What this is about
The author of this site set down a thesis: The Pilgrim’s Progress tells a different story of salvation from the one the Church told for fifteen centuries, Luther included. It has no baptism, and it brings works back in under the name of grace.
Bunyan attacks salvation by good works openly. But, the author suggests, his pilgrim still has to stay on the path, keep hold of his roll, escape Doubting Castle and cross a river whose depth depends on his faith. One man, Ignorance, walks the whole road and is still turned away at the gate of heaven. That can leave readers looking inside themselves for proof that they are really saved. For the early Church and for Luther, the proof was outside: God’s promises, given in his Word, in baptism and in the Lord’s Supper.
What this page is not doing
It does not judge Bunyan’s faith or courage; he spent about twelve years in prison for preaching. It does not say that people who love the book are not Christians. It reads Part 1 (1678), and mentions Part 2 (1684) only where it changes the picture. Bunyan is quoted in his original spelling. Related dossiers: When Were You Born Again? (baptism), Dead Rituals? (assurance) and How Involved Are You at Church? (family and work as callings).
The short answer
- On the main point, Bunyan agrees with Luther. He said Luther on Galatians was the best book he knew after the Bible. In his story the law (Mount Sinai, Moses) cannot save, and the burden of sin falls off at the Cross by grace alone.
- No one is baptized. At the Cross, angels forgive Christian, give him new clothes, mark his forehead and hand him a sealed roll. In 350 a bishop of Jerusalem listed forgiveness, “a garment of light” and “a holy indissoluble seal” as the gifts of baptism. Bunyan keeps the gifts and leaves out the water.
- It was not an accident. Five years earlier Bunyan wrote that baptism “is not the initiating Ordinance”: it is not what lets you into the Church.
- Grace is the teaching; watchfulness drives the story. After the Cross, almost every danger is met by the pilgrim staying awake, staying on the path and keeping his roll. Bunyan does also say that Christ secretly keeps the fire of faith burning, so this point is mixed.
- Comfort is looked for inside. The key that opens Doubting Castle is “in my bosom,” and Christian forgets it for four days. The river is as deep as he believes. Luther told a troubled Christian to say, “Nevertheless I am baptized.”
- Step by step, a pattern shows. Of twenty stops on the journey, eight agree with how the historic Church told the Christian life, nine are mixed and three differ. Every stop where the Church would have put baptism, forgiveness spoken by a minister, the Lord’s Supper or the Church itself is mixed or different.
The case for Bunyan, first
He was Luther’s pupil. In his life story, Grace Abounding (1666), Bunyan says Luther’s commentary on Galatians described his troubles “as if his book had been written out of my heart,” and: “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.”
He is hard on salvation by works. Mr. Worldly Wiseman sends Christian to Mr. Legality in the village of Morality, and the road runs under Mount Sinai, which flashes fire. Evangelist rescues him: “This Legality therefore is not able to set thee free from thy Burden.” Later, Moses beats Faithful and says, “I know not how to shew mercy,” until one with “the holes in his hands and in his side” stops him.
The burden falls by grace. At the Cross it rolls into an empty tomb, and Christian says: “He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.” And Ignorance, who trusts in God’s “gracious acceptance of my obedience to his Law,” is answered with the righteousness of Christ, exactly as Luther would answer him.
Christ keeps the work going. At the Interpreter’s House a fire burns though the devil pours water on it, because behind a wall stands “Christ, who continually, with the Oil of his Grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart.” Bunyan’s own church baptized believers and kept the Lord’s Supper. And a story can’t show everything.
All of that is true. The question it leaves is whether what the story leaves out is random, or whether it is always the same kind of thing: the outward ways in which, the Church had always said, God gives his grace.
Gift, or demand?
Six moments in the story. In each, is Christian mainly given something, mainly asked to do something, or both?
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The clear gifts come at the start and at the Cross. After the Cross, the demands and the mixed cases take over.
A pilgrim with no baptism
What happens at the Cross. Three Shining Ones come. The first says, “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” The second takes away his rags and clothes him with new clothes. The third “set a mark on his forehead, and gave him a Roll with a Seal upon it.” There is no water, no minister, and no one else there.
How the Bible speaks of baptism. “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27): clothing. “Buried with him by baptism into death” (Romans 6:4). “The washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5). “Baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:21). “Repent, and be baptized every one of you … for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). The Nicene Creed: “I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins.”
How the early Church spoke of it. Around 350, Cyril of Jerusalem told people about to be baptized what they would receive: “a remission of offenses; a death of sin; a new-birth of the soul; a garment of light; a holy indissoluble seal.” Forgiveness, a garment, a seal: the Shining Ones’ gifts. The mark on the forehead was the sign of the cross, made on the newly baptized for centuries and still in the English Prayer Book of Bunyan’s day.
Bunyan did not leave out the gifts of baptism. He moved them to the Cross and gave them by angels, to a man alone. What he left out was everything outward: the water, the minister, the Church, the name spoken over the person.
Another pilgrimage. Around 1330 a French monk, Guillaume de Deguileville, wrote a long dream-story of a pilgrim travelling to the heavenly Jerusalem. A fourteenth-century copy shows the start: Grace leads the pilgrim to her house, the Church; he is baptized standing in a river; and a bishop marks his forehead. Only then does he set out. There is no evidence Bunyan read it. But it shows that a story of the Christian life can begin with baptism.
Was it deliberate? In 1673 Bunyan published a book arguing that Christians could join a church and come to the Lord’s table without being baptized as believers. In it he wrote: “Baptism makes thee no Member of the Church,” and “Baptism is not the initiating Ordinance.” Five years later his story of the Christian life has no baptism at its start. Against him stood not only Luther (“It works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this”), but also the English Puritans’ own Westminster Confession (1647), which calls baptism the “admission of the party baptized into the visible Church.”
A correction to the brief
The brief said Bunyan was baptized as an adult. The record is that he was baptized as a baby at Elstow on 30 November 1628. The story that he was baptized again as a believer, in the river at Bedford, is a tradition; a Baptist historian admitted in 1928 that “there is no known record of the baptism anywhere.”
Grace in the teaching, watchfulness in the story
In the gate, but still burdened. Christian goes through the Wicket Gate (Christ, the door), but keeps his burden: “be content to bear it, until thou comest to the place of Deliverance.” He is taught at the Interpreter’s House, and only then reaches the Cross. In Acts 2, repentance, baptism, forgiveness and the Spirit come together, the same day. For Luther, forgiveness is a word spoken to you, in baptism and absolution, again and again: “Repentance, therefore, is nothing else than a return and approach to Baptism.” In Bunyan, forgiveness is a place on the road. The burden falls once, and the story never shows it lifted again.
What gets him through. After the Cross, Christian falls asleep and drops his roll, and has to go back down the hill to find it under a seat. He must not sleep on the Enchanted Ground, must keep out of By-path Meadow (he doesn’t), must see through the Flatterer (he doesn’t). In the full dossier, fourteen dangers are counted: seven are met by his own watchfulness, seven by his effort with help from a friend, a promise or an angel, and none by baptism, the Supper, a minister’s word of forgiveness or the Church.
The thousand years. Two men, Formalist and Hypocrisy, climb over the wall into the way instead of coming through the gate. Their excuse is that their custom is “above a thousand years” old. The warning against empty religion is fair. But the argument Bunyan gives the intruders is the old Church’s own: what has always been believed.
Ignorance. At the very end, Ignorance crosses the river easily, is asked at the gate for his certificate, “fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none,” and is carried off: “there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.” The point is that he never had the gift. But how does a reader know he is not Ignorance? The certificate is in his bosom, where only he can look. For the early Church the certificate was baptism, “a holy indissoluble seal,” done to you, in public, on a day.
What Augustine and Luther said. Augustine: “the perseverance by which we persevere in Christ even to the end is the gift of God.” Luther’s Catechism has every child say the Holy Ghost has “kept me in the true faith.” Bunyan believed that too. But the reader sees the pilgrim keeping himself; God’s keeping is behind a wall.
Given, or reached?
Six statements about forgiveness. Is it something given to the person from outside, or somewhere the person must reach?
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Doubt, the Church and the family
Doubting Castle. Christian and Hopeful are locked in Giant Despair’s dungeon “from Wednesday morning till Saturday night,” beaten and urged to kill themselves. Then Christian remembers: “I have a Key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any Lock in Doubting Castle.” The key is God’s promise, which is good. But it was in his own pocket, and he forgot it for four days. Luther told the troubled Christian 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.” That promise was spoken to the person by name, and does not need to be found.
The river. The river of death is “deeper or shallower as you believe in the King of the place.” Christian sinks, troubled by “the sins that he had committed,” and his friend Hopeful holds him up: “Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole.” Luther told the dying: “Seek yourself only in Christ and not in yourself,” and pointed them to the sacrament as “a sign and promise” that “will not lie.” A dying Christian in his day heard forgiveness spoken and received the Lord’s Supper. Christian in the river has neither.
The Church. The House Beautiful was built “for the relief and security of Pilgrims.” Four women question Christian about his journey and his faith before he stays. It feeds him (with a supper that may stand for the Lord’s Supper), rests him and arms him, which are real works of a church. But it receives a man who already has everything. Cyprian said in the third century: “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.” Luther called the Church “the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God.” In Bunyan the Church does not bear; it shelters. His own church at Bedford took in members “after you are satisfied about the work of grace” in them.
The family. At the start Christian’s wife and children cry after him to come back; he puts his fingers in his ears and runs, “crying, Life! life! eternal life!” The case for him is real: Jesus said a disciple must “hate” even wife and children rather than leave him (Luke 14:26). Bunyan himself went to prison and left a family he loved; parting from them was “as the pulling the flesh from my bones.” Christian tells Charity that he did plead with them, and in Part 2 they follow him. But the scene a reader is given shows a man running from a family that has not forbidden his faith. The New Testament baptizes whole households (Acts 16:33) and tells a believer married to an unbeliever to stay (1 Corinthians 7:12–14). Luther, who had once fled to a monastery against his father’s wishes, came to call that a mistake, and wrote that when a father washes nappies in faith, “God, with all his angels and creatures is smiling.”
The Catechism on the road
Eight parts of Luther’s Small Catechism and the Creed. Is each one present in Part 1, present only in disguise (as a figure that changes what it is), or missing?
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Take any story of the Christian life you know well, a book, a testimony or your own. Where does God give something from outside the person, and how? The full dossier has a twenty-stop journey map you can mark yourself.
What this shows, and what it does not
It does not show
- that Bunyan taught salvation by works
- that people who love the book are not Christians
- that Bunyan despised baptism or the Supper
It does show
- that no one is baptized, and the gifts of baptism are given at the Cross without water
- that this matches Bunyan’s own view that baptism is not the way in
- that wherever the Church put an outward means of grace, the road puts something inside the pilgrim
Check it yourself
Five things. The first takes about an hour. The last is the one that matters.
- 1. Read The Pilgrim’s Progress from the Wicket Gate to the House Beautiful. Mark every place something is given to Christian, and by whom.
- 2. Read Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 16 (free at New Advent). Then read the Cross scene again.
- 3. Read Luther’s Large Catechism on Baptism, especially paragraph 44 (free at bookofconcord.org).
- 4. Read Acts 2:36–42 and Acts 16:25–34. What did the apostles answer to “What shall I do to be saved?”
- 5. One story. Do this one. Take the account of the Christian life you know best, perhaps your own. Where in it does God give something from outside you, and by what means?
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier walks all twenty stops on a journey map you can mark yourself, sets Cyril’s description of baptism beside the Shining Ones phrase by phrase, compares Deguileville’s pilgrim, counts what the story asks of Christian, follows three crises and where the help comes from, sorts pictures of the Church, maps the Catechism onto the road, and publishes the prompt that produced it all.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →