Living Words: Iconoclasm and Beyond in John Bunyan's Grace Abounding

Every Forme, a persecutor, but the spirit free from persecuting any.

—Abiezer Coppe, Some Sweet Sips
of Spirituall Wine (1649)

I. Protestant Iconoclasm and the Bible

Beginning with Luther, Protestants asserted scriptural authority in opposition to traditional ecclesiastical authority. Standing on what John Bunyan called the "plain and simple words" of the Bible, ¹ they waged war on all forms of idolatry or so-called popish superstition. The principle of textual authority was a primary instrument of Protestant iconoclasm, the destruction of idolatrous forms: not only religious images but also traditional rituals and hierarchies were called into question by "the Living Word" of Scripture, miraculously preserved through the centuries and liberated finally by translation into the ver-nacular and by the printing press. At his trial for preaching to an illegal conventicle, John Bunyan refused the "Common Prayer-book" because "I did not find it commanded in the Word of God" (AR 114). (In New England John Cotton also rejected The Book of Common Prayer after "serious meditation" on "the second commandment.") ² "The Common Prayer-book," Bunyan claimed, "was such as was made by other men, and not by the motions of the Holy Ghost, within our hearts" (AR 114). His active refusal to attend "divine service" was viewed as seditious and worthy of imprisonment by the English legal authorities during the Restoration.

Although rhetorically grounded on textual authority, Protestant iconoclasm had a pronounced habit of slipping into self-contradiction. The problem with iconoclasm is that it has no logical stopping point. Once the iconoclastic critique of form is extended to the products of the imagination (as it is with Calvin), ³ or even to the external forms of a godly life in this world (spiritual pride or "the white devil," in Luther's phrase), ⁴ then any and all forms become problematic. Ultimately, pure and godly religion can never be pure and godly enough. For Calvin and his Puritan heirs, ⁵ although the biblical word was consistently asserted as an absolute authority in all religious matters, the problem of idolatry extended even to the word. In conformity to Paul's dictum that "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3.6), ⁶ Puritans insisted that a "historical knowledge" of the Gospel was totally inadequate for salvation. The logic of iconoclasm implied that the bare or literal word was simply another empty formalism; the "letter" required the action of the spirit in order to convey a saving knowledge of the Gospel. "[Without] knowing what it is to be born again, and as having experience, . . . all [Scripture]," according to Bunyan, "is but babbling" (AR 115). An experiential knowledge of the word was commonly described with organic metaphors of life and growth: "the Word of God," Calvin writes, "is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart" (I 3.2.36).

The distrust of empty formalism as another form of idolatry thus created one of the great ironies of Reformation theology: although Calvin strictly prohibited all religious images (I 1.10.2-1.12.3), subordinating them to the preaching of the word, Calvin himself typically resorted to figurative language for describing "the Living Word." The imperatives of iconoclasm seemingly made the turn to imagistic language necessary. But while Calvin used metaphors of sense-perception or organic growth to describe the reception of the word, John Bunyan, in his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), often employed metaphors of violence and destruction: "But this Scripture would strike me down, as dead, Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more: Death hath no more dominion over him, Rom. 6. 9." ⁷ Paradoxically, the biblical word was the agent for an experience that could not be communicated in words; the word had to be received as a message to the heart from...