The Pilgrim’s Progress 241To the very end, it is Christian’s belief in God’s
promises that enables him to finally turn his own
back on his guilt.
Matthew Horn
individual and sOciety in The Pilgrim’s
Progress
Protestantism, or at least John Bunyan’s version of it,
places so much emphasis on the idea that the core
truths of Christianity must be embraced individu-
ally by individuals that an outside observer might
be tempted to say Protestantism has no real concern
for the unity and well-being of human society as a
whole. This view would be mistaken, for Protestant-
ism does not reject human society—but it does not
accept it wholesale, either. Rather, it divides human
society into two groups and positions the individual
believer in relation to these groups. One group is
constituted of people who know and accept the
biblical tenets of Christ’s death, burial, and resur-
rection; the other of people who either do not know
these beliefs or, if they do know them, do not accept
them. The individual believer exists within the
group of other like-minded believers and engages in
edifying and encouraging the “family of God.” On
the other hand, he or she exists outside of but up
against the group of nonbelievers, and to this group
the believer’s responsibility is one of evangelizing.
In John Bunyan’s England, Protestantism’s ten-
dency to divide society into smaller groups of the
spiritual “haves” versus the “have-nots” was even
more clearly felt and accepted, especially among
those who had espoused some sort of Calvinism.
There are various versions of this particular brand of
Protestantism, but all of them, if they can be loosely
labeled as Calvinistic, held that God had pre-chosen
(“predestined”) all those who will eventually be
converted to Christianity. According to this view,
these people are the elect, and their numbers are few.
They themselves do not even know whether they
are elected until they have a salvation experience
and begin to produce acts of righteousness. Even
then, only God knows whether their conversion
is genuine, for it is certainly possible for people to
fake a conversion experience. Besides the elect, all
others are the nonelect. These form the larger of the
two groups by far, and they will eventually become
enemies of God. The only true test that reveals a
person’s status is in how a person is accepted in
the world to come: The elect will invariably be
welcomed into heaven, and the nonelect will be
punished eternally in hell. A corollary to this is
that the current natural world is simply a proving
ground, a place of incubation existing solely to help a
person mature toward his or her genuine, permanent
spiritual identity, be it for God or against God. The
world exists as nothing more; in itself it is barren,
temporary, fading. Bunyan, in the first nine words
of his work, brings this point powerfully home: “As
I walked through the wilderness of this world,.. .”
There is no real doubt that Bunyan the preacher
embraced a sort of mitigated Calvinism. This means
that his character Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress
would see his current society as necessarily compris-
ing mostly the alien nonelect, even if this was not
apparent from people’s outward behavior. Thus,
Christian starts off realizing that his former place in
his preconversion society has been closed off to him:
he no longer feels a part of the City of Destruction,
and his wife, children, and neighbors do not want his
company. Moreover, as he moves away from his for-
mer society in search of his new one, the promised
Celestial City, he remains suspicious of and aloof
from all whom he meets on the way before he can
ascertain whether or not he has enough grounds to
consider them part of the elect—in other words, part
of his new, and infinitely better, society. This is the
reason he will separate himself from his cotravelers
so often, either by remaining on the straight path
as they deviate (such as the characters Obstinate
and Pliable, who both give up the path and return
to the doomed society of the city as Christian con-
tinues on) or by maintaining an unsociable distance
between himself and them while they both travel on
the same path (such as the characters Formalist and
Hypocrisy, whom Christian meets after he leaves the
Interpreter’s house). Of course, Christian does meet
those whom he accepts as genuine friends; Faithful
and Hopeful both enjoy his comfort, companion-
ship, and encouragement. It is to be understood that
Faithful would have stayed with Christian until their
entrance into the Celestial City but for his martyr-
dom, and Hopeful, who almost immediately takes