Conscience and the Moral Education of Children

I have two toddlers, so I watch a lot of children’s television. I have seen an episode of nearly every major children’s show and many of the YouTube channels parents frequently turn to for children’s education. I have my favorites and my not-so-favorites, but I’ll keep those to myself, and you can just wait to see my Halloween costume.

One thing I recently noticed when watching with my daughter is the significant shift the educational emphases of these shows have taken since I was child. Notably, there are far more shows focusing on children’s emotions, how to manage them, and how to relate to others. It certainly speaks to the therapeutic interests of our culture. This impulse is not inherently negative. In fact, it has helped me as a parent have a vocabulary to talk with my children in addressing tantrums, sadness, and more.

However, it does seem that with the interest in children’s emotions, there has been a lack of interest in engaging children in moral lessons. Sure, children are encouraged to share, but it is often couched in how it makes another child feel rather than explicitly moral terms. Gone is the moral lesson, “taking something is bad” or “hurting someone else is wrong.” Instead, the lesson is, “you hurt her feelings.”

My suggestion here is not that we should return to an older vision of moral education, rejecting in total the new perspective. We need both. In fact, the more internal focus of today is greatly aided by an objective moral focus that marked older moral educations (though, like all things, might have been given to excess and abuse). If the sum of our moral formation is grounded in “do no harm” and our own subjective experience, then we tacitly conform to the modern notion that grounds morality in personal choice and experience. As children grow up, they may have a sense an action or another’s action is wrong, but by what standard might they make such an assessment? Their conscience sanctions the action, the culture approves, and it does no harm to themselves or another. The cultural headwinds tell them that in the absence of harm, it must not be wrong. This is why it might be said, our age is the age of the conscience.

This observation coincided with my reading of an early article from Herman Bavinck on the conscience. ¹ In this article, the late 19th- and early 20th-century theologian offered a vision for the development of one’s person, especially their conscience, that I believe should be recovered today in our formation of children. Specifically, I believe Christians should not be wary of offering a moral education, and, in fact, in its neglect, may spare the metaphorical rod resulting in a difficulty to engage the morality of our age as adults and miss opportunities for gospel proclamation.

The Development of Conscience

Bavinck makes the case for an integrated approach to the conscience. He outlines the biblical contours of our moral framework. Inherent in human nature is the moral law written on the heart. This is true of believers and non-believers alike (Rom. 2:15). The conscience is not to be equated with this law. Rather, the conscience is the internal testimony within each person that accuses us where we have departed from God’s law. As Bavinck describes it, the conscience is the law of our personality. Ibid., 124.

Rather, the conscience is the internal testimony within each person that accuses us where we have departed from God’s law. As Bavinck describes it, the conscience is the law of our personality. ²
Skyler Flowers

However, human personality—by which Bavinck refers to who we are at our very core—develops within humans. ³ The person we were as a child is not who we are today. There may even be specific aspects of our personality that have radically shifted as we aged. There was a time in my life when I would have considered myself as extroverted as a human can be. Now, every year I find myself more comfortable and energized by time alone. My personality has developed.

With the conscience being so tied to human personality, Bavinck suggests that they develop alongside each other through our environment, culture, upbringing, education, and more. Thus, the human conscience might be formed or malformed depending on these factors. Bavinck is clear:

Now it is true and must immediately be granted that in the empirical conscience as we know it from daily experience and observation, there is much that is accidental; it includes many elements that do not automatically belong to the conscience but by means of different circumstances, nurture, status, occupation, etc., have come to be included and have, as it were, grown to be intertwined with conscience. The content of our conscience is derived largely from outside, and thus differs enormously among different peoples.⁴

God’s perfect, unchanging law is written on our hearts, and the conscience is an arena for God’s speaking into the life of every person through convicting them of wrongdoing. Yet, the reality remains that our consciences are subjected to influences from this world. Notably, this opens the door to sin.

Sin’s corrupting influence lays a heavy hand on our conscience, resulting in obscuring the law written on our hearts, the reinterpretation of existing moral lines, and the erecting of artificial moral boundaries all around our conscience. Thus, as Bavinck writes, “Something can be a sin before God that nonetheless is not against our conscience.” ⁵

What is the call to every human, notably the Christian? Bavinck answers, “The subjective rule of our life must be brought increasingly into agreement with the objective one made known to us in God’s revelation.” ⁶

God’s perfect, unchanging law is written on our hearts, and the conscience is an arena for God’s speaking into the life of every person through convicting them of wrongdoing.
Skyler Flowers

The Christian should be self-reflective of their conscience, constantly seeking to bring their conscience into agreement with God’s Word while removing the artifices that bind it to idols of this age. This requires attention to one’s environment and education, as well as that which might be personal to them. In particular, Bavinck was greatly concerned late in his career to see a pedagogy arise that formed children morally, shaping the conscience to love God and live faithfully. Even more, he saw it as the duty of parents and churches. As he wrote elsewhere, “Children, being moral beings, have the right to a formation that is in accordance with the laws governing moral life, that promotes their moral development and nurtures their moral personality.”⁷ It is to this formation we now turn.

Implications for Moral Education

Bavinck’s understanding of the conscience is an integrated approach that accounts for environmental and subjective factors without denying the spiritual reality within each person. For the ones primarily responsible for the environments our children are formed by, this should not be a message of discouragement but encouragement. It should be a calling for us to rear them in a way that, from a young age, sees their conscience grow along the contours of Scripture. Here are a few ways we can do this.

1. Expand Our Moral Vision

It is not enough to merely teach children, “this is right, and this is wrong.” We may produce moral citizens, but we might not produce godly people. The moral vision of the Bible promotes not only right actions, but right actions that are empowered by a love of God. In shepherding children in the ways of right and wrong, we must always be holding up for them the hope of the gospel and life of flourishing that awaits them in following the Bible’s moral vision. Concern for a moral education doesn’t call for more law and less grace. Rather, it means allowing the gospel to shape the vision from start to finish. This good news affirms the moral poles of right and wrong, while also firmly situating them in a more expansive reality that compels obedience rather than simply demanding it.

2. Recover Our Moral Tradition

In a gospel-centered moral education, the Christian also finds a robust tradition that comes along with it. Historically, Christians have practiced catechesis, notably surrounding the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. These catechetical resources take different emphases, but they each also expand our moral vision in unique ways.

The Apostles’ Creed enlists us (“I believe”) in the narrative of Scripture, calling for our commitment to God.
The Lord’s Prayer leads us (“Our Father”) to pray to God, honoring his name and making supplications, but also that we would live on this Earth dependent on him, seeking his kingdom, forgiven of our trespasses, and delivered from temptation.
The Ten Commandments call us (“Thou shalt”) to love God and love our neighbor.

Our confession of truth, our communion with God and the saints, and our conformity into the image of the Son all call for a moral renewal and life before God.

Parents and churches should be concerned to assess their moral education of their children to ensure that the morality they teach is neither holding up the subjective world of conscience like a scepter nor wielding the objective morality of God’s Word like a hammer. Rather, we should be constantly assessing our education to situate it in God’s vision of morality, right and wrong, gospel and glory. The church’s moral tradition helps us in this task.

3. Dwell in Our Moral Community

Given Bavinck’s emphasis on the importance of the environment in forming the conscience, it is essential that this environment be thoroughly integrated into Christian community. It has always been God’s intention that his people would morally form one another, especially one another’s children (Deut. 6:4-9). Paul himself even makes direct appeals to children (Eph. 6:1-3). The assumption of the Bible is that God’s people in the Church would form one another. There are innumerable ways the local church might do this, but I will highlight two: the church as the home of God’s Word and God’s people.

A moral community is largely shaped by its stories. The local church offers the stories of Scripture that often instruct God’s children in the delight and obedience of the law of the Lord.
Skyler Flowers

A moral community is largely shaped by its stories. The local church offers the stories of Scripture that often instruct God’s children in the delight and obedience of the law of the Lord. I do not mean to suggest we should moralize the Bible as a version of Aesop’s Fables for Christians. A gospel-less moral instruction cannot be called distinctively Christian (more on this later). Nevertheless, the Bible’s stories are meant to instruct God’s people in how to navigate this world in wisdom. Jacob shows us the folly of deceit. Israel shows us the danger of syncretism. Ruth shows us the beauty of devotion. We could go on and on. These stories were how Israel’s men and women could look to their children and say, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go” (Ps. 32:8).

A moral community is thoroughly shaped by its people. The local church has examples of faithfulness across age ranges and backgrounds. Even in a two-parent home concerned with a moral upbringing, a child might receive two godly examples of Christian living. However, in the church, they might be exposed to the faithfulness of a widow who has served her neighborhood’s families for decades, a college student who is rigorous in their study yet remains devoted to the Lord, a single person who has invested themselves in the ministry of the church, and much more. In other words, the life of faith is given conceptual validity for them. Happiness and meaning are not found outside of the church. They have known from the time of their youth; they only need to look around.

4. Pursue a Moral Education

Recently, work has been done at the North American Mission Board to advocate for churches to take a more direct engagement to formal education. They offer various solutions, but the impulse should be widely affirmed: formal education is not merely intellectual instruction but personal formation. There is no way to avoid it. As Bavinck argued a century ago, “a neutral upbringing is actually impossible.”⁸

Whatever avenue a family chooses for their children’s education, they should be actively engaged.
Skyler Flowers

Whatever avenue a family chooses for their children’s education, they should be actively engaged. Formal avenues like parent-teacher and school board meetings should be in view, but so should informal avenues like relationships with other parents, attendance at school activities, and more. This is the ministry of faithful presence and attention—a ministry that can have subtle but lasting influence. With such presence, families might be able to work with teachers, within schools, and alongside one another to assess and advocate how and by what means students are being formed in their education. One already sees this in the local movements to curb the explosion of technology in schools.

Within the home, this involves exercising wisdom in our entertainment choices. This is not necessarily a call for censoring children’s shows (though parents should be concerned that they do not allow their children to be exposed to sinful content where possible), but ensuring that all content is intentional and there exist opportunities for conversation. We cannot just passively allow anything into our homes, but we also don’t need to necessarily live our lives in fear of every children’s show. Parents need not feel they must have a curriculum for everything they choose to consume, but rather, in today’s world, we should at least be seeking intentional teaching moments in every area.

These implications are not mechanistic levers that parents can pull in order to secure a bright future for their child. Rather, they are organic means by which parents and churches can shape the intellectual, affectual, and physical lives of children to form their conscience and moral consciousness. This calling is made all the more important by the age of moral confusion our kids will be sent in today.

A Better Way than Morally Gray

If you are younger than 100 years old, you grew up with Mickey Mouse and his associated characters. You would be hard pressed to find an American who could not identify Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Daisy, and Pluto. However, I was dumbstruck the first time I saw the recent iteration of these assorted characters in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and found out that Pete was now, while not a core friend, a frequent collaborator of the group. In my childhood, Pete was a verified, no-doubt-about-it villain. Now, they are just playing games with him? How could this be?

This may be a silly example, but I want to suggest that the lack of moral emphasis in entertainment might be seen in the reluctance to portray anyone as a clear villain. Villains are characterized as simply misunderstood. At worst, they are morally gray. There will always be some anecdote to relativize their actions.

Now, one might respond that this emphasis makes sense, as this world itself is morally gray. And it is true, the world is morally complex. As children grow, we should consider the moral complexity and needed wisdom of navigating that complexity in their lives. Nevertheless, at young ages, the separating of good and evil sets the poles by which one may define what is, in fact, morally gray. Indeed, one cannot understand what makes gray if they have no concept of black and white.

What’s more, in engaging directly the reality that in this world there is good and there is evil—that there are heroes and there are villains—we also open the door for a gospel that rings all the more loudly. The gospel is not merely better news for the morally gray or helpful context for the misunderstood. The gospel is good news for the sinner who has done wrong before God. The gospel tells us that not only does wrong exist and our conscience accuses us of this wrong, a fact children will experience even at a young age, but it offers us forgiveness for our wrongdoing. Jesus went to the cross to defeat evil and pay the price for the evil we have done. Understanding the depth of this reality involves understanding the internal reality of our sin. Our sin is not a morally gray issue. In our sin, we stand condemned. In Jesus Christ, we stand forgiven.

The gospel is not merely better news for the morally gray or helpful context for the misunderstood. The gospel is good news for the sinner who has done wrong before God.
Skyler Flowers

Forming children in this message from a young age could have profound implications on them throughout life. Their conscience will accuse them—even of things it shouldn’t. But they will know they are forgiven. Someone will harm them and do them wrong, even profound wrong. But Jesus Christ will correct all wrongs, and he enables us to forbear and forgive even those who persecute us. Remembering the end of our morality ends at a cross is crucial in this endeavor. If we lose the gospel, we do not retain morality; instead, we lose both. Christian morality is always and thoroughly evangelical.

Our age is one of great moral confusion, where the conscience reigns supreme. Teaching both the honoring of the neighbor and sensitivity to their conscience is helpful, but if it is not married to a sense of right and wrong, our children will grow up with a morality that is more culturally than biblically conditioned. If we are going to raise up the next generation to enter in that confusion soberly, we must teach our children to know our Savior, thus keeping his commandments (1 John 2:3). We must teach them to walk in the way our Savior walked (1 John 2:6). But above all, we must remind them of this truth, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”