Reviews
Timeless and relevant for believers in any age as both a universal allegory for the Christian faith and a beautiful product of the best parts of Bunyan's era of Christianity. Will be rereading in the future, multiple times, in order to keep gleaning truth.
Phenomenal! Every chapter of this book does a tremendous job of creating a literary image of the truths of scripture as experienced in everyday life. I found myself constantly going back a re-reading portions because it was so profound or insightful. I read this book as a young teen, but it was so much better as an adult. As a Christian that was born and raised in America, I honestly feel like our culture is depicted accurately in the book as Vanity Fair, and to go even farther, I would add that I believe much of mainstream American Christian churches are full of the characters depicted in this book that believe they are on the way to the narrow gate, but are gravely mistaken. I'll be coming back to read this book again very soon.
"The Pilgrim's Progress" is weird and fascinating. The underlying idea that Christian, the pilgrim, has to learn to read the world like an allegory, is really exciting and comes through in a lot surprisingly satisfying ways. About 2/3rds of the way through the First Part, Bunyan hits his stride and starts going OFF on countless subtle varieties of religious poseurs, and I've never felt so bad for poseurs in my whole life, the way he's wailing on them. But so there's two parts, right? The Second Part was published 6 years after the first, and honestly I think it's probably a good idea to wait six years after reading the first part to go at the second. It gets rather fatiguing to do them back-to-back, as the Second Part is kinda the definition of "rehash." This particular Barnes & Noble edition has a lot of very, very useful historical and contextual information-- including some fabulous stuff about the English Civil War--- and I'd highly recommend having some of that before you begin your own "Pilgrimage"!!!
I can understand why this book was popular in its time (seventeenth century) as it is probably one of the most interesting religious texts of the period. But reading it from a modern perspective, I was bored silly by its complete lack of subtlety. You know exactly what the characters will do and say before they speak, because they are named "Ignorance" and "Charity" and "Mr Worldly Wiseman". I was also discouraged (though not surprised) by Bunyan's dogmatic approach to being "saved". Apparently the only way to Heaven is to be completely evil (because we all are), realise you're evil, discover Jesus and then stick to his teachings, even if this actually means being a lousy human being (which, ironically, seems to be the opposite of Jesus's message and the way he lived his life). I am glad to be done with this book.
For any intelligent human being who have realized the logical flaws in Christianity as a whole, this piece of garbage is very obviously as hypocritical and favoritism-based as the religion it is based on. Yes, because Ignorance really wants to be a good guy but he doesn't know how to word it properly, he deserves to suffer for THE REST OF ETERNITY. This book makes me ashamed that human beings were ever this stupid and evil minded.
