The Pilgrim Who Was Never Baptized

What this page is asking

The author of this site set down a thesis to be tested: “The Pilgrim’s Progress tells a different story of salvation than the Church told for fifteen centuries, Luther included. It has no baptism, and it brings works back in under the name of grace.”

He put the core claim like this. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 1, 1678) is one of the most widely read Christian books in English, and many readers take it as a faithful picture of the Christian life. Yet the story leaves out most of what the historic Church said God uses to save. No one is baptized. No one receives the Lord’s Supper. The Church appears only as a rest stop along the way, and it admits pilgrims only after examining them. Christian receives no absolution from a minister. He leaves his wife and children behind to save himself. Bunyan attacks works-righteousness openly, through Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Legality and Mount Sinai. But the plot still turns on the pilgrim’s own vigilance, and Ignorance walks the whole road and is thrown into hell from the gate of the Celestial City. The result can leave readers looking inward for evidence that they are truly saved. For the ancient Church and for Luther, assurance came from God’s outward promises given in Word and Sacrament.

He put the question in a form that can be checked: read stop by stop, does The Pilgrim’s Progress proclaim the same gospel the Church taught from the apostles through the Fathers, the medieval Church and Luther? Where does it agree, where does it depart, and is the departure only a matter of what an allegory can show? Does the book, while rejecting works, make arrival at the Celestial City depend on the pilgrim’s own perseverance and inner experience?

Earlier dossiers covered several of the doctrines this page relies on, and it links to them rather than repeating them: baptism and the new birth (01, 21, 27), assurance (23, 17, 28), vocation and family (12, 39), and the shape of the Church’s message across the centuries (63). This page does one thing those did not. It takes a single, much-loved book and reads it from the first page of Part 1 to the last, asking at each stop what the Church would have said happens there.

Two ways of telling the Christian life, labelled so they can be told apart

The page compares two shapes the story of salvation can take. They are given letters so that it can refer to them briefly.

The book is not purely one or the other, and the page does not pretend that it is. The journey map in Part II marks every stop separately precisely so that the mixture shows. The question is where its centre lies.

What both sides agree on

So the disagreement is not about grace against works in the abstract. It is about where grace is given and where a doubting Christian should look: to outward means that God has attached his promise to, or inward, to an experience and a record of faithfulness that the pilgrim must keep.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that The Pilgrim’s Progress is a faithful picture of the Christian life as Luther taught it, and see what survives. Second, narrow it: ask the same questions of Part 2 (1684), where Christiana is washed in a bath and sealed, and see whether the verdicts change. Third, widen it: run the same stop-by-stop test on another much-loved devotional book, or on the testimony you have heard most often, and see where its centre lies.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Quote Bunyan from the 1678 text of Part
1 in its original spelling. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, and the
section. Verify every quotation against a reliable published source;
where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it, or say that it is
given at second hand. Do not invent quotes. Do not take verses out
of context. Check every claim marked "(verify)" and say what you
found.

  TITLE. Propose a title that will resonate with readers.

  THESIS TO TEST. The Pilgrim's Progress tells a different story of
  salvation than the Church told for fifteen centuries, Luther
  included. It has no baptism, and it brings works back in under
  the name of grace.

  CORE CLAIM. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (Part 1, 1678)
  is one of the most widely read Christian books in English. Many
  readers take it as a faithful picture of the Christian life. Yet
  the story leaves out most of what the historic Church said God
  uses to save. No one is baptized. No one receives the Lord's
  Supper. The Church appears only as a rest stop along the way,
  and it admits pilgrims only after examining them. Christian
  receives no absolution from a minister. He leaves his wife and
  children behind to save himself.

  Bunyan attacks works-righteousness openly through Mr. Worldly
  Wiseman, Mr. Legality, and Mount Sinai. But the plot still turns
  on the pilgrim's own vigilance. He must stay on the path, keep his
  roll, escape Doubting Castle, and cross the River of Death, which
  is "deeper or shallower" according to his faith. Ignorance walks
  the whole road and is still thrown into hell from the gate of the
  Celestial City. The result can leave readers looking inward for
  evidence that they are truly saved. For the ancient Church and
  for Luther, assurance came from God's outward promises given in
  Word and Sacrament.

  QUESTION TO TEST. Read stop by stop, does The Pilgrim's Progress
  proclaim the same gospel the Church taught from the apostles
  through the Fathers, the medieval Church, and Luther? Where does
  it agree, where does it depart, and is the departure only a
  matter of what an allegory can show? Does the book, while
  rejecting works, make arrival at the Celestial City depend on the
  pilgrim's own perseverance and inner experience?

  POINTS TO TEST.
   1. The strongest case for Bunyan, first: his debt to Luther ("I
      do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians
      (excepting the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I
      have seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience", Grace
      Abounding, verify the section); Mount Sinai and Legality;
      Moses who "knows not how to show mercy"; Ignorance condemned
      for trusting God's "gracious acceptance of my obedience to
      his law" (verify the wording) and answered with Christ's
      imputed righteousness; the burden falling at the Cross; the
      key called Promise; Hopeful in the River, "Be of good cheer,
      Jesus Christ maketh thee whole"; the limits of allegory; and
      Bunyan's own adult baptism (verify).
   2. Walk the whole journey, stop by stop, from the City of
      Destruction to the Celestial City and Ignorance's end. For
      each stop, show what happens, what Bunyan is teaching, and
      how the Church from the Fathers through Luther would have
      told that part of the Christian life. Mark each stop as
      agreeing, departing, or mixed. Present this as an
      interactive table or journey map readers can step through.
   3. A pilgrim with no baptism. Compare the Shining Ones' gifts
      at the Cross with Galatians 3:27, Romans 6:3-4, Titus 3:5,
      1 Peter 3:21, the Nicene Creed's "one baptism for the
      remission of sins", Luther's Small Catechism on baptism and
      Augsburg Confession IX. Examine Bunyan's Differences in
      Judgment about Water Baptism No Bar to Communion (1673): was
      the omission deliberate? Contrast Guillaume de Deguileville's
      Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (c. 1330), in which the
      pilgrim's journey begins with baptism (verify).
   4. Through the gate, but still burdened. Is a person on the way
      of salvation before being relieved of sin? Compare Acts 2:38
      and Luther's teaching that forgiveness is given, not reached.
   5. Works cloaked as non-works. What does the plot actually
      require of Christian? Formalist and Hypocrisy; "a way to
      hell, even from the gates of heaven". Compare Philippians
      2:12-13, Augustine's On the Gift of Perseverance, and
      Luther's passive and active righteousness in the Galatians
      commentary. Does the book overturn its own attack on works?
   6. Where the pilgrim looks for assurance: the Slough, Doubting
      Castle, the River. Compare Luther's Large Catechism, "I am
      baptized" (verify the wording), the Sermon on Preparing to
      Die (1519), the "external Word", and Anfechtung. Connect to
      the earlier article on assurance.
   7. The Church as a rest stop: the Palace Beautiful, Watchful,
      Discretion, Prudence, Piety and Charity. Bunyan's Bedford
      congregation and conversion accounts (verify). Cyprian, On
      the Unity of the Church 6; Luther's Large Catechism on the
      Church as "mother"; Augsburg V and VII. Does the Church in
      the book give life, or shelter those who already have it?
   8. Leaving wife and children. The strongest case first (Luke
      14:26). Then Acts 16:31-33, Acts 2:39, 1 Corinthians
      7:12-14, Luther's On Monastic Vows (1521) and his teaching
      on vocation. Does Christian's flight look more like the
      monastic ideal Luther rejected?
   9. A test readers can run: map the Apostles' Creed and the six
      chief parts of the Small Catechism against the journey.
      Which appear, which only in disguise, which are missing? Who
      acts at each stop: God through outward means, or the pilgrim?

OBJECTIONS. Present the case for Bunyan first, at full strength, in
its own Part. Answer other objections inside the argument, where
each arises. Where the evidence corrects or qualifies the brief,
say so in a marked box.

NAMING. Historic writers quoted from dated, published works. No
living individual named as an example of anything. Any modern
sermon or devotional remark composed by the page labelled as
composed.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. Scenes sorted into gift and demand. A
journey map of all twenty stops the reader can step through,
predicting each verdict before it is revealed, with a table view
and filters. The Shining Ones' gifts set beside the early Church's
description of baptism. The plot's demands on the pilgrim counted.
Three crises and where the help comes from. Images of the Church
sorted into giving life or sheltering it. An objection drill the
reader answers first. The Catechism mapped onto the road. Claims
sorted by whether the argument proves them, a test for any story
of the Christian life, and the reader's own verdict.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating
the question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating
the key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining
every technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the
reader something to do in every major section. Also produce a
plain-English quick version of about fifteen minutes with three
short exercises, and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Twelve things corrected or qualified the brief. They are listed here, and marked again where they arise.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in the texts listed in Part XII. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XI with the sources beside them.

What follows

The case for Bunyan

The author asked that the strongest case for Bunyan be put first, and fairly. It is a strong case. It deserves to be heard in full before anything else is said, and it is given here in seven steps, as Bunyan’s defenders would make it.

1. Bunyan was Luther’s reader, and said so

In his spiritual autobiography Bunyan describes years of torment over whether he had committed the unpardonable sin. What helped him was a battered old copy of Luther’s commentary on Galatians, “so old, that it was ready to fall piece from piece if I did but turn it over.” He found in it his own condition, “as if his book had been written out of my heart” (§129), and he gave it the highest praise he gave any human book:

I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians (excepting the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I had seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience.

John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), §130.

2. The book is merciless to salvation by works

The first false guide Christian meets is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who tells him to go to the village of Morality, where a gentleman called Legality can ease him of his burden. Christian turns aside, and the road runs under a mountain, Sinai, from which come “flashes of fire out of the hill.” He stands there terrified until Evangelist finds him and explains: “This Legality therefore is not able to set thee free from thy Burden.” That is Galatians in a picture: “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified” (Romans 3:20).

Later Faithful tells how a man overtook him on the Hill Difficulty and beat him down. He begged for mercy, and the man answered, “I know not how to shew mercy.” He was saved only when another came and bade the man stop, and Faithful saw “the holes in his hands and in his side.” Christian explains: the first was Moses. “He spareth none, neither knoweth he how to shew mercy to those that transgress his Law.” Luther could not have drawn the distinction between the law and the gospel more sharply.

3. The burden falls by grace, at the Cross

Christian does nothing to lose his burden. Good-will at the gate tells him to “be content to bear it, until thou comest to the place of Deliverance,” and that there it will fall off by itself. When he comes to a place where a cross stands above a sepulchre, “his Burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble” until it reached “the mouth of the Sepulchre”, and he cries: “He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.” No ritual, no merit, no effort. The burden goes because of what Christ did.

4. Ignorance is condemned for the very doctrine Luther fought

Near the end, Christian and Hopeful question a cheerful young man called Ignorance about his hope. His answer is a confession many churchgoers could make:

I believe that Christ died for sinners, and that I shall be justified before God from the curse, through his gracious acceptance of my obedience to his Law.

Ignorance, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 1 (1678).

Christian answers that true faith “taketh Justification from the personal righteousness of Christ,” not from God’s kindness to our obedience. Ignorance appeals to what his heart tells him; Christian replies with Proverbs: “He that trusts his own heart is a fool.” At the gate of the City, Ignorance is asked for his certificate, and “fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none.” He is shut out not for lacking effort, but for lacking the thing that was given at the Cross. On this reading the book’s most frightening scene is a sermon against works.

5. The help that comes is outward

The defender can go further. Christian is awakened by reading a book, which is Scripture. He is directed by Evangelist, a preacher. In the Slough of Despond, “a man came to him, whose name was Help,” who says that “good and substantial steps” run through the middle, which Bunyan’s readers have always taken to be the promises. Hopeful learns of Christ’s righteousness because Faithful told him. The key that opens Doubting Castle is called Promise, which is God’s word, not the pilgrim’s feeling. And in the river it is Hopeful’s voice, outside Christian, that says: “Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole.”

6. Christ keeps the fire burning

At the Interpreter’s House, Christian sees a fire that a man keeps throwing water on, yet it burns higher. Behind the wall stands another, pouring oil on it secretly. The Interpreter explains: “This is Christ, who continually, with the Oil of his Grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart.” That is Philippians 1:6 in a picture, and it is the book’s own answer to any charge that perseverance is left to the pilgrim. Later, Little-Faith is robbed of his spending money by three thieves, but “the place where his Jewels were they never ransacked.” Comfort can be lost; salvation cannot.

7. An allegory cannot show everything, and Bunyan’s church kept the sacraments

An allegory of the inner life is not a church order. Bunyan’s congregation at Bedford celebrated the Lord’s Supper and baptized believers. At the House Beautiful, the pilgrims sit down to a table “furnished with fat things, and with Wine that was well refined,” and talk only of the Lord who shed his blood; many readers have always seen the Supper there. Bunyan himself was baptized, and so was his daughter Mary. A book is not required to put everything its author believed into every scene.

That is a question the book can answer for itself, if it is read from the first page to the last. Part II does that. First, a warm-up.

Try it: gift, or demand?

Ten scenes from Part 1. In each, is the pilgrim chiefly given something, chiefly required to do something, or both?

0 of 10 sorted

The whole journey, stop by stop

Here is the whole of Part 1 in twenty stops, from the City of Destruction to the gate of the Celestial City. For each one the map shows what happens, with Bunyan’s own words; what he is teaching; and how the Church, from the Fathers through the medieval Church to Luther, would have told that part of the Christian life. Each stop is then marked as agreeing, mixed or departing, with the reason.

The marks are the page’s judgment, and you should not take them on trust. With “Predict first” on, you mark each stop yourself before the page’s reading appears, and your marks are tallied against the page’s. Some stops are also flagged as means points: places where the historic Church would have put a sacrament, absolution or the ministry of the Church. Keep an eye on them.

The pattern

Step through all twenty and a pattern appears. Where the subject is the law and the gospel, the world, the flesh and the devil, Bunyan agrees with the historic Church almost every time: Sinai, Moses, the Interpreter’s fire, Apollyon, the Valley, Vanity Fair, By-ends, Demas. These are the stops a Lutheran pastor, or Augustine, could have preached from without changing a word.

Where the historic Church would have placed a means of grace, the verdict is never “agrees.” Evangelist preaches and then sends the man on a long road instead of to the water. The Wicket Gate, which the medieval Church would have called the font, admits a man still carrying his burden. At the Cross the gifts of baptism are given without water. The roll can be dropped in an arbour. The Church is a house that questions its guests. The key called Promise is in the pilgrim’s bosom, and he forgets it. Hopeful is converted by a vision, “as I thought.” At the river there is no sacrament, and the water is as deep as the pilgrim believes.

A pilgrim with no baptism

Here is what happens to Christian at the Cross, after the burden has rolled into the sepulchre. He stands looking and weeping, and three Shining Ones come to him.

Forgiveness, a new garment, a mark on the forehead and a sealed document. Anyone who knew how the early Church spoke about baptism would recognise all four.

How Scripture speaks of baptism

The New Testament uses exactly this vocabulary, and attaches it to water.

Notice Titus 3:5. Paul puts “not by works of righteousness which we have done” and “the washing of regeneration” in the same sentence. For him, the washing was not a work the believer did; it was God’s mercy, given. Bunyan was right that the burden cannot be lifted by Legality. The New Testament’s answer to Legality is not “no outward means,” but the washing God gives.

How the early Church spoke of baptism

About 350, Cyril of Jerusalem gave a course of lectures to adults preparing for baptism at Easter. In his opening address he told them what they were about to receive.

Great is the Baptism that lies before you: a ransom to captives; a remission of offenses; a death of sin; a new-birth of the soul; a garment of light; a holy indissoluble seal; a chariot to heaven; the delight of Paradise; a welcome into the kingdom; the gift of adoption!

Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 16 (c. 350); trans. E. H. Gifford, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7 (1894).

Try it: Cyril’s list, and the Shining Ones

Tap each of Cyril’s ten phrases. For each, the page shows where, if anywhere, Bunyan’s pilgrim receives the same thing.

Three of the Shining Ones’ four gifts are on Cyril’s list word for word in substance: remission of offences, a garment, a seal. The fourth, the mark on the forehead, was the sign of the cross that the Church had made on the foreheads of the baptized since the early centuries. In Bunyan’s own England the Prayer Book still had the priest, after baptizing, “sign him with the sign of the Cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified” (Book of Common Prayer, 1662). English Puritans had objected to that sign for a century; some called it superstition. Bunyan’s biblical source for his mark is plainly Ezekiel 9:4 and Revelation 7:3, where God’s servants are sealed “in their foreheads.” But the Church had read those same texts of the baptized for more than a thousand years.

A pilgrimage that begins in a river

Bunyan was not the first to tell the Christian life as a pilgrimage. Around 1330 a Cistercian monk, Guillaume de Deguileville, wrote Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, a long dream-allegory of a pilgrim travelling to the heavenly Jerusalem. It was translated into English in the fifteenth century and copied and illustrated in many manuscripts. The comparison is worth making not because Bunyan used it, but because it shows what an allegory of the Christian life can put at its start.

The two pilgrims share a destination, and both meet danger, temptation and despair on the road. What differs is the start. Deguileville’s pilgrim is carried into the Church and washed before he walks a step. Bunyan’s pilgrim walks a long way on his own before the Church appears at all, and his washing, if it is anywhere, is an angel’s word at the Cross.

Was the omission deliberate?

Five years before the book was published, Bunyan had been drawn into a fierce controversy with other Baptists. He held that Christians baptized as infants, or not baptized at all as believers, could be members of a church and come to the Lord’s table with those baptized as believers. His defence was published in 1673 as Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion. In it he wrote:

Baptism makes thee no Member of the Church, neither doth it make thee a visible Saint.

Baptism is not the initiating Ordinance.

Faith and Holiness, must be the Essentials, or Basis, upon, and for the sake of which you receive them.

John Bunyan, Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion (London, 1673).

That is the theology of the Cross scene. If baptism is not the entrance, an allegory of the entrance does not need it. If faith and holiness are the basis on which a church receives its members, a story of the Christian life will show faith, then holiness, then the Church. Bunyan was not forgetting baptism when he wrote the Cross scene. He had already written, in print, that it was not what admits a person.

Try it: deliberate, or the limits of allegory?

Eight pieces of evidence. Does each point toward a deliberate choice, or toward the ordinary limits of an allegory?

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What the Church said

Against Bunyan’s 1673 tract, set the two Lutheran texts the brief names. They were written about a hundred and fifty years earlier, and they were confessed by whole churches, not argued by one man.

[Baptism] works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare.

Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529), “The Sacrament of Holy Baptism,” second question; Triglot Concordia (1921).

Of Baptism they teach that it is necessary to salvation, and that through Baptism is offered the grace of God; and that children are to be baptized, who, being offered to God through Baptism, are received into God’s grace.

The Augsburg Confession (1530), Article IX; Triglot Concordia (1921).

The Creed that the whole Church confessed, East and West, says: “I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins.” Cyril taught the same thing in Jerusalem, Deguileville painted it in France, Luther put it in a catechism for children, and the Westminster divines wrote it into the confession of English Puritanism. Bunyan’s pilgrim receives the remission of sins at the place where all of them put baptism, and receives it without baptism.

Through the gate, still burdened

Christian enters the Way at the Wicket Gate. Good-will opens it, pulls him in quickly because archers shoot from Beelzebub’s castle nearby, and sends him on. But the burden stays on his back. “Be content to bear it, until thou comest to the place of Deliverance.” He carries it through the Interpreter’s House, with all its lessons, and only at the Cross does it fall.

So for a stretch of the road Christian is in the Way, admitted by the gate that stands for Christ, taught by the Interpreter who stands for the Spirit, and still loaded with his sins. What does that teach?

Four orders of events

Look at the second row. Bunyan’s first stretch, from the gate through the Interpreter’s House to the Cross, has the shape of the ancient catechumenate: a person is admitted to the way, taught, and then receives remission of sins. That is a point in Bunyan’s favour; the two-step pattern has a respectable ancestry. But the climax is different. The catechumen’s burden was lifted in the font, by the Church, on a known night. Christian’s is lifted at the moment he looks at the Cross, when no one else is there and nothing is done to him.

Given, or reached?

For Luther the decisive thing about forgiveness was that it comes from outside, as a word spoken to you. In baptism, in absolution and in the Supper, the minister says, in effect, “for you,” and faith receives it. The forgiveness is given at a place and time you can point to, and it is given again and again, because the Christian returns to his baptism every day. Luther’s Small Catechism tells the penitent to receive absolution “as from God Himself, and in no wise doubt, but firmly believe that by it our sins are forgiven before God in heaven.”

In Bunyan, forgiveness is a place on the road. Christian has to walk to it. Once there, his burden falls once, and the book never shows it lifted again. When he sins later (in the arbour, in By-path Meadow, with the Flatterer) there is no second Cross and no absolution. He is beaten, imprisoned or whipped, and goes on.

Try it: given, or reached?

Eight statements about forgiveness. Does each describe forgiveness as something given to the person from outside, or as somewhere the person must reach?

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Works under the name of grace?

Bunyan’s doctrine is grace. His plot, after the Cross, is a series of dangers, and the question the brief asks is a fair one: what gets the pilgrim through them? The doctrine says that God keeps him. The plot shows him keeping himself. Both can be true at once, as Philippians 2 says; the question is which one the story teaches the reader to look at.

Try it: what gets him through?

Fourteen dangers Christian meets between the Cross and the river. For each, does the story resolve it chiefly by the pilgrim’s own watchfulness, by the pilgrim with help (a companion, a promise, a heavenly visitor), or by God acting through an outward means such as a sacrament, absolution or the Church’s ministry?

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The other side of the ledger

The count is not the whole story, and Bunyan’s defenders are right to insist on it. The book says plainly, at the Interpreter’s House, that the fire in the heart burns because “Christ … continually, with the Oil of his Grace, maintains the work already begun.” The lions are chained. Little-Faith keeps his jewels. The key is called Promise. Bunyan believed that God keeps his elect to the end, and he says so in his own way.

But notice where the book puts God’s keeping. It is behind a wall, unseen; it is in a doctrine the Interpreter explains. What the reader watches, scene after scene, is the pilgrim staying awake, refusing, resisting, going back for his roll and checking his heart. A story teaches through what it shows. The keeping is told; the vigilance is shown.

Formalist, Hypocrisy, and a thousand years

One small scene says a great deal. Just after the Cross, two men “come tumbling over the wall” into the narrow way. They are Formalist and Hypocrisy, from the land of Vain-glory. Christian asks why they did not come in at the gate. They answer that the short cut is their country’s custom, and has been for “above a thousand years.” Christian replies that they came in without the Lord’s direction. Both are lost later at the Hill Difficulty.

The warning against formal religion is biblical: “Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5). But look at what Bunyan gives the intruders as their argument. It is the Church’s own: what has been done for a thousand years. Vincent of Lérins, in 434, had made antiquity one of the marks of the true faith, “what has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” In Bunyan, a thousand years of custom is the plea of the man who climbed the wall.

“A way to hell, even from the gates of heaven”

Ignorance walks the whole road. He crosses the river easily, ferried by one called Vain-Hope. At the gate he is asked for his certificate, fumbles in his bosom, finds none, and is bound and carried away to a door in the hillside. And the dreamer ends: “Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.”

Part I gave the case for this scene: Ignorance lacks the gift, not the effort. But consider what a reader does with it. He has walked the road too. How does he know he is not Ignorance? Ignorance felt sure; so does he. The only test the book offers is the certificate, which is the roll given at the Cross; and the roll is carried “in his bosom,” unseen, an inward possession that only its owner can check. The historic Church also had a certificate, and it was not in anyone’s bosom. Cyril called baptism “a holy indissoluble seal,” and parishes wrote the date in a register. Bunyan’s own baptism is in the Elstow register; his adult baptism, if it happened, was never written down.

A reader who says that has read the book attentively. That is the problem. Dossier 23 asked what happens to assurance when it rests on an inner act the believer must certify, and Dossier 28 asked whom “Lord, Lord” was aimed at. Both apply here.

What Augustine and Luther said about perseverance

The historic Church did not deny that a Christian must persevere. It said that perseverance itself is a gift, and so is not the pilgrim’s contribution.

I assert, therefore, that the perseverance by which we persevere in Christ even to the end is the gift of God.

Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance 1 (428–429); trans. P. Holmes and R. E. Wallis, NPNF, First Series, vol. 5 (1887).

Luther’s Small Catechism puts the same thing in the mouth of every child: “the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.” Kept, by the Spirit, through the Gospel. And in the commentary on Galatians that Bunyan loved, Luther distinguished two righteousnesses. The active one, of works, is real and belongs to our life among our neighbours. The other, the one that saves, is passive: “For here we work nothing, we render nothing unto God, but only we receive and suffer another to work in us, that is to say, God” (Commentary on Galatians, 1535, “The Argument”; English trans. of 1575, as revised by Erasmus Middleton, 1807).

Philippians 2 holds both: “work out your own salvation” and “it is God which worketh in you.” Luther did not stop Christians running. He told them where to go when they fell: back to their baptism, where the passive righteousness had been given to them. Bunyan’s pilgrim, when he falls asleep and loses his roll, goes back to the arbour and searches under the seat.

Where the pilgrim looks for assurance

Three times in Part 1 Christian is in serious trouble about his own salvation. Each time, the question the brief asks is the same: where does he look?

The Slough, the Castle and the River

The Slough of Despond. Just out of the City, Christian falls into a bog where, Help explains, the fears and doubts of awakened sinners settle. There are “good and substantial steps” through the middle, but Christian, in his fright, missed them. Help pulls him out.

Doubting Castle. After leaving the road for By-path Meadow, Christian and Hopeful are caught by Giant Despair and thrown into a dungeon “from Wednesday morning till Saturday night,” without food or light. The giant beats them and urges them to kill themselves, “with Knife, Halter, or Poison.” Then, before dawn on Sunday, Christian breaks out:

What a fool, quoth he, am I, thus to lie in a stinking Dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty? I have a Key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any Lock in Doubting Castle.

Christian, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 1 (1678).

The River of Death. At the end, the pilgrims must cross a river with no bridge. The Shining Ones tell them it is “deeper or shallower as you believe in the King of the place.” Christian begins to sink, cries “I sink in deep waters,” and is overwhelmed by the memory of “the sins that he had committed.” Hopeful holds his head up: “Be of good cheer, my brother; I feel the bottom, and it is good,” and at last, “Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole.” Christian then finds ground and crosses.

What Luther told the troubled and the dying

Luther knew this kind of trouble from the inside. He called it Anfechtung: not ordinary temptation, but the assault in which a Christian feels himself abandoned by God and accused by his own conscience. His answer was always to look outside.

In the Large Catechism he tells the Christian what to do “when our sins and conscience oppress us”: to say, “Nevertheless I am baptized; but if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved and have eternal life, both in soul and body” (IV.44). The ground of comfort is a fact about the Christian’s past that God did to him, not a feeling about his present.

In 1519 a friend asked him how to prepare to die, and he wrote a short sermon. He told the dying not to look at their sin in itself, but in Christ: “Seek yourself only in Christ and not in yourself and you will find yourself in him eternally.” And he pointed them to the sacraments, so that a dying man could say: “This sign and promise of my salvation will not lie to me or deceive me. It is God who has promised it, and he cannot lie either in words or in deeds” (A Sermon on Preparing to Die, 1519; WA 2:690, 692; LW 42). A Christian dying in Luther’s Wittenberg would expect to hear absolution and receive the sacrament. Christian at the river has neither.

Try it: where does the help come from?

Slide through six moments of crisis, four from the book and two from Luther. Watch two meters: how much the help comes from outside the pilgrim, as something said or given to him, and how much depends on what is inside the pilgrim: his memory, his feelings, the strength of his belief.

The book is not simply inward, and the meters show it. Help reaches into the Slough; Hopeful’s voice reaches into the river; the key is called Promise. That is why the Slough agrees and Doubting Castle is marked mixed on the journey map; only the River is marked as a departure. But look at what the outward help is in each case. It is a companion, a general promise, a voice. It is never a word spoken to Christian by name, from God, through the Church, that he can point back to. The key is in his bosom, and he forgot it for four days. The depth of the river is set by the strength of his belief.

The Church as a house by the road

Christian reaches the Church only after the Cross, the Hill Difficulty and the lions. It is a large house beside the road, called Beautiful, and its porter, Watchful, explains: “This house was built by the Lord of the Hill, and he built it for the relief and security of Pilgrims.”

Christian is not simply let in. Watchful calls a grave young woman named Discretion, who asks where he has come from, where he is going and how he got onto the way. She calls three others, Piety, Prudence and Charity, and only then is he welcomed in. Over supper and into the evening the three question him further. Piety: “What moved you at first to betake yourself to a Pilgrim’s life?” Prudence asks whether he still thinks of the country he left and what makes him long for Mount Zion; he answers, “there I hope to see him alive that did hang dead on the Cross.” Charity asks about his family.

The house does a great deal for him. It feeds him at a table “furnished with fat things, and with Wine that was well refined,” while all the talk is of the Lord who “fought with and slain him that had the power of Death.” It gives him a night in a chamber called Peace. It shows him its records and its armoury and arms him from head to foot. Four of its women walk him down the hill. These are real works of a church, and the page counts them.

Bunyan’s own congregation

The scene resembles the church Bunyan belonged to. The congregation at Bedford was gathered about 1650 by John Gifford, a former royalist officer, with eleven others who “agreed to walk together in christian communion.” Its principle was “faith in Christ, and holiness of life, without respect to this or that circumstance or opinion,” which is why it could hold members who disagreed about baptism. Before his death in 1655 Gifford wrote to the church about receiving members: they were to be joined “after you are satisfied about the work of grace in the party you are to join with.”

The Church as mother

For Cyprian in the third century, the Church was not a house the Christian reaches but the mother who bears him: “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.” Luther, who had little time for Cyprian’s bishops, kept the image entire. In the Large Catechism, explaining “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Christian Church,” he says the Spirit sanctifies through the Church, which “is the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God” (II.42), and that “outside of this Christian Church, where the Gospel is not, there is no forgiveness” (II.56).

The Augsburg Confession says how. “That we may obtain this faith, the Ministry of Teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted. For through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith” (Article V). And it defines the Church by the same means: “the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered” (Article VII).

Set that beside the book. Christian is awakened by a book read alone, directed by a solitary Evangelist, taught by an Interpreter in a private house, and forgiven at the Cross by angels. By the time he reaches the Church, everything that, for Cyprian and Luther, the Church exists to give him (the Word that begets faith, the washing, the absolution) he already has. The house receives a man who was born elsewhere, and its first act is to check that he was.

Try it: does it give life, or shelter it?

Eight descriptions of the Church. Does each picture a Church that gives life, bearing and forming believers through the Word and sacraments, or one that shelters life, receiving and protecting those who already have it?

0 of 8 sorted

Leaving wife and children

On the first pages of the book, Christian tells his family that their city will be burned with fire from heaven. They think “some frenzy distemper” has got into his head and try to sleep it off him, then mock him and leave him alone. When Evangelist points him to the gate he begins to run. His wife and children “began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! life! eternal life!”

The case for Christian, first

Jesus’s own words are the strongest case, and they are hard. “If any man come to me, and hate not … wife, and children … he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). When a family will not come, the disciple must still go.

And Bunyan did not write this lightly. He spent most of twelve years in Bedford gaol rather than promise to stop preaching, leaving a wife and four children, one of them blind. “The parting with my Wife and poor Children hath oft been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones,” he wrote, “especially my poor blind Child, who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides” (Grace Abounding §327). Christian’s flight was written by a man who knew what it cost.

The book also qualifies the scene itself. At the House Beautiful, Charity asks whether he is married and whether he tried to bring them. He says he did. “But did you tell them of your own sorrow, and fear of destruction?” she asks, and he answers that he did, often, but “my Wife was afraid of losing this World, and my Children were given to the foolish Delights of youth.” And six years later Bunyan published Part 2, which is entirely the story of his wife Christiana and their four sons following him to the City.

The household in Scripture

Against the scene, set the households of the New Testament. When the jailer at Philippi asked the same question Christian asks, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”, Paul answered: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” And the jailer “was baptized, he and all his, straightway” (Acts 16:30–33). At Pentecost: “the promise is unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:39). And where a believer is married to an unbeliever, Paul tells him to stay, because “the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy” (1 Corinthians 7:14). Dossier 57 and Dossier 58 looked at those households closely.

Luke 14:26 is about loving Christ above family when the two collide. It is not a call to leave a family that has not asked you to deny Christ. Christian’s family mocks him; it does not forbid him to believe. Paul’s instruction in exactly that case is to stay (1 Corinthians 7:12–13). Dossier 39 read Jesus’s hardest saying about family in its context and reached the same conclusion: Christ first, but never as a licence to abandon those God has given you.

Luther, the monastery and the nursery

Luther had made a flight of his own. In 1505, against his father’s wishes, he entered a monastery to save his soul. In 1521 he wrote On Monastic Vows, and in the dedicatory letter to his father he admitted that he had been wrong to enter the cloister against his father’s will (LW 48:330–336). The treatise argued that vows taken to secure one’s own salvation set aside the callings God had actually given, chief among them marriage and the duties of a household, and that the ordinary tasks of family life serve God as he wishes to be served (LW 44:251–400).

A year later, in The Estate of Marriage, he described a father washing his baby’s nappies while others laugh at him, and said that “God, with all his angels and creatures is smiling,” “not because the father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith” (1522; LW 45:39–40). For Luther the household was not something a Christian leaves in order to be saved. It was where he lives out a salvation already given. Dossier 12 set out the doctrine of vocation in full.

Christian’s flight is not a monastic vow; he takes no vow and joins no order. But the shape is the one Luther rejected: a man who, to save his own soul, leaves the people God placed in his care and goes on a solitary road. The medieval monk at least left behind a family that had consented. Christian’s family is crying after him.

Run the test yourself

The brief asked for a test readers can run themselves. Here it is in two steps. The first uses the oldest summaries of the faith; the second uses the journey map.

Step 1: map the Catechism onto the road

Luther’s Small Catechism has six chief parts: the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Confession, and the Sacrament of the Altar. The Creed itself (Luther used the Apostles’ Creed) has three articles, and the third names the Spirit, the Church, the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection. Twelve items. For each, is it present in Part 1 of the book, present only in disguise (as a figure that changes what it is), or missing?

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Step 2: who acts at each stop?

Now go back to the twenty stops of the journey and ask a single question of each: who does the decisive thing there? The chart below reads the answer from the journey map, using the page’s reading of each stop. If you predicted the verdicts in Part II, your own marks are shown beside the page’s.

Notice where “God, through an outward means” appears: three times, all in the first few pages, and each time it is the Word, read in a book or preached by Evangelist. After the Wicket Gate it never appears again, and it is never water, absolution or the table. That is not because the book has no God in it. It has God everywhere, but after the gate he acts directly, by vision, by angels, by a hand behind a wall; or through a companion’s word; or not visibly at all, while the pilgrim does the decisive thing. What the historic Church would have put at those points is what the road leaves out.

What the reading proves

That verse is from the letter Bunyan loved through Luther, and it is a reminder that Paul too called Christians to keep going. It is important to be exact about what this reading shows, and what it does not.

Try it: does the argument prove this?

Eight claims. Does the argument of this page establish each one, or not?

0 of 8 sorted

A test for any story of the Christian life

Eight questions to ask of any account of the Christian life: a devotional classic, a testimony, a sermon series, a children’s book. Think of one, and answer each. The page records nothing.

Your verdict

Two questions. Nothing is recorded.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Eighteen items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 1 (1678). Read this first. Read from the Wicket Gate to the House Beautiful in one sitting, about an hour, and mark every place something is given to Christian, and by whom. Free at Project Gutenberg, CCEL and sacred-texts.com, which keeps the original spelling.
2. 2. Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis, especially section 16. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Then reread the Cross scene. Free at New Advent.
3. 3. Martin Luther, Large Catechism, Part IV, “Of Baptism,” paragraphs 41–86. Read this first. Thirty minutes. Read paragraph 44 twice. Free at bookofconcord.org.
4. 4. Galatians 3:23–29; Romans 6:1–11; Titus 3:3–7; 1 Peter 3:18–22; Acts 2:36–42; Acts 16:25–34; 1 Corinthians 7:10–16; Luke 14:25–33; Philippians 2:12–13. The texts behind every Part.
5. 5. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), §§129–130 on Luther and §327 on his family. Free at Project Gutenberg.
6. 6. John Bunyan, Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion (1673). Free in the EarlyPrint and Early English Books transcriptions, and on monergism.com.
7. 7. Luther, Small Catechism (1529): the Creed’s third article, Baptism, Confession and the Sacrament of the Altar. Twenty minutes.
8. 8. The Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles IV, V, VII, IX, XI and XII; the Smalcald Articles (1537), Part III, Article 8, on the external Word.
9. 9. Luther, A Sermon on Preparing to Die (1519), LW 42. Short, and among the most consoling things he wrote.
10. 10. Luther, Commentary on Galatians (1535), “The Argument,” on the two righteousnesses: the book Bunyan loved.
11. 11. Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance, chapter 1. Free at New Advent.
12. 12. Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church, chapter 6. Free at New Advent.
13. 13. Luther, On Monastic Vows (1521) with the letter to his father, LW 44 and 48; and The Estate of Marriage (1522), LW 45. For an introduction, Robert Kolb, Robert Kolb, “Luther’s ‘On Monastic Vows’,” Reporter/Witness (LCMS, 2022)ldquo;Still Another 500th Anniversary: LutherRobert Kolb, “Luther’s ‘On Monastic Vows’,” Reporter/Witness (LCMS, 2022)rsquo;s Robert Kolb, “Luther’s ‘On Monastic Vows’,” Reporter/Witness (LCMS, 2022)lsquo;On Monastic VowsRobert Kolb, “Luther’s ‘On Monastic Vows’,” Reporter/Witness (LCMS, 2022)rsquo;,Robert Kolb, “Luther’s ‘On Monastic Vows’,” Reporter/Witness (LCMS, 2022)rdquo; The Lutheran Witness (2022).
14. 14. Guillaume de Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, in the English version printed as The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall and K. B. Locock (EETS, 1899–1904); and the illustrated Morgan Library MS M.1038, fols. 4r–5r, viewable online.
15. 15. The Westminster Confession (1647), chapters XVIII and XXVIII, for the Puritan view of assurance and baptism that Bunyan’s contemporaries held.
16. 16. J. Hobson Thomas, “Bunyan the Baptist,” Baptist Quarterly 4.3 (1928), 97–103, on the evidence for Bunyan’s baptisms; Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, vol. 2 (1814), on the Bedford church and Gifford’s letter.
17. 17. Earlier dossiers: 01, 21 and 27 (baptism); 23, 17 and 28 (assurance); 12 and 39 (vocation and family); 14 (the Supper); 52 (union with Christ given through the means); 63 (the message across the centuries).
18. 18. One reading. Do this one. Take any account of the Christian life you know well, a book, a testimony or your own, and write down where in it God gives something from outside the person, and by what means. Then read Cyril’s list in Part III and do the same.

John Bunyan, the Fathers, Luther and every other writer quoted on this page are long dead and are quoted from dated, published works. Living scholars are cited for their published research and not as examples of anything. The devotional remark in Part V and the objection in the drill are composed for illustration and quoted from no one. No living individual is named on this page as an example of anything. This page judges no one’s motives, sincerity or faith, and makes no claim about the salvation of anyone who reads or loves this book.