The most logical source of the conscience is God. Discuss.’ (40 marks). Conscience is the voice of God - discuss The notion of conscience's matter, form and even existence has been under scrutiny by the Christian Church ever since it began. Although no

The most logical source of the conscience is God. Discuss.’ (40 marks). Conscience is the voice of God - discuss The notion of conscience's matter, form and even existence has been under scrutiny by the Christian Church ever since it began. Although not referred to explicitly in the Gospels, in the letters of St. Paul conscie nce is mentioned twenty-five times in a variety of senses. An example of the manifestation of the idea of a conscience, however, can be found as far back as Job in the Old Testament - “I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go, m y heart does not reproach any of my days” (Job 27:6). According to St. Paul, the law of God is ‘written in the hearts of gentiles'; the conscience acts in every individual, no matter what stage in life, or knowledge of existing civic laws. In Sophocles' ‘Antigone', the her oine defies her King's order in favour of a greater allegiance to an "unwritten law", and history is spattered with such examples of conflict between inner ‘moral truth' and civil obedience. Following the introduction of the term by St. Jerome (347 -420), writers of the earlier and later Middle Ages referred to the innate power of distinguishing good from evil as ‘synderesis'. Jerome himself describes this as the ‘spark of conscience ...by which we discern that we sin', but later writers such as Aquinas refer to the term ‘conscience' (conscientia) for the ability to distinguish good from bad at the level of particular actions. St. Augustine, a contemporary of Jerome, also regarded conscience as an innate faculty which reveals God's moral law, as it is “Written in the book of light from which all laws are copied” (De Trinitate 14, 15, 22). Effectively, Jerome and Augustine thought our conscience is God-given, and thus both face similar difficulties as Divine Command theory. Arguably, Augustine and Jerome