Graceful Reading

Abstract Bunyan’s theology is not obsessed with a forbidding Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Rather, his is a comfortable doctrine, in which the believer is encouraged to accept salvation through the more accommodating terms of Bunyan’s covenant theology. Bunyan’s narrative style is informed by this doctrine, and his major works (with particular focus on Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress) reveal a profound sensitivity to narrative and reading practices, with reading itself instrumental to spiritual instruction. The ‘graceful reading’ of the book’s title thus encompasses a Bunyan for whom grace rather than predestination is most important, as well as a Bunyan whose narrative style tests the reader by presenting narratives that must be read for something other than ‘story’ alone. As commentators tend to divorce the ‘literary’ aspects of Bunyan’s works from their Calvinism, this book suggests a more constructive way of reading his narrative and doctrinal writings, by integrating literary interpretation with their theology and by viewing them in the context of late seventeenth-century Nonconformist culture, as well as against the narrative strategies of postmodernist fiction.