Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent

Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent. By Richard L. Greaves. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. xix + 693 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

The Pilgrim's Progress may be the most influential piece of anti-Anglican literature ever written. It brilliantly and savagely parodies a menagerie of Anglican characters: Mr. Two-Tongues, the parson of Fair-Speech; Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the latitudinarian, moralistic churchgoer; By-ends, who loves to walk with Religion "if the Sun shines, and the people applaud it"; and Mr. Money-Love, who argues that it is providence which has given the clergy their desire for ever more lucrative benefices. And it takes us to Vanity Fair, the spiritually vapid beau monde of Restoration Anglicanism.

This great classic is the most famous of about a hundred publications by John Bunyan (1628-1688), almost all of them suffused with his profound distaste for the Church of England. For he despised its "Antichristian Rubbish" of traditions, titles, and decorations. He detested its set liturgy, which decreed "how many syllables must be said" in every prayer, every day of the year, "by generations yet unbum." He hated its snobbish class consciousness, its persecuting mentality, its intellectual pretentiousness. He found little to distinguish the Christian establishment in England from the Islamic establishment in Turkey.

Bunyan's feelings towards the Church of England were fully reciprocated. At the dawn of the Restoration, an Anglican judge very much like Lord Hategood threw him in the Bedford jail for recusancy, and there he stayed for twelve years while Anglican writers ridiculed him for being an uneducated tinker. Then he was released and returned to his wife and children for a few years, only to be excommunicated and thrown back into jail. To unlock the doors and walk free, all that Bunyan had to do was say, "I will worship in my parish church and stop preaching." He would rather have died.

Ironically, Bunyan in jail did far more damage to Tory Anglicanism than he could have done ministering to his tiny congregation. His prison masterpieces energized dissent, and conferred on him the celebrity by which, in his last years, he drew crowds of several thousands.

Delightfully, the Church of England later gave Bunyan his own memorial window in Westminster Abbey.

Glimpses of Glory follows Bunyan's life chronologically, and connects it very effectively with the political and religious history of the age. It takes a rather formulaic approach-successive sections on political history, biography, and oeuvre, period by period-but the formula works, because, as Greaves shows exhaustively, Bunyan's writings do reflect the political issues of the age frequently, and the experiences of his own life always.

The most profound of these experiences, Greaves argues, was Bunyans spiritual distress of the 1650s, when he felt almost continual despair for his salvation. Greaves turns to modem medical literature to show that this distress was clinical depression. Postmodern readers may not be persuaded that the scientific categories constructed in one culture can so readily be retrojected onto another. But fortunately, Greaves also takes seriously Bunyans own Calvinistic categories. Unlike many commentators, Greaves is sufficiently familiar with the Bible and Christian doctrine to do real justice to Bunyan's theology, which was sometimes deliberately allusive in order to pass the censors. He is also able to trace the mighty influence of Luthers commentary on Galatians and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. From them Bunyan learned that discipleship calls us to suffering, and that sanctification is not an inner peace, not a steady progress in grace, but the unceasing ebb and How of Faith. That is why, in The Pilgrim's Progress, Christians trials all stem from his inability ever to be totally assured of his salvation.

Richard Greaves's biography is a solid, judicious, and reliable work built on a thoroughly stunning array of primary and secondary resources. In fact, readers will sometimes feel a dissonance between this cool, erudite biography and its passionate, anti-academic subject.

Anglicanism today has, fortunately, left much of its Restoration heritage behind. It is more voluntaristic, respectful of diversity, liturgically flexible, tolerant, sensitive to social injustice, and, in a word, pilgrim- just as Bunyan thought the church should be. Perhaps Bunyan's dissent was medicine.

ALAN L. HAYES

Wycliffe College

Toronto, Ontario

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2003
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