Should we celebrate John Bunyan Day?

Now I saw in my dream, that the highway up which Christian was to go, was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.

He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.

Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said, with a merry heart, "He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death." Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him, that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden. He looked therefore, and looked again, even till the springs that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks.

I still recall how coming across this passage during my first reading, 25 years ago, of The Pilgrim's Progress caused me to stop, taken aback by its simple beauty.  "Then he stood awhile to look and wonder": this is the heart of Christian piety across the centuries, gazing upon the Passion of the Lord, captured by the Crucified.

This portion of The Pilgrim's Progress might alone be reason to give thanks on John Bunyan Day, the Bedford Non-Conformist dying on 31st August 1688. This, however, is not without some significant contradictions.  Most obviously for Anglicans, giving thanks for him on this day also entails the recognition that Bunyan's 12 year imprisonment was the result of Anglican establishment and - to use in the in vogue term - privilege.  What is more, as we give thanks for Bunyan and how The Pilgrim's Progress captured the imagination over succeeding generations, we also recall that Bunyan refused to conform to and rejected the Anglican text which had an even greater spiritual and cultural influence, the Book of Common Prayer.  

Bunyan also represented a definitive rejection of the quintessential Anglican institution, the parish.  Indeed, The Pilgrim's Progress is, in some ways, a sustained assault on the generosity of the parish in its embrace of "all sorts and conditions" and its ethos of conversion and sanctification being worked out quietly, over a lifetime in community.  Against this, 'Christian' stood for the purity of the exclusive congregation of the Godly, against "Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Any-thing; and the parson of our parish, Mr. Two-tongues".

This brings us to the sectarianism which The Pilgrim Progress celebrates. As Hooker had warned nearly a century earlier in the face of the sectarianism of the Disciplinarians, "the zeal and fervour" of those rejecting the settled order of the Church by law established would not be contained within the Church itself, but would spill over to inevitably threaten the peace and good of the commonwealth.  The sectarian principle "is a principle not safe to be followed in matters concerning the public state of the commonwealth":

there is in every of these considerations must just cause to fear least our hastiness to embrace a thing of so perilous consequence should cause posterity to feel those evils, which as yet are more easy for us to prevent than they they would be for them to remedy (Preface to the Laws, 8:13 -14).

Hooker's fears were to come to pass, with the religious agitations of the previous decades exploding in the violence of the wars of religion which swept through the Three Kingdoms in the late 1630s and throughout the 1640s, followed by an overthrow of the constitutional order, replaced by the grim rule of an authoritarian strongman.  Bunyan had a part in this, fighting in the Parliamentarian forces.  His embrace of Independency in the 1650s gave theological expression to this political allegiance.  This was not quietism, but a robust ecclesiastical expression of the Protectorate, opposing episcopalians and presbyterians, Ranters and Quakers.  It is not surprising, then, that the Marxist historian Christopher Hill in his study of Bunyan - A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People (1988) - declared that Bunyan's "writings make it clear that he looked back nostalgically to the revolutionary decades".  

The answer to such sectarianism and "the late unhappy confusions" was, as Bulman demonstrates in his superb Anglican Enlightenment (2015), the Anglican Restoration and the accompanying legal framework for conformity and uniformity.  This, Bulman stresses, was "Anglican Enlightenment", couched in terms of natural and civil religion, "with accounts of the expansive civil and religious benefits of Anglicanism".  Here was an answer to the wars of religion and the bitter, toxic religious debates of previous decades which had led to bloody civil war. Significantly, Bulman notes that such Enlightened discourse, "the defence of Anglican Christianity as civil religion", was "found in the works of both 'latitudinarians' and 'high churchmen'". 

No wonder, then, as Hill states, that Bunyan "disliked" the 'Latitudinarians' "as much as he disliked Quakers", with "his particular bête noire" being Edward Fowler, a nearby parson and divine who was author of the 1670 The Principles and Practices of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England. The 'Latitudinarian' principle that, as Hill puts it, "a holy and moral life was possible for everyone, because the principles of such a life were written in the hearts of all men" could only but offend the sectarianism of Bunyan.  Likewise, Fowler's characteristically 'Latitudinarian' view that the rejection of conformity was "contentious and unpeaceful behaviour" could only be rejected by Bunyan, for rejection of ceremonies was more important to sectaries than ecclesial and communal peace.  These characteristics, rejected and ridiculed by Bunyan, and mistakenly described by Hill as 'Latitudinarian' (they were, of course, characteristic of most of the post-1660 Church of England), were a reasoned ecclesial and theological response to bloody civil war, bitter divisions, and "the late unhappy confusions". Bunyan's rejection of conformity, therefore, was no incipient progressivism, but a deeply sectarian vision which had been a leading cause of civil strife and religious violence.

Why, then, would Anglicans commemorate Bunyan - a sectarian who rejected ecclesial and civic peace - with thanksgiving? We may do so precisely because of that ecclesial and civic peace which Anglicanism cherishes but Bunyan rejected: as this peace seeks to anticipate the peace of the Celestial City, so it must be gracious and generous.  Just as the peace of the Celestial City embraces Bunyan, so too our ecclesial peace should embrace him, as it does "all sorts and conditions".  This is also reflected in Anglicanism celebrating the rich elements in Bunyan's writings and witness and opening them, in a way Bunyan then could not accept but in which now he rejoices, not to a sectarian gathering of the godly, but to all those who with faltering, uncertain steps are pilgrims in the parish church.  So we heartily sing 'He who would valiant be'.  We might quietly, before Evensong, read of 'Christian' who "stood awhile to look and wonder" at the Crucified and be moved in our prayer and praise.  And, no doubt in way which in his earthly life would have repelled Bunyan but which now gives him to smile, Anglican parishes and cathedrals can have stained glass windows celebrating the progress of the pilgrim 'Christian'.  

Anglicans can celebrate Bunyan with thanksgiving because Bunyan was wrong: the Church is not called to sectarian purity.  Rather, it ministers with grace and charity, and gathers up with gratitude and thanksgiving. And so, included in our thanksgiving for "all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear" is John Bunyan.

(The first illustration is of the Book of Common Prayer and The Pilgrim's Progress.  The second shows Cromwell tearing down the oak of the English Constitution.  The third is of the Bunyan Window in Southwark Cathedral.)