Bonhoeffer’s Account of the Conscience and How it Can Inform Formation Today

Thomist Tradition

John Calvin

Calvin approached the conscience, like Aquinas, from within the natural law tradition. For Calvin, the unregenerate conscience had access to the natural law (Institutes 2.2.22) and could therefore understand the principles of right and wrong. ³⁸ Lest this seem to be too naturalistic, Calvin does indicate that God has inscribed this law in the human mind. On this point, he writes, “Now, as it is evident that the law of God which we call moral, is nothing else than the testimony of natural law, and of the conscience which God has engraven on the minds of men, the whole of this equity of which we now speak is prescribed in it” (4.20.16). Because the natural law is accessible to even the unregenerate conscience, the conscience is capable of delivering sufficiently reliable verdicts. For example, in 2.2.22 of the Institutes he explains that conscience is capable of “…distinguishing sufficiently between just and unjust, and by convicting men on their own testimony depriving them of all pretext for ignorance.” This does not, however, make the conscience the judge per se. As one commentator on Calvin clarifies, the conscience is not so much “the judge, but…the convener of the court of The Judge for each person.” ³⁹ This is best seen in Calvin’s definition of conscience in 3.19.15 of the Institutes where he writes:

For as men, when they apprehend the knowledge of things by the mind and intellects are said to know, and hence arises the term knowledge or science, so when they have a sense of the divine justice added as a witness which allows them not to conceal their sins, but drags them forward as culprits to the bar of God, that sense is called conscience. For it stands as it were between God and man, not suffering man to suppress what he knows in himself; but following him on even to conviction.

The conscience is thus the arena within which God’s judgment is experienced before the eschaton. Worth noting in light of where we will turn in the next paragraph, he states that conscience does not allow a “man to suppress what he knows in himself.” In other words, human self-deception does not sufficiently suppress or obscure the conviction God brings through conscience. Still, because the conscience can effectively be the arena in which God’s moral judgments are received, like Aquinas, Calvin privileges the conscience above all other forms of human judgment (4.10.5), which allows him to dismiss onerous injunctions from both ecclesiastical and civil authorities since they do not “in themselves bind the conscience” (4.10.5). Thus, although Calvin has a more nuanced view of the conscience than Aquinas, he similarly elevates its authority in personal decision making.

There is, however, a certain incongruity in Calvin’s view of the conscience, which David Bosco in his article, “Conscience as Court and Worm” noted. Calvin, on the one hand, held to the affirmation that conscience would adequately convict the unregenerate to warrant condemnation. ⁴⁰ However, on the other hand, he also believed that humans were masters at self-deception because he did believe the Fall affected the conscience and human moral reasoning. For Calvin, the conscience could accurately ascertain general moral principles, but when it comes to the application of these general principles to specific situations, humans often err. In 2.2.23 of the Institutes, Calvin writes that “Themistius is more accurate in teaching…that the intellect is very seldom mistaken in the general definition or essence of the matter; but that deception begins as it advances farther, namely, when it descends to particulars.” For illustrations of what he means, he points to the fact that people will condemn murder but then view plotting the death of their enemies as a good thing or that people will condemn adultery in general but then view their own adulterous ways as laudable and justifiable. What goes wrong? He explains, “The ignorance lies here: that man, when he comes to the particular, forgets the rule which he had laid down in the general case” (2.2.23). ⁴¹ Thus, although there is ready agreement with moral prohibitions, there is a certain ignorance or forgetting—albeit self-serving—that sets in when one goes to perform that particular action.

In the next paragraph Calvin expounds more upon his belief that human moral judgment goes awry. He begins by stating that “when you hear of a universal judgment in man distinguishing between good and evil, you must not suppose that this judgment is, in every respect, sound and entire” (2.2.24). Thus, Calvin concedes that human moral reasoning bears the corruption of the Fall. Nevertheless, he still wants to retain conscience’s ability to render deserving judgment as a result of Romans 2:14–15. ⁴² While one might think such judgment would require accurate moral assessment in particular cases, he says “it is by no means necessary for this purpose that they should discern the truth in particular cases. It is even more than sufficient if they understand so far as to be unable to practice evasion without being convicted by their own conscience, and beginning even now to tremble at the judgment-seat of God” (2.2.24). Thus, even if the true moral infraction is not identified in a given instance, conscience can deliver a guilty verdict.

This is where inconsistency arises in Calvin’s account. As Bosco points out, Calvin wants to affirm both that unredeemed humans sufficiently warrant condemnation as a result of the conscience’s recognition of general moral principles and yet still admit that humans are self-deceived and unable to apply moral principles concretely. ⁴³ Bosco puts the issue well: “…it is unreasonable to assume that one can make a person conscious of having violated a moral principle unless one offers convincing arguments that in a particular situation such a violation actually took place. Yet the unregenerate’s tendency to indulge in self-deception prevents him or her from finding any such argument convincing.” ⁴⁴ Following Bosco on this point, I would suggest this is one of the weaknesses of Calvin’s account of the conscience as it is presented in the Institutes. ⁴⁵ Calvin wants conscience to be a sufficiently accurate and condemning judge while also conceding fallen humanity’s penchant for self-deception and the inability of human conscience to apply moral principles in actual, concrete situations. As a result, Calvin permits one to question and interrogate the ability of conscience to apply general moral principles to particular situations, but not conscience generally because he retains the ability of conscience to ascribe deserving guilt and condemnation to the moral agent. If Bosco is right, though, one cannot have the latter without the former.

Not only does this account have an inherent inconsistency as we have just seen, it also raises some interesting questions regarding how one approaches something like false guilt where nothing actually wrong was done but the feeling of guilt is present. If Calvin believes it unnecessary to identify where particular moral infractions have incurred for conscience to have sufficient grounds for convicting a person, it is difficult to see the grounds upon which false guilt could be rejected if experiences of true guilt do not need an understanding of concrete moral infractions to be legitimate. Rejecting false guilt requires some ability to identify precisely where one acted according to the moral law in a particular instance despite having the convicting presence of guilt in one’s conscience. It is thus not clear that Calvin effectively opens such a path to interrogate the conscience when it delivers guilt and condemnation, though he does at the level of practically applying moral obligations. One can thus wonder about the degree to which Calvin’s account of conscience would allow counselors and spiritual directors to question feelings of guilt and condemnation in their clients and discern the origins and inner workings of such experiences.

Thus far we have seen deficiencies in two more theologically developed accounts of the conscience. In the Thomistic accounts, we observed a tendency to elevate the dictates of conscience without sufficiently accounting for the fallenness of human reason since it must be obeyed rather than interrogated. While Calvin does acknowledge the Fall has impacted human conscience, he still believes it is sufficient to condemn human beings, despite the fact that humanity’s moral faculties cannot be trusted to apply moral principles concretely. For these reasons, I believe we are better served by other articulations of the conscience that might help us account for fallen humanity’s habit of self-deception on one the hand and the more complicated view of our internal worlds that the psychological world has bequeathed to us on the other. I believe Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the conscience can inform a potential way forward.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I turn to Bonhoeffer’s account of conscience for several reasons. First, his definition of conscience seems sufficiently broad enough to encompass the more common ways the word conscience is used today. One can, for instance, find examples of him using conscience as the rational deliberation over moral convictions, which one should follow even when it brooks the state’s expectations. ⁴⁶ At the same time, he also seems to use conscience to reflect some kind of moral sense operating within humans. Second, his account will in fact give us the ability to interrogate conscience’s ability at more than just the practical level since it is part of fallen humanity’s attempts to rescue itself. Finally, I believe his account of conscience has been largely untapped to date. Someone with the acumen of Stephen Pope can opine, “Bonhoeffer does not seem to say much about the conscience, or at least he has no major treatise on the subject matter, no extensive philosophical account of its structure, no theory of how it functions, no account of its place in practical moral reasoning.” ⁴⁷ Pope then goes on to construct an account of conscience mostly inferred from other dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s thought but leaves wholly untouched some of the more intriguing things Bonhoeffer has to say about conscience, which is most unfortunate. ⁴⁸ While Pope is correct to note that Bonhoeffer has not written an extensive account about the conscience, his failure to acknowledge what Bonhoeffer has written perpetuates an unfortunate oversight regarding one of the twentieth century’s most interesting theologians.

Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on the conscience are informed by his appropriation of both Luther’s anthropology on the one hand and Barth’s elevation of revelation in the task of theology on the other. It is also born out of a polemical context, and Bonhoeffer is most notably reacting to the line of thinking exhibited by his professor Karl Holl who sought to define Luther’s religious faith as one of conscience. For Bonhoeffer, Holl’s position was problematic because “to ground theology in the conscience is to ground it in the self.” ⁴⁹ He instead sought to ground theology in revelation, particularly in Christ who was the fullness of God’s self-disclosure.

What then, does Bonhoeffer have to say about the conscience? In what follows, I will concentrate on those passages where he explicitly articulates a view of conscience in Act and Being and in his lectures, like the ones on Genesis entitled Creation and Fall. These sections will provide a more fruitful and rewarding engagement with Bonhoeffer’s theology of conscience. As we will see, the conscience is the organ of moral self-assessment and one’s moral “sense” about oneself. Importantly for him, it is “self” that does the assessment in the conscience and seeks out its own remedy for moral infractions. As a result, conscience is not a direct conduit with the divine nor does it become a law alongside of God’s. Neither does it need to render a correct verdict for fallen humanity as it is the very indication of such a verdict. Like the rest of the person, it must participate in Christ’s death and resurrection, which means its remedy will require more than moral education.

To begin unpacking Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on conscience, we will commence with Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being, which is a dense philosophical text in which he analyzes much of the German philosophical tradition from the vantage point of Luther’s Augustinian anthropology. Armed with the biblical revelation of humanity’s guilt and Luther’s distinction between active (i.e. self-generated and contrived) and passive contrition (i.e. one that God brings), Bonhoeffer does not elevate conscience to some kind of conduit between God and humanity as we see in parts of the Thomist tradition. Instead, he believes that fallen humanity uses conscience as a tool to manufacture a self-made solution for its guilt. In the following citation, which recounts the consequences of the original Fall, notice how Bonhoeffer sees fallen conscience as the self’s replacement of God as judge:

Under the heavy burden of being both creator and bearer of a world, and in the cold silence of their eternal solitude, they begin to be afraid of themselves and to shudder. Then they arise and declare themselves their own final judges and proceed to their own indictment—concluded in the language of conscience. But the response of the indicted human being is repentance (contrition activa!). The conscience and repentance of human beings in Adam are the final grasp at themselves, the confirmation and justification of their self-glorifying solitude. ⁵⁰

In the quest to be “like God” in Genesis 3, humans arrogate to themselves the right to assess themselves morally, effectively supplanting God. This does not free humans from indictment, though, for now it is “their own.” Faced with the indictment of fallen conscience, humans try to shore up their assessment of themselves with repentance, but for Bonhoeffer, the repentance that fallen humanity “in Adam” contrives with the aid of its conscience is just another ineffective attempt at self-justification and atonement.

As he continues to describe how fallen conscience tries to assuage the pangs of condemnation, he writes:

As sinners they keep their sins with them, for they see them through their conscience, which holds them captive in themselves and only bids them to look at sin over and again…. For this reason, such conscience is of the devil, who leaves human beings to themselves in untruth; for this reason this conscience must be mortified when Christ comes to human beings. Conscience can torment and drive to despair; but it cannot of itself kill human beings—it cannot because it is their final grasp at themselves. ⁵¹

Bonhoeffer makes some interesting statements in this passage worth emphasizing. First, he asserts that fallen “conscience is of the devil,” which stands in sharp distinction from what one finds in some of the Vatican assertions that conscience is the voice of God. It is of the devil chiefly because it cuts humans off from the truth of the justifying Gospel which frees them from being curved in upon themselves. Second, fallen conscience is impotent to fix humans even when it accurately identifies moral shortcomings. It only succeeds in miring one in “despair” because humans left to their own resources are curved in upon themselves. By drawing attention to moral failures, it becomes a prison wherein humans rue over their sin until they are liberated by a force external to them. Finally, fallen conscience—trapped in a repetitive cycle of trying to remedy humanity apart from grace—“must be mortified when Christ comes to human beings.” Fallen conscience cannot be rehabilitated or retrained. It must be put to death and recreated. With such a statement, Bonhoeffer successfully opens up the ability to critique and interrogate conscience itself beyond just the ability to connect moral principles to particular cases. The entire process of trying to identify moral infractions and correct them must be remade in the revelation of Christ.

Further exposition on the conscience can be found in his theological lectures on the Fall entitled Creation and Fall. Here, Bonhoeffer seems to say that fallen conscience is a post-lapsarian reality emerging in Adam’s flight from God. He puts it quite bluntly, “This flight, Adam’s hiding away from God, we call conscience.” ⁵² In fact, Bonhoeffer proceeds to identify conscience not as humanity’s accurate apprehension of the moral law but as the very process of self-delusion for the purposes of avoiding God’s actual judgment:

Indeed it is the function of conscience to make human beings flee from God and so admit against their own will that God is in the right; yet, conscience also lets human beings, in fleeing from God, feel secure in their hiding place. Thus, humankind instead of realizing that it really is in flight, is deluded by conscience…. Conscience chases humankind away from God into its secure hiding place. Here, far away from God…humankind itself plays the role of being judge and in this way seeks to evade God’s judgment. ⁵³

Notice several things in this section. The first is that conscience still renders an admission of guilt. Unlike Calvin, it does not do so on the basis of getting a sufficient amount of the general moral obligations correct but in the fact that it is fleeing from the divine verdict. ⁵⁴ The need to flee is in itself an admission, even if the generalities or specifics of moral shortcomings are misunderstood or misconstrued. Second, conscience is also the same organ by which unredeemed humanity proceeds to render judgment over itself. Thus, while fearing God’s judgment, fallen conscience offers itself as a safe haven. As he puts it more clearly a little bit later: “Conscience is not the voice of God within sinful human beings; instead it is precisely their defense against this voice.” ⁵⁵ Thus, fallen conscience is a means of defending against God’s true voice. It is not the voice of God within, which is a sharp contrast from the Vatican documents seen earlier.

For Bonhoeffer, the chief problem of fallen conscience is the way in which it cuts one off from the grace of Christ. In Act and Being Bonhoeffer identifies the quintessential problem with the conscience by noting that it

…interposes itself between Christ (the community of faith) and me, and either obscures my view of Christ or shows Christ to me as my judge on the cross, thereby pointing relentlessly to my sin. The spiritual law has arisen against me. I hear only my accuser, see myself rejected; death and hell grasp for me. Truly this is temptation and rebellion against Christ, since it is disregard for the grace offered in Christ…. This temptation belongs entirely to the righteousness of the flesh, and this conscience is itself defection from Christ. ⁵⁶

Fallen autonomous conscience is characterized by a relentless focus on one’s guilt and refusal to accept grace. Because it seeks the self’s own righteousness and self-justification, fallen conscience does not attain to Christ and the grace he offers since it tirelessly hunts for a way out from under the burden by looking to its own resources.

Such is the plight of fallen humanity and its conscience. However, Bonhoeffer’s account of the conscience does introduce a positive dimension for conscience as well and no articulation would be complete without it. In his work Act and Being, Bonhoeffer distinguishes between two approaches to the conscience with the first being summarized by much of what we have said thus far regarding conscience in its fallen state. Whether the experience of conscience is positive or negative depends on whether Christ or self is the focus. He explains, “For in order to find Christ, as long as I still reflect on myself, Christ is not present. If Christ is truly present, I see only Christ. Conscience can be termed the voice of God only insofar as conscience is the place where Christ, in real temptation, kills human beings in order to give them life or not.” ⁵⁷ Thus, if conscience is to be helpful at all, the self-obsessed gaze must be redirected to Christ who bids one come and die. In this second form of conscience, that of a Christocentric reflection on the self, which I will henceforth call “redeemed conscience,” he notes that it

…is included in the intention toward Christ. It is the ‘look of sin’ within faith. Those who seek themselves in Christ see themselves always in sin; but now this sin can no longer distort their contemplation of Christ (it is, after all, the basis on which I, [in sarki], can look upon Christ and him alone). I see my sin within the forgiveness through Christ.… Repentance, too, is now no longer the last grasp for oneself, but rather repentance within the belief in forgiveness (contrition passiva)…. It is not the loss of oneself to the self; rather, it is finding oneself in Christ. ⁵⁸

Here, there is the full surrender of the self to Christ. It is entering into self-reflection that anchors any such reflection in the larger biblical narrative of redemption through Christ. The self is no longer fleeing from God but rather losing itself to death to find it anew in Christ.

What does it look like to approach conscience in this second form? Bonhoeffer spells this out a bit more practically in his Theological Anthropology course where notes from Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann provide some of the content. In this course he said:

The Christian will obediently enter daily into this dying and will, here too, assume the existing transgressions. For him, they obtain the dual sense of sin and the reference to sin. The Christian will not remain stuck on the transgression; he will not overestimate himself, i.e., he will not let it distract his view from his fallen existence; he will not let the magnitude of the sins disappear into it; he will not underestimate it, i.e., he will recognize it as his act. He will be attentive to the transgressions but will be even more attentive to the word of the church, which marks him as a sinner, condemns him, and exonerates him. ⁵⁹

Here, one finds no attempts at self-justification but rather a full recognition of one’s sinfulness. There is no minimization of sin. While this might seem overwhelming, this attention to one’s sin is not the final word, for the “word of the church” is no less than the glorious message that God justifies the ungodly (Rom. 5:6–11). For Bonhoeffer, the Gospel allows one to silence the condemning nature of the conscience. Yes, there needs to be an accurate assessment of one’s sin, but the judgment of conscience must ultimately be for the point of correlating with the divine judgment rather than self-justification as one of the abbreviated notes observes: “In the recognition of exploring conscience, of having to judge oneself in order to give expression to God’s judgment.” ⁶⁰ This statement is critical, for there is an invitation to honest self-evaluation here, but it is for the purpose of identifying what God would judge in the situation, not the self alone. This opens up a crucial door for assessing something like false guilt because it would inquire whether the immediate sense of guilt and condemnation did in fact map onto a divine assessment of the situation. Moreover, even in this redeemed experience of the conscience, there is the ability to silence its condemnation with grace. As the notes from Bonhoeffer’s lecture record, one is “…always being able to silence the conscience. Specifically saying: In the face of the continuing reproach of the conscience: be quiet now. Not be ordered around by the conscience.” ⁶¹ Redeemed humans are thus no longer at the whim of the conscience, or at least should not be. They no longer need to flee into hiding nor resort to self-justification because now they experience moral evaluation in Christ. The justifying word of grace provides lasting relief and ability to put conscience in its proper place.

At this point one might be wondering if Bonhoeffer shares Calvin’s paradoxical problem. Does he in fact set conscience up to render an approximate judgment in order to condemn the self while admitting it can succeed at self-deception as well? There is one particular section of Act and Being that answers this concern. He writes,

But to understand sin qua guilt as the being of human beings appears untruthful in light of the experience of one’s own conscience and seems to minimize the gravity of the concept of guilt…. Underlying this view is a concept of conscience as the unmediated voice of God in human beings. But this argument breaks down before the different interpretation of the experience of conscience that was given above. The attempt of conscience to limit sin to the act must be understood as a human attempt at self-deliverance. ⁶²

In case this point was not registered forcefully enough earlier, Bonhoeffer differentiates his view from those in which conscience is “the unmediated voice of God in human beings.” What he emphasizes in this section, though, is that often one’s admission of guilt and sin is restricted to certain actions and that this is none other than another attempt at self-rescue. Thus, even in rendering a judgment on the self, the conscience is still not delivering a full judgment. Instead of relying upon the conscience for this verdict, Bonhoeffer helpfully turns in another direction: “The knowledge of what sin is comes solely through the mediation of the Word of God in Christ; and that knowledge overrules the dissenting conscience. Sola fide credendum est nos esse peccatores.” ⁶³ These sentences effectively move us past one of the deficiencies of Calvin’s view of conscience, which requires even the unregenerate conscience to be effective at rendering judgment on the human person. For Bonhoeffer, only Scripture and the Christ it reveals can truly unveil the depth of human depravity, and it is therefore an assessment we receive by faith and thus not fundamentally contingent on one’s conscience.

Conclusion

How can Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on the conscience inform contemporary Christian reflection on spiritual formation? Bonhoeffer’s reflections offer several helpful things. For one, of the views surveyed, Bonhoeffer provides the greatest freedom to interrogate the conscience because conscience is not established as a moral authority external to God. Like everything else about fallen humanity, it is judged and assessed by Christ. This is important because it is not ultimately about interrogating conscience for interrogation’s sake but to bring forth Christ’s verdict. In addition to this, Bonhoeffer can be a powerful caution to those operating in or borrowing from the Thomist tradition that there is more going on in the conscience than pure rational and ethical deliberation. Even if the conscience is defined as only conscious moral deliberations, beneath such deliberations might lurk a desire to not just do the right thing but to prove that one is in the right. In fact, if Bonhoeffer is correct to say that the conscience is a result of humanity’s post-lapsarian attempt to become its own judge, Aquinas does precisely what one would anticipate from humans seeking to preserve a sense of their own goodness, namely, he makes the rulings of conscience obligatory. Aquinas’ view would allow one to go on thinking that one should have always done what one did. Humans seeking to retain their own righteousness, as Bonhoeffer maintains, would have a vested interest in affirming their moral judgments about themselves and the Thomist tradition and others that make the conscience obligatory can perhaps too casually sanction this by making conscience unquestionable even if it should be informed by divine law. I would contend that, in contrast to the Thomist tradition and its emphasis on conscience formation through learning about moral duties, Bonhoeffer gives us a lens through which we can more readily see conscience not just as a rational process but as a psychological coping mechanism by which humans try to preserve their autonomy and shore up their sense of goodness and even attempt to assuage their own guilt. Moreover, Bonhoeffer’s view of conscience has an added bonus in that it does not need to distinguish between the superego and conscience to preserve his account of the conscience as we find in some Thomist thinkers like Keenan. In fact, Bonhoeffer might have found Keenan’s account of the superego too trivial, for Bonhoeffer would see fallen conscience not just in the internalized parental voices but perhaps also in the “call to grow” that Keenan perhaps too readily equates with the conscience.

Though he shares the belief that the Fall affects the conscience, in contrast to Calvin, Bonhoeffer does not ultimately depend on the conscience to render a judgment about one’s sinfulness. That is the role reserved for the Word of Christ. In fact, for Bonhoeffer, the conscience apart from faith is doing just the opposite. Cognizant of the judgment it is seeking to avoid, it cobbles together a case for its defense or performs a self-generated repentance. Thus, in Bonhoeffer’s account, self-deception, rather than stymieing the purpose of the conscience as it does for Calvin, is consistent with its very nature apart from faith. It would seem then that Bonhoeffer offers a more coherent account of the conscience that is not as threatened by human self-deception as Calvin’s potentially is. In addition, Bonhoeffer’s view provides a straighter path toward discerning between true and false guilt since moral assessment is to give rise to God’s judgment in the redeemed conscience.

In addition to offering a potentially more coherent account, Bonhoeffer can inform our practices of spiritual formation, and here I will offer some thoughts with one concrete way of applying it. To begin, when it comes to the issue of forming the conscience, there is more to be done than providing moral instruction, which one tends to find in those influenced by the Thomist account of conscience. A Bonhoeffer-inspired formation of conscience would still include moral instruction in moral duties. Part of conscience formation, however, would go beyond this and include something like one sees in the notes from his lectures, namely, guidance on how to navigate the internal dialogue one has over the assessment of oneself. Particular focus would be given to confronting guilt and shame, making sure they do in fact give rise to God’s true judgment, which includes condemnation of actual sin and also the comforting words of justification for those who have faith in Christ.

What might this look like as one performs the spiritual disciplines? One of the practices that has been beneficial for me is the prayer of examen, sometimes called the “examen of conscience,” which has its roots in the spiritual disciplines of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. ⁶⁴ Often during this short prayer at the end of the day a person reviews her day, taking note of when and where she was aware of God’s presence and when and where this was lacking. Bonhoeffer’s understanding of conscience would add a more holistic layer to this exercise, for it would cause us to ask not only where did we sense God’s presence but where might we have falsely assumed that God was with us. What attitude or behavior that I have labeled as a moment of connection with the divine needs more interrogation by the Spirit and the Word? Conversely, what feelings of guilt and condemnation in the day flow from the internalized voices of one’s parents or other authorities rather than from God? Which feelings of guilt upon further inspection were not in fact wrong actions? Which are moral evils? These questions are not to cause undo moral despair or lapse into relativism, but it is rather to follow the Apostle Paul when he writes, “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor. 4:3–4, NIV). Our own self-assessment can only be a preliminary judgment and must ultimately be offered to God. Before him, we might discover that some moments where we felt most connected and aligned with God’s will were actually full of our own self-satisfaction and autonomous attempts to deal with guilt and shame.

Bonhoeffer also offers some insights for when we do discover those places where we have failed to love God and others in the examen. For Bonhoeffer, the solution to human guilt is not a contrived contrition but the genuine repentance that God brings. As the examinee sees where sin was indeed present, Bonhoeffer would direct them to the person of Christ whose Word condemns sin yet justifies the ungodly. The latter would bring relief to admission of actual sin. This would offer a fuller set of steps for the person navigating the examen. Consider Phyllis Zagano’s suggestion for what one does with actual sin at the final stage of the examen. She writes simply: “Maybe there is something you did wrong—now is the time to tell Jesus you are sorry and ask Him to be with you the next time a similar situation arises.” ⁶⁵ While this can be helpful, it can also be easily contorted into the guilt-laden admonition to “do better next time.” She unfortunately does not provide a word of assurance, which is precisely where Bonhoeffer’s filtering of the conscience by the Word of Christ is helpful. We can acknowledge the shortcoming and its worthy judgment knowing that we are ultimately dead to ourselves but alive to God. The one solution that Zagano does seem to offer is that one should meet the “sorrow” one feels as a result of one’s failures by focusing on “gratitude when you give thanks for God’s gentle work inside your heart.” ⁶⁶ This may be effective for some, but sometimes the voices of guilt and shame might be stronger than the gratitude. At such times, the ontological superiority of the Word of Christ can provide relief from internal fear, guilt, and shame.

In the end, I suggest that contemporary discourse on conscience and formation would be well served by Bonhoeffer’s account. Not only does he offer a more circumspect view than the ones we surveyed, his view is better able to deal with the complexities that psychoanalytic psychology has brought to bear on the conversation and can also better account for human fallenness. More than that, rather than making conscience a necessary though compromised judge as Calvin does, Bonhoeffer turns conscience’s flight from God into a judgment that is solidified by the judgment found in the Word of Christ. It is this same Word that can alleviate conscience’s pangs through grace and mercy and let the prisoner go free. Rather than conscience being our guide to our moral discernment, the Word of Christ is better suited since it is Christ himself who will judge the world (Acts 10:42).