John Bunyan’s Christian at Three Hundred

Despite its age people still read “The Pilgrim’s Progress”.

At first, people think I’m talking about the lumberjack fellow with the blue ox. “No,” I wearily explain, “not Paul Bunyan—John Bunyan.” Blank stares. “You know, the one who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Then, slowly, people remember that book. Yes, they’ve heard of it, but haven’t read it, and isn’t that the story where a man sets off on a journey.…

Ordinarily, I would be disappointed. Books that people know of, but don’t read, are usually the type that have been made into outrageous movies; people know that the book exists from the movie ads: “based on the novel by so-and-so.” But The Pilgrim’s Progress is quite a different matter, if only because, this month, it is three hundred years old. Something remarkable has happened when a three-hundred-year-old book is still part of the common currency. Despite its age, its countless imitators, the excesses of critics, and the even worse excesses of its admirers, we still cannot seem to have enough of it. And no Christian, especially, should want to have enough of what is, everything considered, the greatest piece of Christian devotional literature ever written.

John Bunyan was fifty years old in 1678 when The Pilgrim’s Progress first appeared. He was a man “Tall of stature, strong-boned, though not corpulent, somewhat of a Ruddy Face, with sparkling eyes … his Hair Reddish” (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 175). He had begun a career of preaching among English Baptists in 1656 while Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans still ruled England. Under the Puritan Protectorate Bunyan and other Dissenters were permitted to grow and thrive. But Cromwell died in 1658, and King Charles II, who had lost his father and his throne to the Puritans ten years before, returned from exile to reclaim his crown. Along with Charles the old episcopal hierarchy returned, smarting for revenge and determined to tolerate none but their own. They wasted little time. Eight months after the Restoration Bunyan was arrested. His crime: preaching to some friends in an open field. His punishment: twelve years in a Bedford jail.

Shut up in the county prison he could not preach. But he could still write, and one of the things he wrote to pass the time was The Pilgrim’s Progress. We don’t know when he got the idea for the book, but it was probably in the summer of 1676 during a three-year stay in the Bedford town lock-up. He had planned a book “on the way and race of saints,” which to his surprise:

Fell suddenly into an allegory

About their journey, and the way to glory,

In more than twenty things, which I set down;

This done, I twenty more had in my crown …

For having now my method by the end,

Still as I pulled it came … (The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. by Roger Sharrock, Penguin Book Libraries, 1975, p. 31).

By the time Bunyan was released in the fall of 1676, he had completed his allegory. But now that it was finished, he had only the dimmest idea of what to do with it. “I only thought to make I knew not what,” he confessed later; now before he had quite realized it, he had a whole book and he had begun to feel that perhaps he ought to do something with it. Accordingly, he showed the manuscript to some friends, who proved to be lukewarm critics. “Some said, ‘John, print it’; others said, ‘not so’,” Bunyan said. If this was the opinion of his friends, what would the printers have to say? Would the government license the work of a convicted Dissenter? And who would read it?

The decisive vote was cast when Bunyan went to London to see John Owen, one-time chaplain to Oliver Cromwell and now the last remaining spokesman for the persecuted Puritans. Owen’s influence had gotten Bunyan out of prison, and now Bunyan showed him what he had done in prison. Owen must have liked it. He put Bunyan into the hands of his own printer, Nathaniel Ponder, who ran off the first copies and applied for a license to sell them. On February 18, 1678, after the usual haggling and delays, the license was granted, and Ponder was free to sell to all the world, for one pound sixpence, The Pilgrim’s Progress from THIS WORLD to That which is to come: Delivered under the Similitude of a DREAM.

Even at the distance of three hundred years, the result is astonishing. Within a year, two editions had been completely sold out and Nat Ponder was compelled to print a third. Bunyan could only marvel, with a sort of innocent egotism, that, from France to New England “So comely doth my pilgrim walk/That thousands of him daily sing and talk” (p. 213). In 1684 Bunyan wrote a sequel (he was content to call it The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Seconde Parte), which turned out to be nearly as popular as the original. By the time Bunyan died in 1688 eleven English editions of his “similitude” had been issued, as well as French, Dutch, and German versions. And this, remember, was the seventeenth century when printing was slow and prices prohibitive. It is no exaggeration at all to say that, short of the Bible, there had never been anything like it in England’s “green and pleasant land” (Puritan’s Progress, by Monica Furlong, Coward, McCann. Geoghan, 1975, p. 181).

Nor did it stop there. That almightly arbiter of the English language, Samuel Johnson, disliked lengthy books, but The Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the few he wished were longer. In 1726 Jonathan Swift was hoping that Gulliver’s Travels would have “as good a run” as The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Alexander Pope felt supremely complimented when he learned that his works were being hawked in the streets “like Bunyan’s.” Louisa May Alcott used it in Little Women, Nathaniel Hawthorne imitated it in “The Celestial Railroad,” and George Bernard Shaw praised it whenever he could. Above all it became the sort of book that tradesmen and crofters (tenant farmers) read to themselves, read to each other, then to their children, and finally passed on to their grandchildren. “In the wildest parts of Scotland,” wrote Macauley, “The Pilgrim’s Progress is the delight of the peasantry; in every nursery, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a greater favorite than Jack the Giant-killer” (Critical Historical Essays, by Tom D. Macauley, Putman, 1903, p. 276). In a word, it has become part of our imagination as a culture; and not ours alone, since editions of the book have appeared in over two hundred languages, not to mention adaptations as plays, poetry, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s resplendent opera.

But none of that, of course, explains why this particular book should speak so profoundly to the evangelical mind, or why we should take the trouble to read it today. Here, then, is where the critic and lecturers step in. With the best of motives, they have proceeded to describe The Pilgrim’s Progress in terms that might frighten people away from reading it. We are told, for one thing, that the story is a great allegory. We are informed that Bunyan uses the majestic language of the King James Bible. Finally, we are told that Bunyan really pays no attention to theology.

To begin with, I acknowledge that The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory. Somewhere along the way we acquired the notion that an allegory should not be read for the thrill of the story, but for the sake of the “idea.” We are not supposed to ask who the hero and the villain are, but rather what they stand for, as though they were only ideas dressed up in literary clothes. Yet, that is not the intention of the great writers of allegory. They are telling a story and use that particular form because it best suits the plot.

Bunyan from the very beginning of his tale sweeps us into the action of a journey, not into an abstract world of symbols. From the first sentence the sense of motion does not stop until the pilgrim arrives at the Celestial City. There is no bar to cross, no special interpretive glasses to put on. Immediately the stage is set, the pilgrim is introduced, and we are pulled along by the urgency of Bunyan’s pilgrimage.

Bunyan was not creating airless abstractions. Mr. Honest, for instance, protests that he is “not Honesty in the abstract, but Honest is my name, and I wish that my nature shall agree to what I am called.” Someone else would have spiritualized this fellow into Honestness; Bunyan merely recognizes him for what he already is, an honest man. The idea here is to attach the correct name to the person whose actions deserve that name. We ought not to think that Old Honest stands for Honesty, but that honest people are like Old Honest.

In this way, Bunyan gives us a book full of people who dance, weep, sing, and rejoice. At times they are uncomfortably real. We can see that Mr. Worldly-Wiseman is every inch a gentle-man—too much a gentleman, as his conversation reveals, to go on a pilgrimage. So he warns Christian, with the maddeningly fatherly indulgence of a local banker, “Hear me; I am older than thou art.” For Mr. Worldly-Wiseman’s part, it is more important to “live by honest neighbors, in credit and good fashion … I could direct thee to the obtaining of what thou desirest, without the dangers that thou in this way wilt run thyself into …” (Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 50). In one sense, Mr. Worldly-Wiseman stands for the temptation of foolish wisdom. But he appears to us as the sort of condescending humbug who lacks the courage to believe and be saved and so spends his time diverting others from believing. Haven’t we all heard arguments like this before?

But then there is also the time-worn platitude that Bunyan “speaks in the organ tones of the King James Bible”—a polite way of saying that Bunyan imitates the Authorized Version. Bunyan’s language was his own and that of the people of his native Bedford. It sounds like King James only when he quotes Scripture. The proof of that, of course, is in the reading:

Christian: I was born in your dominions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, for the wages of sin is death.

Appollyon: Thou hast done in this, according to the proverb, changed a bad for a worse; but it is ordinary for those who have professed themselves his [Christ’s] servants, after a while to give him the slip; and return again to me; do thou so too, and all shall be well (pp. 90–91).

No one in the King James Bible talks like that, but they did in Bedford, and, to a certain extent, still do.

That doesn’t mean that the story lacks grandeur; at times Bunyan’s words have the bright ring of clashing steel. Mr. Valiant-for-Trust wields “a right Jerusalem blade” when three brigands attack him. “They have left upon me, as you see, some marks of their valour,” he says, but adds confidently, that they “have also carried away with them some of mine.”

I fought till my sword did cleave to my hand, and when they were joined together, as if a sword grew out of my arm, and when the blood ran through my fingers—then I fought with most courage (p. 349).

Perhaps a grisly incident; but “nowhere in all Shakespeare” marveled Bernard Shaw, “is there a touch like that.” Just as Valiant-for-Truth’s courage rises to meet the passion of combat, so “the sentences go straight to their marks, and their concluding phrases soar like the sunrise, or swing and drop like a hammer.” And there is nothing that imitates the King James Bible. Bunyan did not need to do that; he drew from life.

The most curious piece of wrongheaded admiration is, unfortunately, the one that I hear the most. It goes something like this: “Bunyan was a wonderful, warm-hearted Englishman whose broadmindedness triumphed over his narrow evangelical outlook and produced a classic that can be enjoyed without any thought of its theological content.” I can understand someone being confused over Bunyan’s fervent evangelicalism. I can even understand someone stoutly resisting it. But I don’t know how anyone can pretend that it doesn’t exist—or, if it does, that it’s unimportant.

“This book,” Bunyan said, “will make a traveller of thee,” because he expected it to “direct thee to the holy land” and salvation in Christ (pp. 36–37). He would not thank those who want to hail it as some sort of literary masterpiece, and simply leave it there. Bunyan was overtly, deliberately, and unashamedly didactic. Christian’s conversation with Faithful becomes a discussion of the relationship of law and grace; Faithful’s question-and-answer session with Talkative unrolls the doctrine of assurance in very specific terms; Christian explains the elements of the imputed righteousness of Christ to Ignorance, and when Ignorance protests, Christian is given the opportunity to introduce yet another doctrine, the authority of Scripture. And so on.

Discovering this may give us a jolt, particularly if we have been lulled into thinking that The Pilgrim’s Progress was written for the comfort of the world in general. Beneath the flesh of allegory is the tough, exacting psychology of Puritan conversion. As such the book cannot be made into a benevolent, open-minded spiritual essay. Nor should we desire to. You may enjoy The Pilgrim’s Progress because of its allegory or its style. But for me the real excitements of the book are Christian excitements, and the joys, Christian joys. It is for this reason that Bunyan has never become obsolete, because an audience for those joys and excitements has never been lacking, not even today. Eventually Bunyan’s world may grow too distant to be of interest, and he could fade out of literary fashion. But he will not fade among those who are themselves pilgrims. Those who belong to that company still find in the exuberance of The Pilgrim’s Progress an invigorating refreshment that no other book can supply.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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