In mid-August 2023, a mild kerfuffle shook the evangelical blogosphere when Russel D. Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, said that John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress leaves me cold.” Moore’s comment was bold, perhaps even brash, given that Bunyan’s novel is among the most beloved classics of Christian literature. Many read it at a relatively young, particularly impressionable age, so that people become fond of it in a way that they typically don’t with more difficult classics like The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, or The Brothers Karamazov.
Personally, I can sympathize with Moore’s comments—many of Bunyan’s puritanical ilk, including Bunyan himself at times, leave me cold. Even as a child I knew some Calvinists who were too eager to suggest specific examples of God’s reprobation. And, like others I know, I was myself thoroughly disturbed by Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at a young age. One particular image from that grisly sermon still recurs occasionally in my waking nightmares: “The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire.”
When confronted with the infernal rhetoric of such puritans, my mind usually counters with some affirmation of God’s infinite love and mercy, such as this stanza from Charles Wesley’s hymn “The Horrible Decree”:
O HORRIBLE DECREE
Worthy of whence it came!
Forgive their hellish blasphemy
Who charge it on the Lamb:
Whose pity him inclin’d
To leave his throne above,
The friend, and Saviour of mankind,
The God of grace, and love.
Perhaps I was too easily swayed from one extreme to another, from an emphasis on God’s wrath to God’s love, but I suspect the latter extreme is closer to the truth. God’s infinite mercy is not contrary to his infinite justice, but too often an emphasis of holding both concepts together is abused to tip the scales towards a grim retributory justice, as in Robert Browning’s “The Heretic’s Tragedy”:
See him no other than as he is!
Give both the infinitudes their due —
Infinite mercy, but, I wis,
As infinite a justice too.
All too quickly, Browning shows, such language of balance can lead to a rhetoric no less ghastly than Edwards’:
And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
And lo, he is horribly in the toils
Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!
Browning’s subject is the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay by the Catholic Church, but (except for some medieval flourishes) it might as well recount John Calvin’s burning of Michael Servetus. All this, however, is somewhat beside the point. It is far too easy to bash on puritans, and when confronting one’s differences with them, one ought to do so with charity. And Bunyan, to my mind, is a far more tender soul than Edwards, though, for those with a broader familiarity with his work, even Edwards is not without his tender moments.
Whatever Bunyan is, he is surely an important author, though perhaps not quite first class. Considered as literature, The Pilgrim’s Progress is not on the same scale as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or even, as Northrop Frye contends in The Secular Scripture, as John Dryden’s plays. Bunyan cannot, then, even claim the crown of being Restoration literature’s second-best writer named John, or that of being its best Puritan writer named John. He is, nonetheless, the most popular. Milton addressed himself to the few, and the few have remained faithful. Dryden addressed himself to a larger audience, but only a very, very few have remained faithful. Bunyan, however, addressed himself to the many and to many he remains beloved.
While Bunyan found a popular audience, he also satisfies many of the most fastidious critics. It would be difficult to muster any greater authorities on English literature across the centuries than Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both of whom praised Bunyan’s work highly. James Boswell recounts Johnson as saying, “Pilgrim’s Progress has great merit, both for invention, imagination, and the conduct of the story; and it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind. Few books, I believe, have had a more extensive sale.” Two centuries after Johnson, humankind’s approbation continued, with Robert McCrum choosing it to begin his series in The Guardian on “The 100 Best Novels” back in 2013.
While Johnson’s praise of Bunyan’s novel is primarily for its appeal as imaginative literature, Coleridge praises it more highly still as a spiritual classic: “I know of no book, the Bible excepted, as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim’s Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best Summa Theologiæ Evangelicæ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired.”
Of course, the spiritual value of the work is one of the main complaints of our time: it leaves many of us cold. What did Coleridge and so many others see in it? An admirer of The Pilgrim’s Progress who is closer to our times than Bunyan, Johnson, and Coleridge—though he knew their works well—is C.S. Lewis. Few essays are so pertinent to the contemporary response to Bunyan as Lewis’ essay “The Vision of John Bunyan.” Lewis recognizes an “unpleasant side of The Pilgrim’s Progress,” locating it in “the extreme narrowness and exclusiveness of Bunyan’s religious outlook” and “the intolerable terror which is never far away.”
As I have noted above, I am no Puritan, so my vision of Christianity is rather different than Bunyan’s. Yet, orthodox Christianity, however, one conceives it, behoves one to hold some notions of things like Satan, sin, death, judgement, and hell—all of which “leave me cold.” As a matter of fact, I believe in universal salvation (in the manner of Gregory of Nyssa or George MacDonald), but even the idea of a hell that Christ has harrowed and is in the process of passing away is enough to send a shiver down my spine and to leave me in a cold sweat.
And they should, whether Bunyan’s view is correct or mine. And Bunyan’s view is indeed harsher than mine. Describing Bunyan’s Christian vision, C.S. Lewis says that “unpleasant” is “a ludicrous understatement.” Lewis illustrates his case with the “horrifying” conclusion to Part 1: “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.” With this sentence we learn that the last fateful steps of Christian’s journey, before he truly enters the ever-burgeoning delights of heaven, are no less perilous than its first.
But whether or not something leaves us cold is not a particularly great measure of its truth. I believe that John Keats’ phrase “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” is metaphysically correct, but I also believe that my perceptions of beauty might at times be as flawed as my knowledge of truth. Sometimes I am weighed in the balances and found wanting. C.S. Lewis perhaps had a greater sense of this notion than most of us, and he expresses it rather eloquently in Letters to Malcolm:
Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.
Bunyan’s novel, “delivered under the similitude of the dream,” has sharp enough corners for one to bang one’s knee on. Perhaps they are needlessly sharp, or perhaps Bunyan’s dream is made of keener stuff than our waking world. I cannot claim to know which option is true. Better-informed readers than myself have been disagreeing about Bunyan for centuries. But there are readers on his side—such as Johnson, Coleridge, and Lewis—who I would contradict only with great caution.
The best approach to the novel, I think, is the oldest—Bunyan’s own. Long before the classic became a classic, Bunyan felt the need to prefix his novel with a poem called “The Author’s Apology for his Book.” Upon penning the pages of his book, Bunyan recounts,
I shewed them others, that I might see whether
They would condemn them, or them justify:
And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die;
Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so;
Some said, It might do good; others said, No.
Facing such divided opinion, Bunyan printed the book to give joy to those readers who would enjoy it. John Bunyan does not wax as supercilious as John Milton, who exhorts his Muse to “fit audience find, though few.” Bunyan says to one reader, “If that thou wilt not read it, let it alone.” He cries to the other in a winsome excitement, “Oh, then come hither, / And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.” I would recommend attempting to lay one’s head and heart with Bunyan’s book for a while, at least once. It may leave you cold, or it may inflame your heart with the blessed fire of love.
Bret van den Brink is an English honors student at Trinity Western University. His research focuses on the intersection between religion and literature. Most recently, his article “What You Will: Double Predestination and the Plot of Twelfth Night” has been published in the Italian journal Sinestesieonline. He also co-hosts the podcast Mandatory Media.