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Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent

Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent. by dint of Richard L. Greaves. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Pres 2002 xix + 693 pp $7500 (cloth)

The Pilgrim's Progres may be the greatest in quantity influential piece of anti-Anglican literature evermore 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-purposes who loves to walk with Religion "if the day-star shines, and the people applaud it"; and Mr Money-Love who argues that it is providence which has given the ministers their desire for ever more lucrative benefices. And it takes us to Vanity Fair, the spiritually vapid beau world of Restoration Anglicanism.

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

Bunyan's feelings towards the house of worship of England were fully reciprocated. At the dawn of the Restoration, an Anglican umpire 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 recured to his wife and children for a not many years, only to be excommunicated and thrown back into jail. To lay open the doors and walk released all that Bunyan had to do was say, "I will worship in my parish temple 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 conferr forward him the celebrity by which, in his last years, he drew common peoples of several thousands.

Delightfully, the house of worship of England later gave Bunyan his have memorial window in Westminster Abbey.

Glimpses of Glory succeeds Bunyan's life chronologically, and coheres it very effectively with the political and religious history of the age. It takes a rather formulaic approach-successive sections forward political history, biography, and oeuvre period on period-but the formula works, because, as Greaves exhibits exhaustively, Bunyan's writings do cogitate the political issues of the age often and the experiences of his hold life always.

The most skilled of these experiences, Greaves argues, was Bunyans spiritual distress of the 1650 when he felt almost continual despair for his salvation. Greaves turn rounds to modem medical literature to exhibit that this distress was clinical depression. Postmodern readers may not be persuaded that the scientific categories raiseed in one culture can with equal reason readily be retrojected onto another. still fortunately, Greaves also takes seriously Bunyans possess 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 forward Galatians and John Foxe's Acts and memorials From them Bunyan learned that discipleship calls us to suffering, and that sanctification is not an inner peace, not a steady progres in grace, yet the unceasing ebb and in what way of Faith. That is wherefore in The Pilgrim's Progress, Christians trials all pedicel from his inability ever to be totally assured of his salvation.

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

Anglicanism today has, fortunately, left a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of its Restoration heritage behind. It is more voluntaristic, ceremonious of diversity, liturgically flexible, tolerant, sensitive to social injustice, and, in a word, pilgrim- just as Bunyan musing the church should be. Perhaps Bunyan's dissent was medicine.

ALAN L HAYES

Wycliffe College

Toronto, Ontario