The Pilgrim's Progress

Because Bunyan’s personal experiences impacted his religious beliefs, the work’s authorial and ideological contexts intertwine. Countless familiar Christian views shape The Pilgrim’s Progress, including belief in Jesus Christ’s divinity, heaven, and hell. Bunyan’s Puritan ideology manifests in the simplicity of the journeys. Christian and Christiana don’t require popes or priests; what they need are straightforward Christian values like faith (Faithful), hope (Hopeful), and a good heart (Mr. Great-heart). Puritans thought the Church of England was too Catholic and meddlesome. They didn’t think the government had the right to determine who could preach, and they disapproved of the C of E’s Book of Common Prayer—a text intended to standardize religious worship. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, what makes an honorable Christian isn’t formulaic prayers or deference to church hierarchy but one’s personal relationship with God. As Roger Pooley writes in his introduction the 2008 Penguin Classics edition, “[Bunyan] claimed authority from God, and God’s word in the Bible, which he claimed to discern as well as they [the gentry, including the clergy]” (unpaginated).

Pooley detects aspects of Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin in Bunyan’s ideology. As with Luther, whose Ninety-Five Theses sparked the Protestant Reformation, The Pilgrim’s Progress makes the Bible the main source of wisdom and stresses