Matthew Vogan
1. The Preacher
It may seem especially strange to speak of the author of a best-selling book as “forgotten”. There is no shortage of editions and adaptations of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Even in secular terms Bunyan is still relatively well known. Indeed, several years ago, The Guardian newspaper announced The Pilgrim’s Progress at the top of the list of 100 best novels (the book is not, in fact, a novel as we shall see). Yet it is possible for certain associations to be so familiar that vital aspects of an individual can be forgotten. Perhaps a particular incident and representation of Bunyan will help illustrate this.
Around 30 years ago in Beirut, Lebanon, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy Terry Waite is shackled to the wall in his underground cell. He is wakened by a guard bringing food and “a coloured postcard. . . John Bunyan sits at a table looking through the bars of his cell in Bedford jail.” The message that comes from a lady resident in Bedford is: “You are not forgotten. People everywhere are praying for your release.” He placed the postcard in his Bible. It would be the only correspondence and outside contact that would lighten his years of solitary confinement.
This stained-glass-window depiction of John Bunyan captures a great deal of the most common conceptions of him. Sometimes he is seen as a prisoner of conscience without any clear acknowledgement of the reasons for which he languished in prison (preaching outside of the jurisdiction of the Church of England). The window also depicts him rather like a poet getting inspiration for his literary genius. This is a common view of Bunyan, the immortal dreamer. He is seen as someone who shaped a classic imaginary narrative with wide appeal. Even in Evangelical circles, this aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress has been championed as if it was a kind of classic Christian fiction. Through retellings, abridgements and adaptations, the original of The Pilgrim’s Progress has often been diluted into something that risks being more entertaining than edifying. Bunyan warned against merely reading it as a story, without penetrating to the rich layers of spiritual and biblical instruction: “Take heed, also, that thou be not extreme, / In playing with the outside of my dream”.
Often the so-called creative writer has been isolated from the itinerant preacher. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge reckoned that, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s “piety was baffled by his genius: the Bunyan of Parnassus [that is, poetic genius] had the better of the Conventicle”. Historians now understand that Bunyan cannot be separated from his nonconformist setting in this way. It is clear to all that success in The Pilgrim’s Progress is achieved, to a significant extent, by virtue of, rather than in spite of, his commitments as a preacher. But the whole idea of literary genius is a misleading perspective because it reflects the interests of a later period, not Bunyan himself or his context.
This is the Bunyan that most people are familiar with: the prisoner of conscience and classic literary author. People of all kinds of Christianity and none have been interested in him and appeal to the narrative that they find so fascinating. But sometimes this kind of popularity can mask some of the real nature of a historical figure, so that we forget some of the things that were actually central to who they were and what they did. When Iain H Murray wrote The Forgotten Spurgeon, his concern was to draw attention to crucial aspects of Spurgeon that were glaringly overlooked, particularly his doctrine. The following reflections likewise seek to focus on the key aspects of Bunyan that we have largely forgotten. The emphasis will not be so much on his life or his autobiography, Grace Abounding (a recommended book). There are useful and well-researched books on his life, most recently Fearless Pilgrim: The life and times of John Bunyan by Faith Cook. Our attention will be drawn to The Pilgrim’s Progress, but not so much in terms of the content, which should be well known (if it is not, it ought to be). For all that this book is so familiar and well known, important dimensions of it and its author have been neglected.
1. The Forgotten Preaching Behind The Pilgrim’s Progress
We can focus particularly on Bunyan’s preaching in seeking to recover a deeper understanding of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is well known that he was a preacher – that fact has not been forgotten. We may or may not know, however, that he was the most popular preacher of his time – more than John Owen or any of the other Puritans. It is debatable indeed whether he was better known at the time as a preacher or the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Thousands would turn out to hear him preach in London at short notice. Three thousand people listened to him one Lord’s Day when many had to be turned away and Bunyan himself was almost pulled over the heads of the congregation to get into the pulpit. One winter weekday, 1200 people gathered at 7 am to hear him preach the Word of God.
Why was he such a popular preacher? To understand this, we could think back to London in 1685 and follow a man called Charles Doe making his way at dawn to the home of Stephen Moore. It was no small thing for people to do. Informers might be watching in order to report them to the authorities. Doe heard Bunyan preach from Proverbs 10:24: “The desire of the righteous shall be granted”. Young in the faith, Doe wept profusely for joy (something he would experience most times he heard Bunyan preach) as he heard a sermon full of the love of God.
Bunyan describes the desires of the righteous in a powerful, even imaginative way: “If desires be strong, they carry all away with them; they are all like Samson, they will pull down the gates of a city; but they will go out abroad; nothing can stop the current of desires, but the enjoyment of the thing desired, or a change of opinion as to the worth or want of worth of the thing that is desired”. “A desire will take a man upon its back and carry him away to God, if ten thousand men oppose it.” “It will carry him away after God to do His will, let the work be never so hard.” He speaks of Christ’s “poor ones that are now kicked to and fro, like footballs in the world!”
Charles Doe observed: “Thousands of Christians in country and city can testify that their comfort under his ministry has been to admiration, so that their joy hath showed itself by much weeping”. John Owen also tells us succinctly why Bunyan’s preaching was so popular in his response to Charles II’s enquiry as to why he would listen to such a man. He spoke of the tinker’s power to touch men’s hearts, in exchange for which he would gladly relinquish all his learning. Bunyan first preached the truth that had impacted his own heart in order to convey it to the hearts of others. He said, “I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel, even that under which my poor soul did groan and tremble to astonishment”.
The Independent minister George Cokayne wrote, in the preface to The Acceptable Sacrifice, that Bunyan “did experience in himself . . . the nature, excellency and comfort of a truly broken and contrite spirit. So that what is here written is but a transcript out of his own heart.” This transcription in turn “may be transcribed out of the book, into the hearts of all who shall peruse it”.
As anyone who has read the spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding, can testify, Bunyan experienced the authority of the truth of the Word of God personally in a powerful and immediate way. He speaks of the Word as a living force that shapes our experience. In the preface to Grace Abounding, Bunyan asks his readers about their spiritual experience: “Have you never a hill Mizar to remember? Have you forgot the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn and the like where God did visit your soul?”
Bunyan experiences Scripture with unmitigated immediacy and spiritual power; he rushes into it as a torrent and finds it to shine warmly upon him: “I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the Word of God as now; the Scriptures that I saw nothing in before are made in this place and state to shine upon me”. The spiritual world of Scripture is living and powerful. The metaphors of the Bible are not simply to be read; he says that they “amplify something before our faces” as a spiritual reality. Bunyan often sees, as it were, a whole world in one text: “I have sometimes seen more in a line of the Bible then I could well tell how to stand under, and yet at another time the whole Bible hath been to me as dry as a stick”.
Often indeed it is the metaphors and comparisons of Scripture that stick in Bunyan’s memory and mind and engage his affections. A large part of Scripture, of course, makes frequent use of such comparisons, even books we may think of as primarily doctrinal, such as Paul’s epistles. Things such as saving faith are described in metaphorical terms: fleeing to Christ, feeding on Him, resting on Him, opening the door to Him, for instance.
Bunyan was able to use metaphors to communicate spiritual experience in a powerful way. This is what made his preaching unique and made him especially equipped for writing The Pilgrim’s Progress, which simply combines many of the metaphors of Scripture into a continuous narrative.
One of the features that Charles Doe highlights in Bunyan’s preaching is the apt use of similitudes. Ebenezer Chandler (Bunyan’s successor as minister of the Bedford congregation) and John Wilson (minister at Hitchin, and a former member of the Bedford congregation) said that Bunyan had a unique ability to bring “deep things . . . into a familiar phrase”: he was able to translate spiritual mysteries into plain and colloquial terms in a powerful and experiential way. “The author indeed had a peculiar phrase to himself in expressing the conceptions of his mind; his words were his own, as well as his matter.”
Experimental preaching is warm with the life of the preacher’s own felt experience of the Word and the truths he declares. It has been experienced with power directly. John Owen said, “If the Word does not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us”. Today, more than ever, we need this kind of preaching – not ministers who can compile a reasonably good essay and deliver it as a sermon that is more of a lecture, without application. We need those who have, like Bunyan, been gripped by divine truth in their own experience and are then enabled by divine grace to bring that truth to bear on the souls and experience of their hearers.
George Swinnock
When God had acquainted Abraham with his intention to destroy Sodom, Abraham, aware of his nephew’s danger, commended him to God by prayer and by faith (Gen 18:23). Now mark the issue: God remembered Abraham, and brought Lot out of Sodom (Gen 19:29). Abraham’s prayer hit the mark at which it aimed, but it is because the eye of faith levelled the arrow.
1The first part of a lecture to the Scottish Reformation Society in Inverness.