We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Wendell Willis excavates from within the New Testament the meanings of what is termed “conscience” in the English language today. Upon surveying all the books of the NT, Willis concludes that suneidesis (the word most-often translated in the NT as conscience) does not have a fixed meaning for NT writers. Willis’s key contribution is to cleave the reader’s understanding of suneidesis into two main categories, while also identifying additional shades of meaning across NT texts. For example, in the Pauline corpus, especially in 1 and 2 Corinthians, suneidesis seems most often to refer to a person’s self-knowledge or internal understandings about himself and his past actions. Here, suneidesis should be understood as “consciousness” rather than “conscience”. In this sense, suneidesis in Corinthians is fundamentally retrospective in nature, while in Romans, suneidesis is more often a guide for the believers’ future moral choices. Other usages of suneidesis in the NT are a variation on the theme first established by Paul: consciousness of past actions or an inner model for one’s future actions.