You may be forgiven for having forgotten about Ignorance, but as Christian and Hopeful begin their final approach to the Gate they catch sight of him ‘loitering’, and taking pleasure in his own company. They wait for him, hoping that even at this late stage in the Pilgrimage they can impart some wisdom, and lead him to a knowledgeable faith in Christ.
But their counsel is drowned out by ‘good motions that come into my mind and comfort me as I walk’. This is a telling turn of phrase, and one that we hear often today. In modern parlance it sounds like this: ‘I know that’s what the Bible says, but I think…’. Ignorance has never reconciled himself to the ‘narrowness’ of the Path. He dismisses their concerns as ‘just their opinion’, or their ‘interpretation’. The God he believes in would never be so mean-spirited and begrudging as to reject one such as himself, who has been so full of spiritual sensitivity and so sincere in seeking to live his life well. Christian shows that such hopes and dreams don’t come anywhere near the reality of saving faith. But Ignorance is just glad that the God he worships is so much more open-minded than the Christian who thinks he knows Him so well. He is of course a paragon of tolerance, compared to the narrow-mindedness of Christian: ‘That is your faith, but not mine; yet mine I doubt not is as good as yours, though I have not in my head so many whimsies as you’.
Ignorance personifies the ‘follow your heart’ idea that has plagued Christianity for centuries. Never mind that the heart is decietful above all things (Jer.17:9-10). He feels he will be accepted by God and he resents any suggestion to the contrary. His motto, and his answer to every questions is: My heart tells me so. How can it be wrong when it feels so right?
Bunyan’s point is not that Christian pilgrimage doesn’t affect the heart, but rather that the heart must be measured by Scripture, must be ‘such as agrees with the Word of God’. In other words: The Bible tells me so. We must pass the same judgement on ourselves as the Word passes. How do I know my life is good? …that my thoughts are good? Ask what the Scripture says about your life… your thoughts. Are you passing the same judgement as Scripture does? Ignorance flatly doesn’t. Even when confronted with the Bible’s teaching about the state of the human heart, he states: ‘I will never believe that my heart is thus bad’.
He vastly underestimates the reality of his sin, and in that moment, Ignorance’s fate is sealed. He cannot see the truth about Christ because he cannot see the truth about himself. Thus his thoughts about God (about which he is so confident) will prove to have been only his own imagination, his own desire. He has made ‘god’ in his own image, and such an idol cannot save him. Indeed, such an idol doesn’t need to - for Ignorance can save himself.
Ignorance’s problem is not that he isn’t willing to walk the Path. He does, after a fashion. It is that he believes what he wants to believe, irrespective of whether that tallies with Scripture or not. Where Scripture can be made to re-iterate what he wants to believe he heartily accepts it, but where it doesn’t he is even quicker to reject it…
And herein lies the seed of his own rejection.
Questions to ponder:
How can you know whether what you believe is what the Bible teaches… or what you want the Bible to teach?
How consistent are you in the way you interpret the Bible?
