Show how the Christian Puritan
spirit is manifest in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Any comprehensive reading of The Pilgrim's Progress requires an extensive understanding of the religious framework within which John Bunyan was writing. Generally speaking, Bunyan fits into the group of people that are now commonly referred to as Puritans. In Bunyan's time, however, 'Puritan' was a somewhat ambiguous term that incorporated Baptists and Quakers, Ranters and other dissenters. While they shared a common goal of "purifying" the Church of what they saw as excess and materialism, there are many subtle differences between these religions' theologies, methods, and relations to authority. Bunyan did not necessarily chose to label himself, but Greaves observes that he likely could have been described as an open-membership, open-communion Baptist (19).
Generally speaking, whatever their particular differences, all Puritan theology owes a great debt to the work of Martin Luther and John Calvin, two of the most influential theologians during the continental Reformation. Bunyan draws heavily from both Luther and Calvin's ideas, and their influence is palpable in The Pilgrim's Progress. One of the hallmarks of Reformation theology is that it articulates a system of justification by faith alone, as opposed to justification by good works, as the Catholic Church once encouraged. For Luther, faith in God and the gift of God's freely given grace erased the sins of humanity, rather than good works or indulgences issued by the Church. Though Calvin is famous for his very strongly articulated doctrine of predestination, which states that God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned, Luther's theology can also be considered to be predestinarian, albeit more generous than Calvin's definition. The question of election aside, both maintained that humanity had wholly fallen, and redemption was only possible through faith and God's grace, which was made manifest in the Crucifixion, and continues to be bestowed on sinners. Realizing and living these ideals is at the heart of the Puritan religious experience, and "the essence of Puritanism...is an experience of conversion which separates the Puritan from the mass of mankind and endows him with the privileges and duties of the elect. The root of the matter is always a new birth, which brings with it a conviction of salvation and a dedication to warfare against sin" (Swaim 8). Any sense of entitlement that accompanied being God's elect was tempered with an inordinate sense of duty which lent a tone of serious conviction to the daily life of the Puritan, which centered largely around scripture.
