Bunyan, Luther, and the Struggle with Belatedness in Grace Abounding

DA YTON HASKIN Bunyan, Luther, and the Struggle with Belatedness in Grace Abounding At many pOints in his autobiography John Bunyan attests to a longstanding worry that, by the time he got religion, 'the day of grace' was 'past and gone: He feared greatly, he says, that 'I came too late, for [others] had got the blessing before I came." It was as if there were not enough grace for him; and he therefore felt a close kinship with Esau, who, although he was to inherit his father's blessing, got there too late and lost it to his brother Jacob.2 In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners Bunyan describes his personal struggles by way of various figures, the most prominent of which is a competition between two biblical texts. Each was competing, as it were, to be deemed the apt deScription of his eternal state - whether damnation or blessedness. The texts, which associate him alternately with Esau and with St Paul, are as follows: 1 Or profane person, as Esau, who for one morse} of meat sold his Birth-right; for you know how that afterwards when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears. (Heb 12:16-17; Grace Abollnding, p 43) 2 My grace is sufficient for thee. (2 Cor 12:9; Grace Abounding, p 65) Although he sometimes felt like a battlefield on which opposing texts fought with one another, or like a rope pulled in opposite directions during a tug-of-war, Bunyan realized that he himself would have to adjudicate between these texts. For in the Calvinist scheme certitude about one's faith on the one hand and the feeling of despair on the other were ultimately their own validation.' The worry about his belatedness forms an essential part of Bunyan's narrative; and it is indicative not only of an obsession about his eternal destiny that he inherited from Calvin but also, more deeply, of the extent of his literary debt to his chief precursor, Martin Luther. GraceAbounding tells how Bunyan dissociated himself from Esau by continuing to read. He studied the relevant texts in Genesis and Hebrews, read more of St Paul, and found great consolation in a text of Luther that had for its epigraph 'My grace is sufficient for thee: He preferred, he relates, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUM.E 50, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1981 0042-0247/81 /°500-0300$01.5010 Cl UNIVERSI1Y OF TORONTO PRESS BUNYAN'S Grace Abounding 301 Luther's Commentarie on the Galathians '(excepting the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I have seen, as most fit for a wounded Conscience' (p 41 ). 4 If the Calvinist dochine of double predestination sent Bunyan on a familiar quest, then, so that he sought to ascertain with'certain knowledge whether [he) had Faith or no' (p 18), he conceived the nature of this quest in terms of a narrative pattern derived from Luther. And, like many of his contemporaries, Bunyan pursued the quest according to a set of hopes raised by Luther's persuasive account of the pattern that a true Christian's life will take. In the Lutheran scheme, to live through anguished experiences of personal turmoil and inward affliction, and to pass through 'the time of the law' into the 'time' ofabundant grace, was to be, finally, on time. Only those whose lives did not ultimately manifest the pattern were too late. In the pages that follow I should like to explore the relationship between Bunyan's autobiography and Luther's Commentarie on the Galathians . I shall first examine some passages in Grace Abounding that help to define what Bunyan understood about his feeling ofbelatedness. Then I shall try to trace the broad outlines of the tradition into which the author of Grace Abounding had entered. I think that it can be shown that Bunyan's sense that he had perhaps arrived too late involves a literary problem as well as a religiOUS one. But the worry about his debt to Luther seems to have aided him in transforming what would otherwise be merely traditional materials...