement, human sexuality, gift, and trust. For more information about the study or to see this podcast or other resources, go to ELCA.org slash reconsiderations.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Second example is what happened in 1527 and 28. And this is an interesting example to me as a historian because some of the letters that actually are part of the background of this story were not known until the early 2000s. Um, they were letters uh from some people to Philip Melenkston. Now, Philip Melangston was Martin Luther's right-hand man at the University of Ittenberg. And in 1527, when they decided that because the Roman Catholic the Roman uh bishops were not acting, there had to be an official visitation of all of the congregations in um uh in Saxony, in the Principality of Saxony. Melanchthon then went with these three others in a team, and they visited all of the churches, the schools, and the monasteries that actually were under the control of the prince uh in the area of Saxony and then later in Thuringia. And two cases came up, and we just discovered these letters uh uh about these two issues uh that were published finally uh in the in the 2000s. In the one, Melanchthon describes how some brothers at a monastery uh asked if they could still wear their habit, their regular uh monastic robes. And they say in their letter, well, we know that we aren't saved by wearing these things. So they'd kind of got the message, but please can we do it? Now, in that case, it was a matter of what uh Lutherans call adiaphra, that is to say, undifferentiated matters where you don't know if it's right or wrong. You know, who knows? And so Melanchthon writes a very simple letter back and says, No, this is okay. As long as you don't imagine that doing things like this earns you God's grace, fine. You can wear those things and you can say the prayers that you would normally say as a monk, and so on, and so forth. The second example, however, is far more interesting. A group of nuns also write to Melanchthon, and they want two things. On the first instance, they want, please, to not have to receive both bread and wine in the Lord's Supper. They say, this is a real problem for us. We've always only taken the bread, and this disturbs our consciences deeply that we would suddenly have to break this rule of the church and take now both bread and wine. And, oh, by the way, the second thing is could you get rid of the our pastor? There always was a male pastor over uh that that served the uh nuns in cloisters uh because he is evangelical, that is Lutheran, and he's telling us that we really ought to take both bread and wine.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

So this might be the first example where they tried to run a pastor out of a congregation.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

Exactly. Okay, and Melanchthon says, you can't. You're keeping the pastor, and you're going to have to put up with his preaching on this matter. But then on the other matter, he says, Because it's a matter of conscience, we will allow you to continue not to take the wine along with the bread. Now, just as in the case with St. Paul, where the issue was the first commandment, here the issue was Christ's command. Drink of this, all of you. Melanchthon knew this. Luther did too. Well, then what happens is that in the next year, 1528, they then write the instruction of the visitors for the parish pastors in Saxony, which was published. Here's what they say, and I hope this is helpful for you. This comes from uh volume 40 of Luther's works. Inasmuch, however, as no one is to be forced to believe, or driven by command or forced from his or her unbelief, since God likes no forced service and wants only those who are his servants freely, without constraints, and view of the fact that people, in this case these nuns, are confused and uncertain. It has been and still is impossible to establish a rule concerning persons to whom both kinds are to be offered, or from whom they are to be withheld according to the teaching. Now, what's interesting there is they say the teaching now will remain. Okay? Uh we insist that in fact Christ commands us to have both bread and wine. But they go further with then this other group. They quote, by the way, uh Romans 14 and 15 in the context here. Um they well, before we get there, here's one line that I just love. Luther loves to talk about how God looks through his fingers to look at us, that is, he overlooks our sins. So in the middle of their discussing this, they say, even nowadays, God tolerates much in us and in others, which is wrong or insufficient, as a weak faith and other defects, according to Romans 14 and 15. Notice that Luther puts himself in the shoes of the weak or of the bound conscience. And I think as we look at this issue, we have to understand that there that nobody is kind of exempt from this in our life of faith. Um, in any case, the instruction of the visitors, however, goes one step further. Further, it's uncharitable, even unchristian, to force these weak ones to receive the sacrament in both kinds or to withhold it in one kind. See, the other option would be to say, well, then you can't come to communion at all. Now, finally, the final quote. We have often experienced that such people uh make confession and do penance for gross heresy when they've taken both kinds against their conscience. They think themselves guilty of heresy. This goes back to the uh that category that you talked about earlier. Um they feel that they're guilty when they do not receive one kind, as has been their inclination. In both cases, weak faith burdens itself with grievous sins. And finally, now I get to the f the final point, and here it is. They leave this up to the pastor. The pastor, who knows his people and daily associates with them, most uh must distinguish between the weak and then another category that they also had. Introduced and the obstinate. He can easily observe those folk who have a good disposition, who gladly listen to the preaching and gladly want to learn and be rightly guided thereby. I mean, he's saying think locally and act locally. But of those coarse and perverse people who pay no attention to preaching are under no circumstances to be considered weak, however loudly they may claim to be so. So Luther there, and it actually came in the beginning in a section I didn't read, talks about really three groups. There are people who, when they hear of a decision of the church, in this case, communion of both kinds, they say, This is wonderful. We've been waiting for years for this to happen. There's another group who say, wait a minute, no, we can't do this. We we are this is just wrong. And they confess it to be wrong. And then there's a third group that's obstinate. And Luther leaves it to the pastor, to the bishop, we would add, to the local authorities in the congregation, to determine: are we dealing with somebody who's just plain obstinate, my way or the highway, or are we dealing with someone who, having pondered these things, still cannot see their way clear to follow the directions of the church?

SPEAKER_00 23:24

If you have questions about conscience and conversation, the ELCA's study of the reconsideration of the social statement, human sexuality, gift and trust, you can contact us at reconsiderations at elca.org. That's a great place then to say, okay, let's fast forward 500 years. You were, as I mentioned earlier, on the task force that helped develop the concept of, well, you developed a social statement on human sexuality. You helped develop a concept of bound conscience that is a part of that social statement. What was the original intent? I mean, I'm guessing it ties very closely to what you just described. What was the intent of bound conscience when it was put into that document? And then let's talk a little bit about, you know, in this society that we're in today that's that's growing more and more polarized every day. What has been the impact? What have you seen? What are the positives that have come from that? What are have been the challenges? What types of things do we need to perhaps look at correcting um as we think about the concept of bound conscience?

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Well, I'm going to begin with a very personal uh uh comment, uh, two actually, if I remember the second, remind me that there were two. Sure. The first one simply is that when an original uh statement, uh sexuality statement came out in the 1990s, I was completely opposed to it. And I was opposed because in my conscience, I felt that ordaining folks in as we called it in in uh lifetime uh uh uh same-sex relations was wrong. I thought that. And when I was on the task force, I had come really quite a ways, uh, in large part due to my own experience then with uh folks who were gays and lesbians at the seminary, and I learned a lot. I listened to them, and I changed my mind. And I asked myself, when I was on that task force, would I have changed my mind if the church's response had been my way or the highway? You can no longer be a professor or you have to, you know, or something like that. And and I thought, that's just that's not good. This is a fraught issue. We do not know, I think, and I think we say that in the in the statement, we don't know everything about sexuality. This is one of the great mysteries. That was the first thing. Um uh the the second thing was uh simply that um I already knew, and we all on the task force, I think, realized just how deeply divided folks were on this issue. And how do you allow space, pastoral space, living together space, uh, four different views on this very important issue. And this was the way we decided to do it. Now, one of the things we did was then to list, I think, four different kinds of options. Correct. Um there, you know, looking back, I think we had to do that at that point so that we could give voice to some of the different uh perspectives that people had. Um this is a pastoral matter, and even today, and even in our church, with that statement, um, and it means that we can't really, you know, list well, there are only these four, or or which one do you fall into, or something like that. No, we have to do it only by, uh, and this is the important word that comes from Martin Luther's Small Called Articles, also part of the Book of Concord, the mutual conversation and consolation of the brothers and sisters. It's a line in the Small Called Articles that is in Latin. It's the only sentence as I recall that's in Latin, Luther's writing in German, but he recalled this from his experience as a monk, that the way in which you you live together in community, in monastic community, was through uh uh uh an open confession of faults, where you would take into account the other person's weakness and your own. Um and and so he puts that in there. And the mutual conversation for in my case was in fact that of a of a gay man who became then a an Anglican priest, because at that point uh he couldn't he couldn't become a Lutheran and he felt called to be a pastor. Well, I'll say the single most important thing is to understand this as pastoral. Then there is a second thing, and that is what I learned as I went back, actually in preparation for talking to some of the folks on this uh round's task force, and that is that Luther also knows of the obstinate. What I really didn't know how this would shake out, but I think that some folks were really uh ended up being just obstinate on this, in that they would not talk about the issue at all. They would not learn about it, they didn't want to hear about what the uh the the considered arguments of uh of the church were on this issue, which in fact became then uh the rule of the church uh on the question of gays and lesbians in community relationships, as we called it. We would now say married folks uh in same-sex uh marriages. Um I have a hard time uh understanding that. Now, another point just to add in terms of my own experience afterwards, and that is that I had students, uh conversation partners, former students, who in fact were opposed to the decisions made in 2009, who remained in the church, who remained in the church because their conscience, they felt heard. They need to have that sense that, yes, you hear my pain, you hear, and you can hear that particularly in Luther's plea to Leo X. His plea is there, and that we have to really listen to. And that only takes place through pastoral care. I don't think that any decision our church makes will get rid of the kind of deep social conflict that right now racks our society and our government, our democracy. Um, but I think that this proposal and keeping that notion of the bound conscience actually will help to ameliorate at least some of this tension so that folks who may not agree with us on this very important issue can still feel like they're heard.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

And that's so important in today's society. People, I think you're right. I think people just want to be, they want to be acknowledged, they want to be heard. I think that's how we've where we've reached in some of the polarization, people feeling marginalized when they don't feel like that they're being a part of the conversation. So well, this is Professor Viz has been a thrill. I really have enjoyed having this conversation with you and learning from you. You you you bring so much wisdom to this subject. And so thank you for all you have done over the years for the church. Thank you for this conversation and uh appreciate your time today.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

You're very welcome. It was my honor to be asked to do something like this. Great.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

Thank you very much. If you have questions about conscience and conversation, the ELCA's study of the reconsideration of the social statement, human sexuality, gift, and trust, you can contact us at reconsiderations at elca.org.