The Pilgrim's Progress

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© 2014 Desiring God

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I do not doubt that the one volume of Pilgrim’s Progress, written by a man who knew hardly any book but his Bible, and was ignorant of Greek and Latin, will prove in the last day to have done more for the benefit of the world, than all the works of the schoolmen put together.
—J.C. Ryle  

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Leland Ryken I

To Live Upon God Who Is Invisible: The Life of John Bunyan by John Piper IX

Preface by John Newton (1776) XXXIX

The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Jail 1

Conviction of the Necessity of Flying 5

The Slough of Despond 9

Evangelist Findeth Christian Under Mount Sinai, and Looketh Severely Upon Him 19

Proceeds to the Cross 39

Christian Saluted by the Three Shining Ones 41

The Hill of Difficulty 45

The Valley of Humiliation 61

Combat with Appolyon 65  

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Christian Overtakes Faithful 75

Christian Has Another Companion 111

The Delectable Mountains 135

Christian, Hopeful, and the Shepherds 139

Adventures on the Enchanted Ground 155

Ministering Spirits Meet Christian and Hopeful 183

The Conclusion 187

Scripture Index 189

Acknowledgements 197  

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FOREWORD
Leland Ryken

The book that became known to posterity as The Pilgrim’s Progress is a Christian classic whose importance is impossible to overstate. For more than two centuries after its first publication, The Pilgrim’s Progress ranked just behind the King James Bible as the most important book in evangelical Protestant households. The book has been translated into some two hundred languages, including eighty in Africa. Any book that has achieved such popularity has a very large claim to our attention.

Facts of Publication

The Pilgrim’s Progress actually has two publication dates, cor-responding to the two books that comprise it. The first book was published in 1678 and bore the title The Pilgrim’s Prog-ress: From This World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream. It tells the story of the spiritual journey of the protagonist named Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City (meaning heaven).Book II was published six years later as part of an old artistic tradition known as a “companion piece.” It tells the story of the same journey, this time undertaken by Christian’s wife, Christiana, and their four sons. The two books  

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continued to be published separately until 1728, not being published as a combined book until forty-four years after the first appearance of Book II. This new edition from Desiring God resembles the early publication strategy of The Pilgrim’s Progress by releasing Book I individually.
Additionally, in order to provide more insight into the life of Bunyan, this new edition features an introduction by John Piper that traces the character of Bunyan’s faith in the midst of suffering. This new edition also includes a preface written by John Newton in 1776. Newton’s preface accompanied several publications of The Pilgrim’s Progress in the eighteenth century, but has virtually been non-existent for the last century. The recovery of this preface and incorporation into the present volume sets it apart from other editions currently in print.

Author and Composition

The author of The Pilgrim’s Progress is John Bunyan (1628–1688.), one of the most famous preachers in English history as well as a popular British author. Externally Bunyan led a difficult life. He was poor from childhood. He married his first wife at the age of twenty, and Bunyan once claimed that when the couple married they had not “so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.” By Bunyan’s own account, he led a wild youth and was converted at the approximate age of thirty. Following his conversion, Bunyan felt a call to preach. Therein lay a difficulty. Religious tolerance had not yet arrived on the scene, and only one state-sanctioned Christian group enjoyed freedom of worship. In Bunyan’s day that group was the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church. Bunyan was a Baptist preacher who refused to stop preaching without an official license. As a result,  

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Bunyan found himself in and out of prison over a period of twelve years (1659–1671). While imprisoned, he eked out a living for his family by making shoe laces.

Much great literature and art have been produced in the crucible of suffering, and The Pilgrim’s Progress is such a work. The consensus of scholarly opinion is that Bunyan wrote Book I of his masterpiece while in prison. (He is also reputed to have secretly carved a flute from a table leg in the prison.)

Bunyan was emphatically not a one-book author. Despite his chaotic and stressful external life (including the death of his first wife when he was approximately thirty and the blindness of his daughter Mary), Bunyan was a prolific author. He published over thirty books, mainly theological in nature.

Bunyan was also one of the most famous preachers of his day (which partly explains why the civil and Anglican officials singled him our for particularly harsh treatment). After his release from prison, Bunyan sometimes traveled all the way from his native Bedford to London to preach (a two-day journey in Bunyan’s day). On one recorded event, 1,200 Londoners turned out on a cold winter morning to hear Bunyan preach.

Bunyan’s death at the age of sixty was caused by pneumonia resulting from exposure to drenching rain while Bunyan made a two-day trip on horseback to heal relations between a father and his estranged son. Bunyan was buried in the famous nonconformist cemetery in London called Bunhill Fields. The monument on his tomb is today the most prominent site in the cemetery. On its side is the carved figure of a person carrying a burden on his back, a picture of the most famous moment in The Pilgrim’s Progress where Christian loses his burden of sin at the foot of the cross.  

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The Pilgrim’s Progress As a Literary Classic

The Pilgrim’s Progress is a paradox. On the one hand it is a work of folk literature. This makes it a book of the common people, just like the Bible. Through the ages, parents have read The Pilgrim’s Progress to their children much as they read Bible stories to them. Reinforcing this identity of being a book for ordinary people rather than literary scholars is the religious nature of the book. It is a book of edification first, and beyond that it offers whatever entertainment value we might wish to find in it.

But that is only half of the picture. The Pilgrim’s Progress is also a complex work of literature, appealing to people of literary sophistication as well as the common person. Perhaps no other literary masterpiece incorporates as many different literary genres as The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The primary genre is narrative or story. This means that readers need to be ready to respond to the three narrative ingredients of setting, characters, and plot. Most storytellers excel in one of these or perhaps two, but we would be hard pressed to decide which of the three Bunyan is best at. He is good at all three. His ability to describe scenes cannot be surpassed. But just as we think that this is Bunyan’s specialty, we remember his skill with character creation and remind ourselves that few authors have given us a greater gallery of memorable characters than Bunyan. And then we further recall that Bunyan’s skill with plot is breathtaking.

What kind of story is The Pilgrim’s Progress? The list of subgenres is nearly endless. The main storyline is a travel story, in the specific form of a perilous journey (surely one of the five greatest story motifs of all time). The virtues of the travel story are one of the leading appeals of The Pilgrim’s Progress, as we are entranced by strange settings remote from our daily routine (though somehow familiar),  

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encounters with unusual characters, and narrow escapes in abundance.

Many travel stories are quest stories, and this is true of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The protagonists of the two books—Christian in Book I and Christiana in Book II—leave the City of Destruction in a search to find the Celestial City. The story of their quests is an adventure story par excellence. Danger and suspense greet us at every turn.

An Allegory

Much more could be said about the story qualities of The Pilgrim’s Progress, but the really essential final thing that we need to note is that Bunyan’s story is an allegory. An allegorical story is one in which the literal, physical level of action is intended as a picture of something else. Double meaning is at the heart of allegory. The details in an allegorical story stand for something else. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, a slough or bog (modeled, incidentally, on a notorious bog on the outskirts of Bunyan’s home town) stands for spiritual despair over one’s lost state.

There is a right way and wrong way to deal with the allegorical aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The wrong way is to slight the literal, physical level of action on the premise that the religious meaning is what really matters. The right way is to abandon ourselves to the story qualities of the work and let the second level of understanding grow out of that narrative experience. Giant Despair first of all needs to be a terrifying giant in our imagination, and then he becomes a picture of psychological and theological realities.Allegory can easily become reductionistic, but this need not happen.

For example, a character with the allegorical name of Talkative is immediately recognizable to us: he is someone who talks too much. But the Bunyan magic is such  

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that Talkative is simultaneously (a) a personality type, (b) a social type (the overly talkative person who quickly be-comes a social pest), and (c) a spiritual reality (someone who substitutes talk for genuine faith and Christian action). The allegorical names of Bunyan’s characters should not lull us into thinking that they are one-dimensional.

The Religious Vision of The Pilgrim’s Progress

Bunyan was a belated Puritan. Puritanism was the English branch of the Protestant Reformation. At every point in The Pilgrim’s Progress we can see Puritan inclinations of mind and belief. The preoccupations of the book are Puritan—the Bible as the authority for religious belief (the book is a virtual mosaic of Bible verses); human sinfulness as the natural state of all people; salvation of one’s soul as the one thing needful; the substitutionary atonement of Jesus as the basis for the forgiveness of sin; heaven as the ultimate longing of every person.

But the picture is a little more complex than simply calling Bunyan a Puritan. When Bunyan was finally freed from imprisonment, he became a Baptist preacher. If Bunyan were living today, we would call him an evangelical Christian, but more specifically a Reformed Calvinistic Baptist.

Tips for Reading Bunyan’s Masterpiece

The Pilgrim’s Progress is initially a difficult book for modern readers. The first obstacle is the archaic language of the book. The language of The Pilgrim’s Progress is decidedly old-fashioned (like the King James Bible, which it more closely resembles than any other English-language literary work). The solution to the problem is to accept the archaic language as a feature of the book and enjoy it as part of  

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its arresting strangeness (a phrase that comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s endorsement of fantasy and fairy tales as literary genres).

Secondly, the taste for allegory is today somewhat out of vogue (though it has always remained part of the folk imagination). We will fare just fine with Bunyan’s allegorical story if we read it as a travel story and adventure story first, and then allow the theological and moral level to emerge as an extra source of enjoyment and edification.

Some people read The Pilgrim’s Progress for edification and receive literary enjoyment as a byproduct. Others sit down to read it for its narrative qualities and gain edification as a byproduct. It makes absolutely no difference which of those two models is true for a given reader. What matters is that once we start to read the story we open ourselves to both aspects of the book—its literary qualities (which exist in abundance) and its religious meanings. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a “crossover” book that appears in lists of both literary classics and religious (or even devotional) classics. It is an expansive book that holds up under virtually any approach that we bring to it. It is a book for all readers and all tastes.  

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TO LIVE UPON GOD WHO IS INVISIBLE

The Life of John Bunyan

by John Piper

 

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In 1672, about fifty miles northwest of London in Bedford, John Bunyan was released from twelve years of imprison-ment. He was forty-four years old. Just before his release he updated his spiritual autobiography called Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. He looked back over the hardships of the last twelve years and wrote about how he was enabled by God to survive and even flourish in the Bedford jail. One of his comments gives me the title for this short biography.He quotes 2 Corinthians 1:9 where Paul says, “We had this sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God that raiseth the dead.” Bunyan writes,

By this scripture I was made to see that if ever I would suffer rightly, I must first pass a sentence of death upon every thing that can be properly called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyment, and all, as dead to me, and myself as dead to them. The second was, to live upon God who is invisible, as Paul said in another place; the way not to faint, is to “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

The phrase that I have fastened on for the title, and focus of this study of Bunyan, is the phrase, “to live upon God who is invisible.” He discovered that if we are to suffer rightly we must die not only to sin, but to the innocent and precious things of this world, including family and freedom.  

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We must “live upon God who is invisible.” Everything else in the world we must count as dead to us and we to it. That was Bunyan’s passion from the time of his conversion as a young married man to the day of his death when he was sixty years old.

Suffering: Normal and Essential

In all my reading of Bunyan, what has gripped me most is his suffering and how he responded to it—what it made of him, and what it might make of us. All of us come to our tasks with a history and many predispositions. I come to John Bunyan with a growing sense that suffering is a normal, useful, essential, and God-ordained element in Christian life and ministry—not only for the sake of weaning us off the world and teaching us to live on God, as 2 Corinthians 1:9says, but also to make pastors who are more able to love the church (2 Tim 2:10; Col 1:24) and make missionaries who are more able to reach the nations (Matt 10:16–28.), so that they can learn to live on God and not the bread that perishes (John 6:27).

I am influenced in the way I read Bunyan by both what I see in the world today and what I see in the Bible. As you read this book, there are sure to be flashpoints of suffering somewhere in the world. The followers of Jesus will suffer as long as the world stays and the word of Jesus stands. “In the world you have tribulation” (John 16:33). “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves” (Matt 10:16). Today churches are being burned in some countries, and Christians are being killed by anti-Christian mobs. Christians endure systematic starvation and enslavement. China perpetuates its official repression of religious freedom and lengthy imprisonments. India, with its one billion people and unparalleled diversity, heaves with tensions between  

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major religions and extremist violence. There are consistent reports that thousands of Christians across the world die as martyrs every year.

And as I come to Bunyan’s life and suffering, I see in the Bible that “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom” (Acts 14:22); and the promise of Jesus, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20); and the warning from Peter “not to be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you” (1Pet 4:12); and the utter realism of Paul that we who “have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the re-demption of our body” (Rom 8:23); and the reminder that “our outer nature is wasting away” (2 Cor 4:16); and that the whole creation “was subjected to futility” (Rom 8:20).

As I look around me in the world and in the word of God, my own sense is that what we need from Bunyan right now is a glimpse into how he suffered and how he learned to “live on God that is invisible.” I want that for myself, my family, and my church—and I want that for all who read this book. Nothing glorifies God more than when we maintain our stability and even our joy having lost everything but God (Hab 3:17–18.). That day is coming for each of us, and we do well to get ready.

The Times of the Redwoods

John Bunyan was born in Elstow, about a mile south of Bedford, England on November 30, 1628, the same year that William Laud became the bishop of London during the reign of king Charles I. That connection with Bishop Laud is important because you can’t understand the sufferings of  

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Bunyan apart from the religious and political times in which he lived.

In those days there were tremendous conflicts between Parliament and monarchy. Bishop Laud, together with Charles I, opposed the reforms of the Church of England desired by the Puritans. But in 1640, Oliver Cromwell—an advocate for the Puritans—was elected to Parliament, and civil war broke out in 1642 between the forces loyal to the king and those loyal to Parliament. In 1645, the Parliament took control of the Monarchy. Bishop Laud was executed that year and the use of the Book of Common Prayer was overthrown. The Westminster Assembly completed the Westminster Confession for the dominant Presbyterian church in 1646, and the king was beheaded in 1649. Cromwell led the new Commonwealth until his death in 1658. His main concern was a stable government with freedom of religion for Puritans, like John Bunyan and others, including Jews, who had been excluded from England since 1290 and finally allowed to return in 1655.

After Cromwell’s death, his son Richard was unable to hold the government together. The longing for stability with a new king swelled (How quickly the favor of man can turn!). The Parliament turned against the Nonconformists like John Bunyan and passed a series of acts that resulted in increasing restrictions on the Puritan preachers. Charles II was brought home in what is known as the Restoration of the Monarchy, and proclaimed king in 1660, the same year that Bunyan was imprisoned for preaching without state approval.

Two Thousand Pastors Ejected

In 1662, the Act of Uniformity was passed that required acceptance of the Prayer Book and Episcopal ordination. That