"As blood is forced out of flesh": Spontaneity and the Wounds of Exchange in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress

Abstract

A full third of Grace Abounding recounts one traumatic experience: a voice coaxing Bunyan for over a year to "Sell him," to sell Christ, "for this or that." Criticism has ignored the economic form of this episode. I argue that in it we see the symptom of an early modern religious subjectivity coming to understand itself in evidentiary, economic terms; "Sell him" marks the incommensurability between economic logic and personal relation. Where criticism has long recognized the relationship between Grace Abounding and Pilgrim's Progress as "creative reworking," I argue that Pilgrim's Progress relieves the particular wounds described in Grace Abounding.

Grace and Favour: Deconstructing Hospitality in <I>The Pilgrim's Progress</I>

“…Such is also the lesson of part II, a sequel accused of being more socially conservative than its predecessor, yet one in which Bunyan attempts to prioritise the stranger at the door above the host. 115 Where part I remains caught within the alienated logic of private ownership, 116 part II, despite its status as a sequel, is set in a mythical golden age of English hospitality, a time when one did not have to knock on the door but could simply walk in. Resisting contemporary political philosophies through pushing the rights of the host, rights grounded in laws of property, to the margins, part II also dilutes the harsher implications of predestinarian theology.…”

Pilgrim’s missionary progress: Contemporary evangelistic adaptations of John Bunyan’s lingering spiritual classic for a post-secular West

“…Read as the narrative version of the spiritual autobiography of an anxious, even tortured Puritan, it offers a vision of internal struggle toward faith and epistemic certainty (Stachiniewski, 1991). This individualism leads to the proliferation of consumerist capitalism (Branch, 2007) and the disenchanted secularism that is engendered by such commodified materialism (Boscaljon, 2013;Crawford, 2017). The idea is that the individual, who sees the world as open to their own self-creation, is alienated from and thus can commodify and sell everything.…”