Religions and Discourse 22

Grace Overwhelming

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind

von Anne Dunan-Page

1. Auflage

Grace Overwhelming – Dunan-Page schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2006

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 055 2

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Grace Overwhelming – Dunan-Page Introduction

Sometime in the mid-1660s, when pondering the twenty most significant aspects of his ministry in the ‘language of my heart’, the Yorkshire Presbyterian Oliver Heywood expressed the difficulties of his calling with a horticultural metaphor:

I find christians of different tempers, some apt to run into one extreme others into another. I find it very hard to suit every condition, so as to give every one their grain of allowance and yet indulge them in no sin, to curb their frowardnes so as not to nip the buddings of grace, and prevent the sproutings of what is good in their harts and lives.1

Heywood had daily experience of a spiritual garden which was tempted to extremes, whether that meant falling into despair of

1 The Reverend Oliver Heywood: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols (Bridgehouse: A. B. Bayes; Bingley: T. Harrison, 1881–85), 1: 206. On Heywood, see Joseph Hunter, The Rise of the Old Dissent, exemplified in the Life of Oliver Heywood, one of the Founders of the Presbyterian Congregations in the County of York, 1630–1702 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1842); ‘Oliver Heywood’, Calamy Revised: Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660–1662, ed. Arnold G. Matthews (1934; Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988), hereafter cited as Matthews; W. J. Sheils, ‘Oliver Heywood’, Oxford DNB; David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1980), 60–66, 92–99; Patrick Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Voluntary Religion, Papers read at the 1985 summer meeting and the 1986 winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 223–59; W. J. Sheils, ‘Oliver Heywood and his Congregation’, ibid., 261–77; and John Smail, ‘Local Politics in Restoration England: Religion, Culture and Politics in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax’, in Muriel C. McClendon, Joseph P. Ward and Michael MacDonald (eds), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1999), 234–48. Smail attributes Heywood’s ministerial success to an effective ‘practical divinity’ that was attractive to many outside nonconformist circles. salvation or a rash confidence of being among God’s chosen.2 The pastor, as a conscientious gardener, had to find an equilibrium between trenchant words that would induce a conviction of sin and nourishing words for those whose good beginnings were as fragile as early buds. This conception of the pastor was complicated by the multifariousness of the believers’ spiritual conditions, a variety that makes Heywood’s image of a garden prone to profligate growth and confusion especially apt. There was little chance of striking a balance between the communal need of the congregation and the individual needs of the worshippers. Such a balance had nevertheless been defined some years earlier as the chief duty of the good pastor by Richard Baxter, who considered the pastor’s knowledge of each individual believer, each case history, to be an absolute necessity.3

2 For puritan and dissenting pastoral, with special emphasis on spiritual counselling, see William Haller, ‘Physicians of the Soul’, in The Rise of Puritanism: Or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (New York: Columbia UP, 1938), 3–48. For an overview of pastoral literature, see John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper, 1951), esp. 247–86, although he has very little to say on Restoration dissenters; Patrick Collinson, ‘Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, papers read at the 1988 summer meeting and the 1989 winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 185–220; Isabel Rivers, ‘Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity’, in eadem (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester UP; New York: St Martin’s P, 1982), 127–64; and Neal Enssle, ‘Patterns of Godly Life: The Ideal Parish Minister in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Thought’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 3–28. 3 Richard Baxter, Gildas Salvianus; The Reformed Pastor (London, 1656), 60– 61. Specifically on Baxter’s conception of the ministry and Church discipline, see T. H. Martin, ‘Richard Baxter and “The Reformed Pastor”’, Baptist Quarterly 9 (1939): 350–61; John T. Wilkinson, ‘Introductory Essay’, Gildas Salvianus: Or, The Reformed Pastor (1939), rev. edn (London: The Epworth P, 1950), 15–47; McNeill, 266–67; Geoffrey Nuttall, ‘The Reformed Pastor’, in Richard Baxter (London: Nelson, 1965), 40–63; Neil H. Keeble, ‘The Pastor and the Practical Divine’, in Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford:

18 Heywood had read Baxter’s Gildas Salvianus during a bout of sickness, and had found himself ‘convinced and awakened’ by it.4 One might safely assume that he strove to abide by the standards that Baxter had set for all the ‘painful’ ministers of puritan tendency: to convert while ‘building up’ those already converted through ‘confirmation and progress’, ‘preservation’ and ‘restauration’; to comfort those labouring under special temptations while admonishing the schismatics and keeping the seducers and the profane at bay.5 But even Baxter thought it very difficult to reconcile the need to awaken and the need to comfort. In the 28th direction of The Right Method for a Setled Peace of Conscience, he advises distressed Christians to talk to their minister in private, without ‘hurting’ the others by demanding comforting sermons, and to ‘consider what a strait Ministers are in that have so many of so different conditions, inclinations and conversations to preach to.’6 Pastoral theory and pastoral practice necessarily conflicted in the reclamation of Christians from the extremes of sin or the extremes of despair. The ministers, however, did not entirely accept the blame for any pastoral failure. The believer’s individual responsibility was also involved:

The Ministers of the Gospel must be good Stewards, giving to every one their Portion [...]. And as Ministers must give, so People must take every one their own Portions; as Ministers so People must apply the Word of God aright. Let every Man take his own Portion, and not be catching at that which is another’s. There is too great an aptness in the distressed, to lay hold on those words, that

Clarendon P, 1982), 69–93; Timothy R. Cooke, ‘Uncommon Earnestness and Earthly Toils: Moderate Puritan Richard Baxter’s Devotional Writings’, Anglican and Episcopal History 63 (1994): 51–72; and J. William Black, ‘From Martin Bucer to Richard Baxter: “Discipline” and Reformation in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, Church History 70 (2001): 644–73. Philip Doddridge pronounced Gildas Salvianus to be ‘a most extraordinary performance, [that] should be read by every young minister, and the practical part of it reviewed every three or four years; for nothing would have a greater tendency to awaken the spirit of a minister to that zeal in his work’, quoted by Martin, 356. 4 Heywood, 1: 177. 5 Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, 68–77. 6 The Right Method for a Setled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort In 32 Directions (1653), 3rd edn (London, 1657), 309.

19 are spoken to the secure; if there be ever an afrighting word in a whole Sermon, that’s my Portion, saith the Distressed, this Word belongs to me; and so the secure are too ready to lay hold on those healing and comforting words, which belong to the broken and distressed [...].7

Baxter had much to say on the subject of spiritual extremes and it earned him the reputation of being an effective ‘practical’ pastor. He professed a desire to avoid ‘extreams in [his] doctrinal Directions’ for believers to escape ‘the desperate extreams of Ungrounded Comforts, and Causless Terrou[r]s’ in their own spirit.8 This mission greatly benefited from a personal interest in medicine that he had practised, albeit without a licence, in Kidderminster.9 His cure of melancholy, or ‘over-much’ sorrow, is by ‘Faith and Physick’, as the title of one of his works on the subject unambiguously proclaims.10 But this was only one aspect of the believer’s life that the pastors had to confront. Even more dangerous was the tendency of the faithful to run to doctrinal extremes, in the form of heresies or ‘novelties’:

Some will first believe, that God is nothing else but Mercy, and after take notice of nothing but his Justice. First, They believe that almost all are saved, and afterwards that almost none [...]. First, they think that all that Papists hold and do must be avoided: and after that there needed no reformation at all: now they

7 R[ichard] A[lleine], Godly-Fear: Or, The Nature and Necessity of Fear, and Its Usefulness (London, 1674), 220. 8 Baxter, Right Method, 2. 9 For Baxter as physician, see, for instance, Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’ (1985), repr. in Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in Social and Intellectual History, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 55–99 (original pagination). 10 Preservatives against Melancholy and Over-much Sorrow: Or, The Cure of Both by Faith and Physick (London, 1716) This is an echo of the standard pastoral text, 2 Cor. 2: 7 (‘So that contrariwise ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow’). On melancholy, see also The Right Method; God’s Goodness Vindicated (London, 1671); A Christian Directory: Or, a Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience (London, 1673) and the compilation by Samuel Clifford, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy, with Directions Suited to the Case of Those who are Afflicted with it. Collected out of the Works of Mr. Richard Baxter (London, 1716).

20 are for Legal bondage, and anon for Libertinism: To day for a liberty in Religion to none that agree not with them in every circumstance: and to morrow for a liberty for all [...].11

Baxter’s extreme Christians randomly throw in their lot with Arminians and Antinomians, and espouse their very different but equally erroneous positions regarding predestination, the use of the law and the due extent of religious toleration. Baxter proposed to challenge their errors by composing a treatise which would visually demonstrate the benefits of a mean, ‘a peculiar Treatise with three Columns, shewing both extreams, and the truth in the middle, through the body of Divinitie’12. In the meantime, he suggested, a proper consideration of doctrinal ‘middle ways’, such as Moïse Amyraut’s, would effectively dispel the temptations of extremism.13 Baxter plays upon the image of orthodoxy as halfway house between a Pelagian tendency to rely on good works and the Antinomian rejection of the law. However, since doctrinal equilibrium, like doctrinal extremism,

11 Baxter, Christian Directory, 50. 12 Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest: Or, A Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in their Enjoyment of God in Glory (London, 1650), sig. A4r. 13 Ibid. On Amyraut, see Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969). On Amyraut’s influence in England, see Peter Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Nonconformity, 1689–1765 (London: The Olive Tree, 1967), 18–26; John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought, American Academy of Religion, Studies in Religion 45 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars P, 1986), 127 ff. For Amyraut and Baxter, see William M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), esp. 129, 138, 146–47, 152–53; Neil H. Keeble, ‘Richard Baxter’, Oxford DNB; and Matthew Kadane, ‘Les bibliothèques de deux théologiens réformés du XVIIe siècle, l’un puritain anglais, l’autre pasteur huguenot’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 147 (2001): 67–100. In his library Baxter kept six books by Amyraut, which he recommends to his readers in the Christian Directory to heal the disputes between the Protestants.

21 lay essentially in the eye of the Restoration beholder, many claimed that they came close to it while their opponents strayed.14 Heywood’s moving admission of his difficulties in finding pastoral equipoise in the face of unsettledness, and Baxter’s irritated sally against extreme religious beliefs, represent two concerns of the present study, which examines the nature of doctrinal and spiritual extremism in a particular brand of English puritanism, namely Restoration nonconformity. My chief example of one tempted by such extremes is the Baptist John Bunyan. But to say this much is already to place Bunyan within a seventeenth-century denomination that was considered by many, most of all by Baxter, to be a clear example of extreme ‘Anabaptistical’ beliefs and behaviour inherited from heretical offsprings of the Continental Reformation. Some modern commentators, however, have contended that the very name ‘Baptist’ is inappropriate for Bunyan on the ground of the open-communion principles that allowed him, unlike the majority of Calvinist Particular

14 For John Owen’s discussion of his own ‘middle ground between orthodox Anglicanism on the far right and Quaker antinomianism on the far left’, see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 162. Commentators often resort to the ‘left’ and ‘right’ positioning of dissenters on the Restoration religious spectrum (for instance, with Quakers on the far left and Arminians on the far right, and moderate or strict Calvinists in the middle), but the conception of which denomination was on the ‘left’ and which on the ‘right’ varies from one author to the next. For Leonard Trinterud, for instance, Baptists are on the ‘left wing’ of Puritanism, with Fifth Monarchists, Levellers and Diggers; ‘The Origins of Puritanism’, Church History 20.1 (March 1951): 37–57 (at pp. 51–53); for John von Rohr the ‘Arminians’ are on the left and the ‘Antinomians’ on the right (p. ix). See also Richard L. Greaves, ‘John Bunyan and Covenant Thought in the Seventeenth Century’, Church History 36 (1967): 151–69, incorporated into ‘The Pilgrim’s Covenant’, John Bunyan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 97– 119. For an invaluable discussion of the ‘left/centre/right’ categories with implications for the definition of radicalism and conservatism, see Conal Condren, ‘Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A Case of Sandwich Islands Syndrome?’, History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 525–42 and ‘Will All the Radicals Please Lie Down, We Can’t See the Seventeenth Century’, in The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, Studies in Modern History (New York: St Martin’s P, 1994), 140–68.

22 Baptists, to welcome adults into his congregation who refused to accept a second baptism.15 This debate about names, punctilious though it may seem, is linked to the much broader and contentious issue of the nature of Restoration radicalism, and of Bunyan’s place within it.16 Bunyan the radical has attracted much critical attention in the past,17 although such interpretations have more recently been

15 See Joseph D. Ban, ‘Was John Bunyan a Baptist? A Case-Study in Historiography’, Baptist Quarterly 30 (1984): 367–76 and the many arguments adduced in support of his friendship with Congregationalists given in Richard Greaves’s recent biography, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2002), hereafter cited as Greaves, Glimpses. 16 On the difficulties of defining radicalism, see Condren, ‘Radicals’. Richard Greaves and Robert Zaller define radicals ‘as those who sought fundamental changes by striking at the very root of contemporary assumptions and institutions, often in order to revert to what they judged to be proper historic roots’, even though they concede that ‘[t]he delineation of the boundaries of radicalism is clearly a matter of judgement’; Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller (eds), Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (Brighton: Harvester P, 1982–1984) 1: viii, ix. Hereafter cited as BDBR. For a persuasive, albeit vehement, criticism, see J. C. Davis’s review, ‘Radical Lives’, Political Science 37 (1985): 166–72. Greaves later gave a much more narrow definition of radicalism: ‘I have chosen not to equate radicals with all Protestant nonconformists, but have instead limited the term “radical” to those who espoused active disobedience of the law, particularly in the form of such activities as rebellion, assassination, the publication of allegedly seditious literature, and the use of violence to prevent legally constituted authorities from enforcing the law’; Enemies under his Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1990), 2. More recently, see Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith, ‘Introduction’, in eidem (eds), Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650– 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 1–26. 17 Bunyan the radical was popularised by such works as William York Tindall, John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1934) and by Christopher Hill’s biography, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church, 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988), hereafter cited as Hill, Turbulent. Discussions of Bunyan and radicalism are to be found in Richard F. Hardin, ‘Bunyan, Mr Ignorance, and the Quakers’, Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 496–508; Richard L. Greaves, ‘John Bunyan and the Fifth Monarchists’, Albion 13 (1981): 83–95, reprinted in Greaves, John

23 counterbalanced by the view that he was ‘the most conservative of nonconformists’.18 Presented in this light he appears as an untiring champion of political non-resistance and religious orthodoxy who challenged the enthusiasm of Quakers and Ranters, or opposed the drift of the Anglican Church towards a moral religion, little prone himself to the excesses of some of his contemporaries. Previous ‘radical’ readings, it has been suggested, misrepresented Bunyan as an extremist while he was in fact a mainstream Calvinist, shunning the

Bunyan and English Nonconformity (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon P, 1992), 141–53; Dayton Haskin, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Context of Bunyan’s Dialogue with the Radicals’, Harvard Theological Review 77 (1984): 73–94; Aileen M. Ross, ‘Paradise Regained: The Development of John Bunyan’s Millenarianism’, in M. van Os and G. J. Schutte (eds), Bunyan in England and Abroad, papers delivered at the John Bunyan Tercentenary Symposium, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1988 (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 1990), 73–89; W. R. Owens, ‘“Antichrist must be Pulled Down”: Bunyan and the Millennium’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England, 1628–1688 (London and Ronceverte: The Hambledon P, 1990), 77–94 and ‘John Bunyan and English Millenarianism’, in David Gay, James G. Randall and Arlette Zinck (eds), Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community (Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 2000), 81–96, hereafter cited respectively as Bunyan and his England and Awakening Words; Ted L. Underwood, ‘“It pleased me much to contend”: John Bunyan as Controversialist’, Church History 57 (1988): 456–69 and idem, ‘“For then I should be a Ranter or a Quaker”’, in Awakening Words, 127–40; Crawford Gribben, ‘John Bunyan and the Realized Apocalypse’, in The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts P, 2000), 172–93. Haskin, one of the most persuasive commentators on The Pilgrim’s Progress, discusses Bunyan’s anxiety concerning radical religion and the complex feeling of attraction and repulsion it entailed. He concludes that ‘Bunyan aligned himself with conservative Reformation theology. He did not envisage the greatest dangers to contemporary Christians as those associated with the persecuting Establishment (and dramatised in the episode at Vanity Fair) but as those associated with radical Dissent’ (pp. 74–75). For the link with Fifth Monarchy, see Greaves, ‘Bunyan and the Fifth Monarchists’; Bernard S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 145–46. 18 J. C. Davis, ‘Puritanism and Revolution: Themes, Categories, Methods and Conclusions’, Historical Journal 33 (1990): 693–704 (at p. 696). For Bunyan’s doctrinal via media between moderate Calvinists and Antinomians, see Greaves, ‘John Bunyan and Covenant Thought’.

24 most dangerous heresies of the post Civil War period as well as the comfortable ‘silver-slipper’ religion of those who diluted true Reformed principles into a pious moralism;19 instead, he was a ‘middle way’ Christian, walking safely and equidistantly between ‘legal bondage’ and ‘libertinism’, of whom Baxter himself could have been proud. Except that Baxter was not, and nor were many of his contemporaries. Bunyan took the opposition that he encountered very much to heart. On many occasions he expressed his amazement at the gulf between his positions and the way they were perceived by others. He contrasted his desire to live peaceably with his reputation for being ‘factious, seditious, erroneous, heretical; a disparagement to the Church, a seducer of the people, and what not ?’; ‘a Witch, a Jesuit, a

19 This is how By-ends describes his religion: ‘First we never strive against Wind and Tide. Secondly, we are alwayes most zealous when Religion goes in his Silver Slippers’; The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W. R. Owens, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 98. In two cases, when citing the works of Bunyan, I depart from the Oxford English Texts that have enjoyed unrivalled status as the only scholarly editions of Bunyan. Roger Sharrock’s revision for Oxford of James Wharey’s edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1960 is based on the first (1678) edition and incorporates the revisions subsequently made by Bunyan for the second and third editions (The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. James Blanton Wharey, 2nd rev. edn, ed. Roger Sharrock [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960], hereafter cited as P’sP, OET). Sharrock’s introduction is still the most comprehensive account of the editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress, but a drawback for the reader is that the OET’s typographical presentation does not distinguish between the first edition and the later additions. Since no modern scholarly edition attempts such visual distinctions, I will here use Owens’s recent edition that follows Sharrock’s text (hereafter cited as P’sP for the first part and P’sP II for the second part). Owens’s edition (in addition to being widely accessible) conveniently reproduces the seventeenth-century woodcuts added to Bunyan’s allegory and their versified lines of text, which are increasingly thought to merit inclusion in the Bunyan canon. Grace Abounding, whose revisional process was longer and more complicated than that of The Pilgrim’s Progress, raised its own editorial issues. They are, however, successfully dealt with in John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco’s edition, in which later additions are separated from the text of the first edition. All subsequent references are to this edition (Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski with Anita Pacheco, Oxford World’s Classics [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998], 1–94, hereafter cited as GA).

25 High-way-man, and the like.’20 The loaded term ‘Anabaptist’ was used against him, despite his vehement protestations that he had nothing to do with a sect that sound believers, in his opinion, would do well to shun.21 Bunyan’s complaints were apparently well founded. The Pilgrim’s Progress was criticised (and purportedly much improved) by the General Baptist Thomas Sherman, while those engaged directly in controversy with Bunyan understandably called him a fanatic and traitor.22 Perhaps even more importantly, he had to face the recurrent charge that he was an Antinomian.23 Furthermore,

20 I Will Pray with the Spirit, and I Will Pray with the Understanding also: Or, A Discourse Touching Prayer (1662?), MW 2 : 284; GA 85. 21 MW 2: 284 (earlier on Bunyan had complained, reworking Ezra 4: 12–16, that the godly were ‘looked upon to be a turbulent, seditious, and factious people’, MW 2: 253, which inspired the title of Christopher Hill’s biography, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People; The Heavenly Foot-man: Or, A Description of the Man that gets to Heaven (1698), MW 5: 153. 22 T[homas] S[herman], The Pilgrim’s Progress from this Present World of Wickedness and Misery, to an Eternity of Holiness and Felicity (London, 1682). For perceptive comments on this little-studied text, see Albert B. Cook III, ‘John Bunyan and John Dunton: A Case of Plagiarism’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 71 (1977): 11–28; Susan Cook, ‘Pilgrims’ Progresses: Derivative Texts and the Seventeenth-Century Reader’, in Awakening Words, 186–201; Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 292–300, hereafter cited as Davies, Graceful Reading. For examples of strong language used against Bunyan in the baptismal controversy, see Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, no Bar to Communion (1673) and Peaceable Principles and True (1674), MW 4: 193, 196–97, 233, 270, 286. 23 On Antinomianism in the context of federal theology see Michael McGiffert, ‘Introduction’, God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard, ed. Michael McGiffert, The Commonwealth Series (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972), 3–32 (at p. 28); Richard L. Greaves, ‘Introduction’, MW 2: xv–xliv (at pp. xxi–xxxii); Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982), 112–57; J. Wayne Baker, ‘Sola Fide, Sola Gratia: The Battle for Luther in Seventeenth- Century England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 115–33. For Wallace, ‘the Antinomian crisis and controversy acted as a catalyst in the forming of theological parties, on the one hand driving a wedge between moderate Calvinists who abhorred them and high Calvinists who found them incautious

26 one might gain the impression that Bunyan never penetrated the small circle of open-communionists who revered Henry Jessey as the inspirational founder of their principles and who were inclined to regard university-educated Baptists, such as John Tombes, as the most able exponents of their views.24 Bunyan was of course praised in his lifefime, most notably by the oft-quoted John Owen, who wished he had Bunyan’s preaching gift, and by ‘I. G.’ (John Gibbs?) who added a long preface to Bunyan’s A Few Sighs from Hell: Or, The Groans of a Damned Soul in 1658.25 ‘I. G.’ urges the reader to disregard

allies and, on the other hand, further alienating Arminian Anglicans from all Calvinists’ (p. 120). Wallace finds Baptists such as Benjamin Keach, John Tombes and Bunyan ‘less fearful’ of Antinomianism than Congregationalists (p. 161), a point already made by Richard Greaves, for whom ‘[t]hat which distinguishes Bunyan (as well as other strict Calvinists) from those of an Antinomian persuasion is basically a matter of emphasis’ (‘John Bunyan and Covenant Thought’, 167). See also Richard A. Muller, ‘Covenant and Conscience in English Reformed Theology: Three Variations on a Seventeenth- Century Theme’, Westminster Theological Journal 42 (1980): 308–34. Muller argues that ‘Bunyan’s reformulation of federalism represents a reaction against legalistic covenant theology: it is, in other words, a movement away from the center toward the Antinomian side of the spectrum which nevertheless avoids the pitfalls of true Antinomianism’ (pp. 320–21). For an illuminating critical survey of that literature in relation to Bunyan, see Davies, Graceful Reading, 17–80. Davies points out with Muller that Bunyan’s doctrine can be said to be ‘Antinomian’ only in ‘its least pejorative sense’, as a product of his understanding of covenant theology as promise rather than bargain. However, Bunyan’s opponents, mainly Anglican Latitudinarians and Quakers in unholy alliance, were very keen to portray him as one making adherence to the law unnecessary (Davies, Graceful Reading, p. 54), a criticism that was voiced at least until 1720 when Thomas Cox declared that The Pilgrim’s Progress was ‘of an antinomian spirit’ (cited in Hill, Turbulent, 348). For more general remarks on Antinomianism in relation to puritan piety, see William K.B. Stoever, ‘A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven’: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1978), 138–60. 24 Julia Smith, ‘John Tombes’, Oxford DNB. 25 John Owen is cited in John Brown, John Bunyan (1628–1688): His Life, Times, and Work (1885), rev. edn, ed. Frank M. Harrison (London: The Hultbert Publishing Company, 1928), 366. See I. G. ‘To the Reader.’, A Few Sighs from

27