What was the first CD you ever owned? For me it was a CD by Blink 182. Well, when I say owned I mean the first CD that I ever permanently “borrowed” from my brother. When I was 10 years old our family went on a holiday to Avoca. I saw my brother sunbaking on the beach listening to a CD he had bought. I asked him if I could have a listen. The CD was “The Mark, Tom and Travis Show” by Blink 182. I enjoyed it so much that it became the only CD I listen to for the next six years. “Enjoyed” is really an understatement. I listened to it every night for those six years and, having learnt the lyrics to every song, I would sing myself to sleep every single night - much to the annoyance of my brother.
Wanting to relive the nostalgia of my youth, I went to play a song from this CD recently at a recent Karaoke night with Korean friends from my church. After displaying a rather remarkable range in pitch of which I was rather proud, my ballad was cut short as the sexually explicit content of the song I was singing became apparent. Recognizing the unhelpfulness of this song and feeling some-what embarasssed I decided to change the song. As I look back I can see that through continual exposure throughout my youth, my conscience had become desensitized to the constant swearing and sexual references. It was not until this event so many years later, as a Christian amidst a group of other Christians, that I was able to rightly perceive the offensiveness of what I had spent so many nights of my youth enjoying.
For most of us, the normalization and celebration of sin has been so pervasive in the entertainment we have grown up enjoying that it can be difficult for us to discern whether or not God is pleased with our lifestyle. There is often a cognitive dissonance between what we believe about God and his law and how we live. So, how are Christians meant to navigate this complicated issue?
I believe that appealing to a conscience that has been informed by God’s word is the means through which Christians can honour God with entertainment and maintain the integrity of our witness to this fallen world.
For us to glorify God with our conscience we must first understand the role of the conscience. The conscience is the moral faculty given to all men by God which enables us to pass moral judgements on ourselves.[1] Its intended function is to act as a mirror “so that we can determine our true spiritual state in accord with the mind of God.”[2][3] Richard Sibbes, the Puritan theologian, compares the conscience to a divine court within the soul whereby it works as a witness (2 Cor. 1:12, Rom. 2:15) as our guide (Acts 24:16; Rom. 13:5) and as our judge and executioner condemning us and filling us with grief when our guilt is discovered (Rom. 1:32).[4] So serious is the role of the conscience that Paul can say, that though all food is clean, if anyone is convicted that to eat certain foods would be disobedient to God, such a person “is condemned if he eats” (Rom. 14:14, 23). Why? Though our conscience is fallible, whatever we do that causes us to disobey our conscience is sin. As Paul puts it, “whatever doesn’t proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:14).
One way to understand the effect entertainment has on our conscience is through the concept of a laugh track. Many sit-coms have what is called a laugh track. Brian Patrick says that “The laugh track is a social cue, a means of exerting group pressure. The viewer follows the group norm and thoughtlessly laughs along.”[5] All entertainment seeks to convey a particular worldview and a particular view of morality, a particular narrative, and uses a variety of means to evoke a particular response favorable to the moral messaging that they seek to promote. In one sense, our conscience can be viewed as an internal laugh track which generates our internal disposition towards what we watch, listen to or read. Albert Mohler describes how our internal laugh track is being affected by the morality of the shows we watch:
“There is no way to watch entertainment, regardless of its media format without also receiving moral messaging. Sometimes that moral messaging comes directly to us in terms of something we recognize. But far more ominously from a Christian perspective this moral influence often comes in a far more subtle form. It is the rearrangement of our intuitions, sometimes even of the laugh track of our lives. That is a moral change that we might not so readily perceive that explains why we might laugh at something now we would not have laughed at just a matter of a couple of years ago. That is a moral change and it’s one that most Americans do not even recognize.”[6]
I remember watching the movie American Pie during high school. In it, 5 boys make a pact to lose their virginity before their high school graduation. By the end of the movie, all of them have lost their virginity and tranquil music is played while we view each of them finally content and satisfied in having finally had sex. As fun as much of this movie was, the moral messaging intentionally romanticized sexual immorality and presented a view which depicted having a one night stand as a boy’s initiation right to manhood. I remember reflecting on how fulfilled they were, laying with the women they had slept with, and the profound yearning this produced in me to have such an experience. The intuitions of my laugh track were so rearranged by this experience that I decided that I wanted to lose my virginity by the time I had finished school! A movie or a book is like a sermon and we kid ourselves when we say that the movies we watch don’t project a moral influence on us.
The effect of this moral conditioning is that the entertainment we engage in can deprive us of a conscience that is at peace with God. Because “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17:9) unbelievers and believers alike can settle for a lifestyle in which they are not at peace with God whilst they try to talk their consciences into a false sense of peace. Such consciences can never truly have peace for, as John Trapp (1628-1691) said, “One small drop [of guilt] troubles the whole sea of outward comforts.”[7] Like Cain, we so often forgo the blessing that is our rightful inheritance - a conscience at peace with God - for a bowl of soup that provides no lasting satisfaction (Gen. 25:33).
Such a lifestyle, can incline the affections of our heart towards the world, weaken our conscience and prompt actions and reasoning’s that are unscriptural and unreliable.[8] Ashley Null aptly describes this relationship:
“What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.”[9]
In other words, our heart never remains neutral, and yet its influence on our moral reasoning is often imperceptible. If we continue in a lifestyle where we justify our worldliness, we can so darken and sear our conscience as to render it insensitive and ineffective. A defiled conscience can strip people of an awareness of sin and of a sensitivity to their need for repentance leaving such people in danger of “mak[ing] ship wreck of their faith.” (1 Tim. 1:19 cf. Eph. 4:18) Such men can “swallow down sin like drink and without any remorse.”[10] John MacArthur provides this helpful illustration:
‘…the conscience functions like a skylight, not a light bulb. It lets light into the soul; it does not produce its own. Its effectiveness is determined by the amount of pure light we expose it to, and by how clean we keep it. Cover it or put it in total darkness and it ceases to function. That’s why the apostle Paul spoke of the importance of a clear conscience (1 Tim. 3:9) and warned against anything that would defile or muddy the conscience (1 Cor. 8:7; Tit. 1:15).”[11]
In the gospel, God has provided the means for our conscience to have peace with God. The starting point for Hebrews is the axiom ‘man cannot worship God with a guilty conscience.’[12] It is for this reason that Christ died that we would have “our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience” granting us the “full assurance” of peace with God (Heb. 10:22 cf. 9:14). Puritan theologian William Fenner wrote about the abiding peace and comfort of a good conscience. A good conscience, he said, arises from a life of integrity and the fear of the Lord, where we seek to obey God with sincerity, in every area of life, and with humility over our sins and dependence on Christ and His Spirit.[13] Such a conscience “maketh a man taste sweetness in all outward things: in meat, in drink, in sleep, in company of friends… In life, in death, in judgement, it is unspeakable comfort.”[14] Through the gospel we can have the full assurance of a conscience at peace with God.
The lasting comfort of a good conscience is illustrated most memorably at the end of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Mr Honest is about to cross the River Jordan. He had asked Good Conscience to meet him at the river, and Good Conscience was there to help him through the final trial of death.[15]
Through the gospel we can experience subjectively what Christ has obtained for us objectively in his life death and resurrection – the full assurance and comfort of peace with God. In my next blogpost we will explore the importance of holiness in our witness to non-Christians.
[1] J. I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2001), 114. Here Packer defines the conscience as “the build-in power of our minds to pass moral judgements on ourselves, approving or disapproving our attitudes, actions, reactions, thoughts, and plans, and telling us, if it disapproves of what we have done, that we ought to suffer for it. Conscience has in it two elements, (a) an awareness of certain things as being right and wrong, and (b) an ability to apply laws and rules to specific situations. Conscience, as distinct from our other powers of mind, is unique; it feels like a person detached from us, often speaking when we would like it to be silent and saying things that we would rather not hear.”
[2] Robert Harris cited in Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 915.
[3] Conscience (Gk. συνειδησις) literally means a knowledge ('...science' Gk. ειδησις) that is shared (‘con…’ Gk. συν). In Hebrew the word for conscience is leb (לבב) typically translated as “heart” (cf. Ex. 8:15). The implication is that conscience is more than just intellectual self-awareness, there is a moral aspect to our awareness – knowledge of right and wrong – that touches our affections. In A discourse of Conscience, William Perkins translates the biblical word for conscience as “co-knowledge” or “co-testimony.” He shows that the word itself witnesses to the divine dimension of conscience, for who can “co-know” our deepest thoughts and feelings but God and ourselves?
[4] Richard Sibbes, ‘An Exposition of Second Corinthians, Chapter One’, in Works of Richard Sibbes (Banner of Truth, 1973), 210-211.
[5] Brian Anse Patrick, The Ten Commandments of Propaganda (London: Arktos Media Ltd, 2013), 96.
[6] Albert Mohler, ‘The Briefing’, As Chinese Consume American Culture, Americal Moral Messaging Spreads, (http://www.albertmohler.com/2015/09/30/the-briefing-09-30-15/, September 30, 2015.)
[7] Quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 916.
[8] In Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections (2013), p 25, 29, Edwards says that our heart never remains neutral but is either inclined towards loving or hating something, towards approving or rejecting something.
[9] Ashley Null, ‘Interview with Dr. Ashley Null on Thomas Cranmer: Primary Author of the Book of Common Prayer’, (http://www.acl.asn.au/old/null.html, September 2001.) This relationship between head and heart helps illustrate the gnomic effects of sin.
[10] William Fenner, The Souls Looking-Glasse quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 919.
[11] John F. MacArthur, The Vanishing Conscience (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005), 39. Cf. Matt. 6:22.
[12] Claude Anthony Pierce, Conscience in the New Testament: A Study of Syneidesis in the New Testament , in the Light of Its Sources and with Particular Reference to St. Paul, ... Today (SCM Press, 1958), 101.
[13] Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 924.
[14] William Fenner, The Souls Looking-Glasse, 112-13, quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 924-25.
[15] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (ed. Rosalie De Rosset; New Edition edition.; Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2007), Part II, Ch. XI.
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