Summary
Ignorance Is Not Bliss
The old saying claims that "ignorance is bliss," and in everyday matters there is a sliver of truth to it—we say it about the calm before we discovered a problem we could not yet see. But ignorance can also be the very thing that ruins us. The would-be bank robber who smeared lemon juice on his face, convinced he had rendered himself invisible to security cameras, is a memorable picture of how confidence and ignorance often travel together. Studies bear this out: those who know the least frequently overestimate themselves the most, while the genuinely wise recognize their limits and seek instruction. Mark Twain put it bluntly: "It ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you. It's what you know for sure that ain't so."
When the matter turns spiritual, ignorance is far more dangerous than embarrassing. In Ephesians 4:17-18, Paul insists that believers must no longer live as the unbelieving world lives, "in the futility of their minds," "darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart." The Greek word here points to a lack of knowledge of God and His ways. Joined to a hardened heart, that ignorance is not innocent; it is the natural condition of fallen humanity. By nature, Romans 5:10 reminds us, we were enemies of God. The Lutheran Confessions describe the unconverted heart as a stone—no spark, no inkling, no desire for God on its own. Any relationship with Him is the result of His changing of our heart, not our reaching toward Him.
Scripture hammers this point repeatedly. 1 Thessalonians 4:13 urges believers not to be ignorant about those who have died. 1 Peter 1:14 warns against returning to the desires of our former ignorance. Romans 10:3 describes those who, ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, sought to establish their own. 2 Peter 3:16 cautions that the ignorant and unstable twist the Scriptures to their own destruction. The danger of spiritual ignorance is that it is one of those "acceptable sins"—not acceptable to God, but easily tolerated by us. We can quietly turn God into an addendum to a busy life, content to remain unaware of what He has said about Scripture, salvation, and the Savior. As Luther asked pointedly, "Are you ignorant of what it means to be ignorant?"
The cure is not self-improvement but the work of God. Ephesians 4:22-24 calls us to put off the old self—corrupt, deluded, present-tense and ever ready to deceive—and "to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." The verbs are passive: we are renewed; we are created anew. This is not our project. At the cross Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God, bore every sin—past, present, and future—and won our forgiveness. Daily we return to our Baptism in repentance, drowning the old Adam and old Eve who, as one professor memorably put it, "are really good swimmers."
God carries out this renewing work through specific means: the proclamation and study of His Word, and the Sacraments, where the very body and blood of Christ are given in bread and wine for the forgiveness of sins. Because Word and Sacrament are precisely how God grows and keeps His people, this is exactly where Satan attacks. From the garden onward, the tempter's question has been, "Did God actually say…?" His strategy is to pull us away from the means of grace, to make us comfortable with skipping them, to make God an afterthought. Accepting that drift is itself an ignorance not grounded in God's Word.
So the saying needs to be turned around. Bliss is not ignorance. Bliss is knowing the Word of God, receiving the Sacrament, hearing again and again the word of forgiveness, being transformed by the Spirit, and understanding why we exist and how deeply we are loved by the Father. Bliss is knowing Jesus. For the fuller treatment of this theme from Ephesians 4, see Ignorance/Bliss 3-9-25.
Video citations
- Ignorance/Bliss 3-9-25 — Would you open your Bibles, please, with me, for our time and God's Word to the fourth chapter of the Book of Ephesians. If you're using a Puedition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find that page…