About ten days ago blogger Tim Challies asked on Facebook, "Can I be a true Christian and still admit that I really dislike Pilgrim's Progress?" To date, 55 of his Facebook friends have answered, all in good humour, that he is assuredly a Christian even though Bunyan's classic fails to resonate with him. Right around that time I read the following on Richard Mouw's thoughts on Bunyan's magnum opus from When the Kings Come Marching In as summarized by Tim Chester in his book Mission and the Coming of God:
Mouw concludes When the Kings Come Marching In with a reflection on Hebrews 13:14 and John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress. Bunyan's vision of the Celestial City, and the pilgrimage towards it, has proved an inspiration to generations of Christians. Mouw acknowledges that Bunyan's portrayal of the Christian life is very individualistic. Although Bunyan's vision is not wrong, it is, argues Mouw, incomplete.
When the Christian life is viewed as a-lonely-journey-through-a-hostile-world, it is difficult to find a context for thinking about economic injustice or racial discrimination.
Nevertheless, Mouw argues that we should not ditch Bunyan for two reasons. First, the pietistic perspective, despite its defects, is an important one. Second, many of the alternatives prove inadequate because they fail to ground the vision of the Christian life, as Bunyan does, in the individual's experience of God's preserving mercies. Bunyan begins in the right place, in a piety expressed as a commitment to holiness, to obedience to God's word, to following Jesus. The question is, What does the word of God say? What does following Jesus involve? What are the political consequences of such commitment? In other words, Mouw wants to harness this piety, a piety already shaped by the vision of the Celestial City, and shape it by the vision of the City in its political dimensions so that it expresses the full range of what it means to be a Christian disciple.
