Review of Pure Joy by Christopher Ash

Wanting to think through what it means to have a conscience? Not sure where the limits of conscience should be with regard to how you make decisions? How can you know your conscience isn't just you acting out your personality?

So many questions in the age of individualism where I need to be 'true to myself' to be a valid person. Talking about conscience in this context can feel a bit like being inside a Disney movie with a song about to burst into the dialogue at any moment.

Into this context, Christopher Ash writes about the conscience in Pure Joy.  And gets straight to the point and goes for the pastoral issues surrounding conscience. It's great stuff because it feels like it is written for real people who don't have the mental space to think through the place of the conscience in the 21st century western world. He writes to real people who may or may not be Christian and want to know how to think about what the Bible means by conscience and their own experience of having one.

Ash is great at putting Jesus front and centre in his discussion. By the end of the book it feels as though what Jesus has done for us is far more important than any subjective experience we have, and that our conscience is the servant of the message of Jesus, not the other way around. He helpfully shows how the conscience fits with trusting Jesus, needs to be trained by God through his word by his Spirit, isn't static and is both profoundly untrustworthy, and very useful as a trusted tool (for different reasons).

In his thinking he is shaped by the Puritans, to which he refers frequently. The appendix demonstrates why: his understanding of the usefulness of the conscience when shaped and reshaped by Scripture aligns with what he understands their thinking on the issue to be. He has chosen the most useful aspects of their thought and left some of their less helpful legalism unstated. This is great, but if someone were going to chase down all the references and read all their context, they might need some debriefing.

It's fantastic to have this book available. Most of us have a fairly modern take on our conscience: it's my God given right to disagree with everyone and believe in myself. Ash pushes us back to kneel at Jesus' feet with our conscience, as with everything and allow it to be shaped and reshaped by him through his Word by his Spirit. This is a great service to us.

Further, each chapter drips with pastoral situations from people at various points on their conversion: non-Christian through to strong Christian. These demonstrate how the conscience functions for different people in different contexts and solves some of the more difficult problems using concrete situations. This both fleshes out for us what he means, gives the book some energy, and helps us to think beyond ourselves as we read to situations we might not have faced in order to understand others and how their conscience might be functioning for them.

I was disappointed by the introduction to the last chapter. It felt like we'd crept into legalism: how to die with a clean conscience. It was useful in terms of really pushing the limit of what it means to have a clean conscience: how do we die well. It's a great thing to come to God and confess sins each and every day, but to do so in order to make death easier seems to detract from the full forgiveness of sins offered in Christ. It could be that it smacked of some of the more systems thinking of the Purtians, which I find distracting from the grace we have in Christ, but it left me uneasy.  Ash reiterates that grace later in the chapter, a re-emphasis which probably counters this (apparent) deficiency.

This was a fine book and I would lend it and will probably give it to someone else with confidence. It's well written, clear and Christ centred. It was good for the soul.  And it fills a hole in popular level books on issues of the heart.