Sinners and “Standers By:” Reading the Characters of Calvinism in The Pilgrim’s Progress

This essay shows how Bunyan’s adherence to Calvinist theology and Congregational ecclesiology shapes his method of characterization in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan reorients the celebrated Puritan introspective gaze toward the social world and emphasizes the intellectual agency of “standers by,” members of the gathered church tasked with reading the spiritual condition of other professed believers. Attending to the perspectival shift—from self to other—demanded by Bunyan’s ecclesiology clarifies the Calvinist inheritance of the novel: a model of literary character in which surfaces rather than interiors are the source of complexity.