Ignorance Is Bliss

"...Eve erred in not regulating the measure of her knowledge by the will of God. And we all daily suffer under the same disease, because we desire to know more than is right, and more than God allows; whereas the principal point of wisdom is a well-regulated sobriety in obedience to God."
-Calvin, Commentary on Genesis III.5

It's Thursday morning, I'm walking the regular route from Herald Square to 8th Avenue while indulging in a well-worn daydream: I'm wishing that I had the raw brainpower, not to mention the training, to solve at least one of the festering questions that has always plagued Christianity. (My innermost secret is that I would like to have developed a rigorous and completely new argument for the existence of God; but you didn't hear that from me.) I've thought for a while that I would like to generate a compelling solution to the problem of interaction; double agency would be okay, too. Theodicy is for amateurs.

But I'm a good Calvinist, and I'm familiar with Moses: I know that the secret things are private property, no trespassing allowed. But if we could just reframe the nagging issues...just put a new spin on an old concept...if there were only some crowbar we could stick in the door of academia, or at least of the mainstream media. Machen got a tip of the hat from Mencken; can you imagine Thomas Friedman doing that for R.C. Sproul? The theologian has gone the way of the poet-maybe never to return, in this culture. Slam goes the office door.

But then, on lunch, I break out the Hendrix Publishers copy of Calvin's Commentary on Genesis, which I keep in a drawer, ostensibly for the purposes of regular reading. And I remember, as I encounter one of Calvin's most characteristic sentiments, that the thorniness of the much-touted difficulties is evidence, not of the problematic nature of Christian theism, but of the wickedness of man's heart. The conundrums are man's problem, the problem of boundless pride, of rebellion against the "but" following "of every tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat." So I let my best buddy Johnny remind me that ignorance is sometimes bliss, and, as I step outside on the last minutes of my break, feeling better, I wonder what a solution to the problem of interaction would even look like.