240 Bunyan, John
Guilt in The Pilgrim’s Progress
One of the most commanding images of the open-
ing pages of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
is the figure of Christian, the pilgrim, being bent
almost double by the large sack he must carry on
his back. This is the sack of his sins, and the weight
that presses down on Christian is the guilt he has
before the one against whom he has sinned (God).
Two of the Bible references relating to the sack in
the first paragraph of The Pilgrim’s Progress speak of
the debilitating effect of this weight: Psalms 38:4
speaks of an overwhelming guilt that is too heavy to
bear, while Isaiah 64:6 paints a picture of the guilty
sinner shriveled like a leaf and being mercilessly
blown by the wind.
It is no surprise that Bunyan emphasizes the
image of guilt at the beginning of his allegory, for in
his eyes a growing sense of one’s guilt before a holy
God is the first sign that the soul is being drawn
toward God in a good way, a way that leads to for-
giveness. Among other things, Bunyan’s interpreta-
tion of the Bible would lead him to say that God’s
standard for a human’s way of living is absolute—
that is, it reaches and obtains to all humanity—and
that no one can meet this standard. Thus, all have
fallen short of God’s standard, and all human acts
of supposed righteousness are really like filthy rags
(Isaiah 64:6). Bunyan would say that if people do
not realize this, then it is because they are blinded to
this truth by their own sinful nature—that they are
dead to spiritual things and thus cannot respond to
any sort of outside human admonition against their
sins, just as a dead person lying in a casket cannot
respond to someone’s call for him or her to get up.
Bunyan’s theology holds that if someone does
begin to sense the guilt and does begin to associate
this guilt with his or her faulty standing before God,
then this is evidence that God’s miraculous power
has been at work in that person’s heart, bringing
a new life to it and a new orientation toward the
things of God. The conversion process is not com-
plete with this, however. The awakening sinner must
next come to a genuine knowledge of why the wrath
of God is upon him. Bunyan signals this continual
awakening by continually increasing the burden
on Christian’s back as Christian endeavors to find
the narrow gate and to stay on the right path. This
would be the reason Christian’s burden is still on his
back even after he has read (and believed) the Bible
about God’s coming judgment against the sins of
this world, has met the Evangelist and by him has
been put on the narrow path, and has received more
biblical insight at the house of the Interpreter.
It is only some way into The Pilgrim’s Progress
that Bunyan releases the burden from Christian’s
back by having him come face to face with the bare
cross. The cross symbolizes Christian’s personal
apprehension of what Christ did on the cross to
appease God’s wrath against the sins of human-
ity. When he accepts Christ’s sacrifice, his pack of
sins rolls off his back and into the empty tomb by
the side of the hill on which the cross stands. It is
important to remember, however, that this does not
mean that Christian is not perfect, without the ten-
dency to sin. This means only that the official judg-
ment of God against Christian has been removed on
account of Christ’s work. Thus, Christian is given
a new object to carry, a roll, which is fashioned by
Bunyan to closely resemble the legal charters of the
day, sustaining and obliging the fulfillment of a legal
promise or proclamation, in order to have proof that
he has been “legally” freed from the consequences
of his sin.
This means that although Christian loses the
legal consequence for his sins, he does not lose the
ability to sin or the ability to feel the emotional
result of sin—guilt. So, periodically throughout the
allegory, Christian will be buffeted with this feel-
ing, and he will reach for the roll or will engage his
companion in godly talk of justification in order
to comfort himself. This strange predicament (of
being beyond sin’s legal reach but not beyond its
emotional effects) is the story of every true pil-
grim whom Christian meets, and the predicament
remains in place even until the very gates of the
Celestial City. For as Christian crosses the river to
reach the heavenly shore, he has one last, profound
encounter with his guilt, which is figured in this
scene as overwhelming waves, and here he almost
loses the whole journey by succumbing to the sense
of his sin. Yet a way out for Christian is found, and,
true to form, Bunyan has this way be Christ himself,
coming to Christian in the river in the form of a
vision mediated by Bunyan’s memory of the Psalms.