The Progression of Grace: A Re-Reading of Pilgrim's Progress

This is a very personal article about the evolution of my learning affair with John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. On first meeting as a seventeen year old fresh out of the Missouri Ozarks I got nowhere with this "classic." Curiously help came not from a fellow Baptist pilgrim but from Thomas Merton. A visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1960 inspired me to teach a course in Classics of Christian Devotion at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Preparing to teach The Pilgrim's Progress led me to Bunyan's spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, where I was able to discover the rich Puritan stream of spirituality which sprang from the catholic mainstream and flowed into the Bunyan story. In the meantime, concurrent loss of hearing and loss of voice early in my teaching career enabled me to identify with Bunyan's experience of grace as a vulnerable God's gift of Godself in human vulnerability in ways never possible simply as a reader of classics.