Gary Brady is a present-day John
Flavel. Like Flavel the Puritan, a minister in Dartmouth, Gary
has been the pastor of an urban church for many years, and as Flavel became used to the ups
and downs of such a life so no doubt has Gary. He
has been pastor of Childs Hill Baptist Church in north west London since 1983. And like
Flavel he is a considerable author, with five books already, and now a sixth, Candle in the Wind – Understanding
Conscience in the Light of God’s Word. (EP Books, 2014, 242 pages). This post
is by way of a modest celebration of it, and of Gary’s gifts as an author on
this great but neglected topic.
Conscience is a permanent resident in every
person, a personal moral and spiritual reflex of that very person that it is
the conscience of. You have your conscience and I have mine, and mine does not
throw a light on you, nor yours a light on me. Properly understood, it is the
voice of God, which can be fine-tuned - sometimes too finely - or almost
drowned out. It can excuse or accuse. It can thunder or whisper. Whisperings can
become full-throated. But it can be almost subverted by the culture, by upbringing, by friends or by the boss, by what we read and by the media.
A strong conscience, how about that? This is
a conscience informed by the word of God. God is Lord of the conscience. Gary thinks
that Christians with such a weapon, who know what they believe and what and
what not to do, should be careful of not
bullying the weaker brethren. That is, those sincere believers whose conscience is ill-informed in some way. But a sound
conscience is nevertheless a great good. There is a greater thing that parading
your conscience, however, and making a thing of it, and that is love or concern
for the weaker brethren. ‘…If I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge…but have not love, I am nothing’. This is the best
section of the book, thoughtful and wise.
Here are some questions which I don’t
think Gary touched on, though he touched on most things, I reckon, The question
of whether the operation of conscience leads or follows what we do. Conscience
seems to behave in either of these two ways. When you consider doing something,
the conscience kicks in, telling you
that this is the right thing to do it, and so you do it, or at least try to do i.. At other times it is
like a rear-view mirror, telling you that what you did was or wasn’t OK. Is
this before – or after – behaviour significant? Or does it simply show dull or
quick wittedness, as the case may be? The Christian’s conscience, like other
things, is imperfectly regenerated, subject to ignorance, bias and weakness.
The Christian is a ‘wretched man’ who has a conscience, he or she does not yet
possess a perfectly judging and operating moral sense.
Most of Gary’s concerns are with the
conscience as it operates within the sphere of the church. Here very definitely
God is ‘Lord of the Conscience’, as Perkins and Ames and the Westminster Confession
had it. But what about Gary’s hearers when they are at work or at leisure? If
things are operating as they should then one cannot expect the same standards
at meetings at work to the meetings at church. Ought conscience to operate
differently in different circumstances? Is this dangerous, like having double
standards? In one place Paul writes ‘I wrote to you in my letter [which
unfortunately we do not possess] not to associate with sexually immoral people
– not at all meaning the sexually Immoral of this world, or the greedy and
swindlers, nor idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.’ As
Augustine might have put it, church and world are two ‘cities’. Ought a
Christian to have two sets of standards, two consciences, one for each
city? Don’t we in practice have two
standards? When in Rome, do as the Romans do? Is this the place for some casuistry?
As a Baptist, Gary has an interest in
liberty of conscience. He notes its development in England in the seventeenth-century.
Particular Baptists have a confessional position advocating such liberty from
the beginning, though in a restricted form. (Of course as he notes, any freedom
of expression must have restrictions.)
In this Independents and Baptists were distinct from the Presbyterians
and Anglicans, who edged their way to social liberty as it became clear to the powers that be that good Christian people could differ from each other on various matters which did not imperil the integrity of the state. (Socinians and Roman Catholics were another question!) Gary is quite keen on Roger Williams. Gary is uncertain about
whether liberty of conscience is the teaching of the New Testament. But surely it can be considered as an application of the principle of 'Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets'. Indeed it might be argued that freedom of
conscience is like sanitation and public hygiene, an obvious good. But, alas,
a good that it is hard for societies who enjoy it to retain, as we are currently
seeing.
What Gary mainly does in his book – tho’ he
does not say that he is doing it - is to treat the Christian life from the
vantage point of the conscience. In conviction of sin, the voice of conscience
is the voice of God. In penitence and faith, the troubled conscience, troubled
by sins, can through exercising the faith which justifies, come to enjoy a good
conscience, not a witness to failure but to Christ’s victory. But even then it
can lapse through carelessness into an ill-formed conscience, a seared conscience, unfeeling. Watchfulness is needed. A Flavelian theme.
Gary takes us through all this in a clear,
unassuming style. He has a light touch, chatty and unpretentious. Bags of quotations, and much good
sense. His favourite writers on the theme
seem to be Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn), and John Bunyan in his Holy War.
Thanks, Gary, for a wholesome, entertaining and insightful read. May you continue preaching and pen-wielding
for many years to come!
Gary’s other books are - Heavenly Wisdom, The 1662 Great Ejection, What
Jesus is Doing Now, The Song of Songs
and Being Born Again
