The Gift of Interpretation

The House of the Interpreter remains one of the most intriguing sequences of the whole of Pilgrim’s Progress, and in it Bunyan is laying out the key dynamics that will shape Christian’s experience of discipleship. Some speak to what he has already experienced, some are designed to prepare him for what lies ahead. As we see in the first picture, there are those authorised and able to teach such things, and to lead pilgrims safely on the way… and there are those who aren’t. It is more important than we might realise to make sure that we are listening to the right preachers, ‘lest in thy journey thou meet with some who pretend to lead thee right, but their ways go down to death’.

Interpreter draws on such homely and everyday images as dusty rooms; children waiting for gifts; a fire in a hearth; guards at a doorway; a prisoner; someone waking, trembling from a nightmare… from these humble, familiar analogies, profound spiritual truths are drawn to help Christian understand what he has already been through (e.g. his flirtation with morality and legalism), or to equip him for the journey ahead. He will face many difficulties and dangers, trials and temptations. These foundational truths will encourage our Pilgrim to press on, when his heart would otherwise fail. As with the rest of the book, we aren’t left to guess at the meanings of what we are shown. Interpreter lives up to his name.

Christian is schooled as to the presence and nature of sin in the human heart; he is taught the importance of valuing the new creation over the old; he is shown the grace of Christ in preserving His saints in the face of Satan’s opposition; he is warned of the danger of not putting into practise what we learn from Scripture, and of denying Christ; he sees the dangers of persecution and suffering; and he is shown how to live with an awareness that he does so before God, and in the light of the Day of Judgement… These are all lessons Christian will have to draw on later in the journey; and they are worth pondering in our own expereince of discipleship.

‘Then Interpreter said to Christian, Hast thou considered all these things?’ ‘Yes’ Christian replies ‘and they put me in hope and fear’. This (perhaps unexpected?) combination of emotions holds the Pilgrim in creative balance. it is a well known observation that the most frequently repeated exhortation in the Bible is for Christians to fear the Lord. But it is not a fear that shuts out hope, but one that rather gives lustre to a joyful hope of the New Creation. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Without it we cannot follow the path of pilgrimage.

Only as he leaves Interpreter’s house does Christian finally come to the cross. And finally he loses his burden, watching it roll into the tomb, ‘and I saw it no more’. The three Shining Ones bless him with peace, absolution, the robes of righteousness (Zech.3:4; Rev.19:8), a mark on his forehead (Ezek.9:4; Rev.7:3) and a scroll. Watch for that - it becomes significant later! In the meantime, Christian runs through surprise, wonder, weeping, joy and song in swift succession, and heads off down the narrow path!

The sequence of events as Bunyan describes them has caused quite a bit of discussion. Some feel that Christian has, well, become a Christian earlier, and that Bunyan’s point is that a person ‘may be a Christian and yet have a deep sense of the burden of sin’. This is undoubtedly true; but my own view is that it is only here, at the cross that Christian is saved. Only here is he freed from the guilt of sin, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, assured of peace with God and forgiveness by Him. Bunyan’s point is rather, that the Spirit can be leading us for some time before we actaully come to the cross. We can know quite a bit about Jesus, and what it would mean to follow Him, even before we are regenerated. We can experience quite a lot and still not be a Christian! Our journey to Christ starts before we come to the cross.

This is the thinking that lies behind courses such as Christianity Explored. And it is the experience of many of us in our own journey. Looking back, we can see God’s hand on us, guiding us to Calvary, long before we actually became Christians.

Questions to ponder:

Go back to the first picture Christian sees. What characterises a minister of the Gospel? Would you pray for these things in those involved in ministry at MIE?

What does it mean to fear the Lord?

How does hope feature in your life as a Christian?

Can you tell the story of how you became a Christian, tracing out how God lead you to the Cross of Christ, and what happened when you were converted? Can you find someone to tell that story to?

When trusting Christ is not enough...

Take a moment, and ask yourself: What is the Gospel? What is the ‘Good News’ that beats at the heart of my faith?

Now, take another moment and ask yourself what you make of Evangelist?

There are two aspects to Evangelist’s contribution that are worth pondering. The first is his method. Whereas our instinct might be to soothe someone’s spiritual anxiety and discomfort, perhaps by assuring someone wrestling with a sense of guilt or unworthiness that God is loving and compassionate, Evangelist seems to aggravate precisely that we would seek to alleviate. Before he presents the Good News of the Gospel, he wants to make sure we understand why it is Good News. He wants to make sure we know the reality of what the Gospel saves us from. He pushes until the man before him is convinced that ‘I am not fit to go to judgement … the thoughts of these things makes me cry’.

Only now will Evangelist reveal that there is a way to be saved from that judgement. This is the second thing worth pondering: the content of the Gospel. The Gospel is not here being presented as a way of dealing with our sense of guilt, or lack of fulfilment in life. It is about how God protects us from His own holy response to our sin. Only when the reality of judgement is in focus, does Evangelist take to his lips a phrase of John the Baptizer, ‘Flee from the coming wrath’ (Matt.3:7).

But why does Evangelist not take him straight to the cross?

It is possible that this is a narrative devise used by Bunyan to expose the mistakes we can make in trying to deal with our guilt. It gives him a chance to introduce characters such as Obstinate (stubbornly holding to an opinion or course of action) who will not accept the Bible’s diagnosis of his state before God (‘away with your Book’), nor entertain any sacrifice of what he thinks of as ‘the good life’; Pliable, who sets out to follow the way of Christ without any ‘burden of sin’ and quickly loses interest in what had initially seemed attractive, when the going becomes difficult in the Slough of Despond (discouraged and disheartened by the response of mocking, threatening and calling back by others); and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, who holds the remarkably contemporary opinion that we don’t need to be Christian to be good, and that while a little bit of self-affirming, ‘civic religion’ is no doubt a good thing, you certainly don’t want to be too serious about anything Evangelist says! That’s all a bit extreme, and unnecessary. It might sound sophisticated and reasonable, but ‘Christian’ (as he is now called) soon learns the hard way that Morality only increases the burden of sin, ‘and he soon began to be sorry that he had taken Mr. Worldly-wiseman’s counsel’.

More likely however, Bunyan understands and is teaching us about a wisdom that is needed in leading people to Christ. Counter-intuitively, there is great spiritual danger in rushing ahead of the Spirit’s leading someone to the Cross. Jesus once left a teacher of the Law ‘not far from the Kingdom of heaven’ (Mk.12:34). Not far… but not ‘in’ either.

Even though he is weighed down by his burden of sin, and is anxious about judgement, Christian is not ready yet to trust Christ, or at least, he is still too ready to trust others. He might be willing to trust Christ, but he is not yet willing to trust Christ alone. Only after he has been to the house of the Interpreter will be ready to climb ‘Salvation Hill’…

Questions to ponder:

Is Bunyan setting the bar too high?

Does reading this part of Pilgrim’s Progress help you make sense of your own experience of becoming a Christian? …and perhaps what you have seen of other people’s experiences of becoming Christians, or not, as the case may prove to be?

Take some time to pray for those you know who think and behave in ways that remind you of Obstinate, Pliable and Mr. Worldly-wiseman. Is there any way over the next few days you could say or do something that might help them re-engage with the Gospel?

The Gospel begins in the City of Destruction

Pilgrim’s Progress starts without a Pilgrim. Or better, it starts with the making of a Pilgrim. Pilgrims are made, not born. Or better, they are born again. And the process of birth is often a traumatic one.

Bunyan begins with ‘a man’. He does not yet have a name; he is dressed in rags (a reference to Is.64:6); with his face already turned away from his own house, with a book in his hand and a burden on his back (Ps.38:4). He is weeping and trembling, and he feels an anxiety that he cannot keep to himself. He is fearful of the coming judgment. ‘I am informed that our city shall be burned with fire from heaven … in which [we] shall come to ruin’.

Although he meets with scepticism from his family and friends (who fear he is becoming mentally unstable!) his state of spiritual concern becomes agonising, and his fear and confusion are palpable in these opening paragraphs. Only Evangelist is able to point him in the right direction, as we’ll see tomorrow…

It’s unfamiliar territory, and likely not where we would start the story. It all feels, well, very 17th Century-ish. We tend to think of Christianity in much more postive and constructive terms. We don’t start our story in a state of fear about our spiritual condition and our destiny of destruction. It’s all very quaint, but probably best left in the 1600s!!?

Which just goes to show, we weren’t listening to C.S. Lewis yesterday. Might not this be one of our blind spots? …one of the ‘characteristic mistakes’ of the 21st Century that old books like this one might alert us to?

Bunyan has his finger on the pulse of reality. He self-conciously presents our spiritual biography as shaped by ‘the book’. Our experience of our story might not start here, but it has to pass this milestone. The Spirit of Christ has many routes to bring us to this place of despair, but we all must pass it. I’d venture to suggest that until we have experienced something like this ‘man’s’ sense of helplessness before the judgement of God, we haven’t really begun to experience the Gospel at its deepest level. Or put another way, until we have experienced the trauma of our sin, we will struggle to enjoy the depth of his grace. As we’ll see on Saturday (at Romansfest) the Christian Gospel as laid out by the Apostles in ‘the book’ begins with the hopelessness of humanity. It begins with the desperation we must feel as we recognise that God’s holiness will not compromise with sin, only destroy it. The City of Destruction is well named. The burden is real. And as far as Bunyan is concerned, until we have recognised it, we haven’t yet started our pilgrimage.

Questions to consider:

In another work (Law and Grace) Bunyan wrote: Sometimes I have been so laiden with my sins, that I could not tell where to rest, nor what to do, yes, at such times I thought it would have taken away my senses’.

Do you have anything in your own experience that resonates with this?

Do you think this is an essential part of Christian experience?

Approaching the Pilgrim's Progress...

As we approach a book like Pilgrim’s Progress, it should be with humility and a prayerful expectancy.

It is - after the Bible itself - probably the book that has outsold every other published Christian book… ever (excluding liturgical books such as the Book of Common Prayer)! It is considered by many scholars as one of the most important books ever written. It has never been out of print, and is currently available in over 200 languages It has been on the ‘must read before I die’ lists of many of the world’s great thinkers and leaders, from Benjamin Franklin to Spurgeon (who claimed to have read it over a hundred times) and C.S.Lewis; with one contemporary scholar at least arguing that it should be required reading ‘for all Christians of all denominations of all ages’.

John Owen, a contemporary of Bunyan, and likely the greatest theologian the English speaking world has ever produced, told Charles II he would gladly give up all his learning if he could preach like Bunyan.

Simply from a literary perspective it signalled the birth of a whole new way of writing, betraying the aesthetic instinct of Biblical Christianity, and its impulse to the development of culture and literature. From a Christian perspective it is one of the most insightful books of pastoral theology at the Church’s disposal. It is saturated in the Bible’s way of thinking, exposes the dynamics of the soul, and lays out the reality of Christian experience so compellingly that it resonates with the disciple of Christ in any age and in any culture. When originally published, the book became an instant best seller, and by his death, Bunyan was preaching to congregations of thousands.

For us it has an added advantage. In writing the foreword to another Christian Classic (On the Incarnation), C.S. Lewis highlights the value of reading books from a different age:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books [or ideas, practices, etc.] that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it ... We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century … lies where we have never suspected it. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.

Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than we are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction…

As we read this classic over the next few weeks, it is worth doing so slowly, prayerfully, and with an anticpation that the Spirit will use a book so packed with Biblical insight and imagery, to help us understand ourselves, our God, our pilgrimage… and to correct and rebuke us where our thinking on such matters is skewed or inadequate. It promises to be an exciting season!

Welcome to the Pilgrim's Progress

The mid-1600s were a tumultuous time to live through. It felt like the world was changing fast, and that no-one was quite sure where it would end up. The English Civil War(s) was a living memory, and the consequences were still being felt through out society. The after-effects of re-instating the Monarchy in 1660 created a political instability that wouldn’t be resolved until the ‘Glorious Revolution’. In the meantime intrigue and uncertainty characeterised the corridors of power. Scotland was agitating for religious and political independence, and Europe was embroiled in war and conflict. It was the era of the Plague, and the captial was slowly rebuilding after the great fire of 1666.

It was a time of incredible cultural upheaval and spiritual uncertainty. There were concerns about the rise of Islam (in the form of the Ottoman Empire and culminating in the Great Turkish War); and Anglican Bishops seemed more concerned with institutional niceties and political influence than with the Gospel. Indeed, the Great Ejection of 1662 had witnessed several thousand evangelical clergy deprived of their livings, and the consequent rise of an ‘underground’ Church in the UK.

As a wise man once said, ‘There is nothing new under the sun…’ (Eccl.1:9).

And what does the Church need from her pastors during such times as these? Well, according to Bunyan, the answer seems to be: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come’ (to give it its full title). Bunyan wrote, rather understatedly: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress is a guide to all heavenward pilgrims; the author furnished with leisure time to write it, by being for many years shut up in prison for refusing to viiolate his conscience’. In 17th Century terms, he was a pastor in the British Underground Church, and had been imprisoned as a result.

We’ll reflect on this more fully as we navigate the narrow path with Christian. But as we start it is worth considering the simple fact that in view of everything that was going on in the 1600s, this is what Bunyan wrote about. To be fair, it wasn’t the only thing he wrote. My edition of ‘The Works of Bunyan’ extends to three volumes, each in excess of 700 pages. Pilgrim’s Progress (both parts and unabridged) covers some 240 such pages at the beginning of Vol.3. It wasn’t even the only allegory he wrote. The Holy War, (in which Diabolus and Shaddai battle for the Town of Mansoul); The Heavenly Footman; The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, all fall in the same genre.

But Pilgrim’s Progress is by far the most enduring and popular of Bunyan’s works. If we are looking for nuance, sophistication and subtlety, we'll be disappointed. We’ll interpret Characters, Places and Events as having at times an almost comical sense of caricature. If we are reading for the sake of being entertained, everything seems too obvious. But if we read this work as those on pilgrimage ourselves, the work takes on a very different feel. We find ourslves in a map, that charts the reality of spiritual experience. If we identify with Christian and his struggles, his triumphs and defeats, his failures and restorations, and his inexorable progress towards the Heavenly City, then we will find this a book that has a great deal to teach us. Over the centuries, many have found this simple work to hold a penetrating diagnostic ability, helping us to make sense of our own expereince as disciples in a world in which nothing seems stable or secure. It becomes autobiographical. In this, Pilgrim’s Progress has few equals.

Bunyan understood that in tumultuous times, his people needed a pastor who would lead them past the shifting shadows of this world, with its uncertainties, its brokeness and struggle. There are deeper issues to grapple with, and higher stakes to play for. Bunyan can never be accused of being detached from life in this world, but he sees clearly that there is more to life than this world. From his cell, he preaches. And in this, his most enduring sermon, he doesn’t settle for political commentary, or an analysis of the economic situation; neither does he engage in polemic, in virtue signalling, or moralising for the nation. He focusses on the greatest adventure of all, the most tumultuous of epic journeys… It is the ultimate Tale of Two Cities, as Christian flees from the City of Destruction to find refuge in Celestial City. It is a road of many dangers and obstacles, a road of struggle, pain and at times, uncertainty. It is a road which we do not travel alone. We will meet many who will help or hinder. It is a road in which we find rest and restoration.

And it is a road we will follow.

Questions to ponder:

Do you think Bunyan is right in what he thinks his people need from their pastor? What do you think the role of your minister is?

Can you think of any passages from the Bible that would help you make sure your expectations of your Church leaders are in line with God’s vision for their roles and responsibilities, rather than simply our own cultural assumptions?