John Bunyan

Résumé du livre

The heritage of the Puritan-sectarian tradition to Anglo-American civilization is a significant one. From that tradition have come progressive principles in support of education, liberty, democracy, and social concern. Those principles were thoroughly grounded in the religious convictions of those who compromised this tradition. Indeed, the religious beliefs themselves have been widely embraced by subsequent generations of English Nonconformists, and by the spiritual followers of the Puritans of New England and the pioneering migrants who spread out to settle the American wilderness. This book is a study of the thought of one of those men- a Bedfordshire tinker with the version of Paul, the conviction of Luther, and the commitment to freedom of Milton. John Bunyan, whose life spanned that tumultuous period of England history extending from the petition of Right of 1628 to the Glorious revolution of 1688, was not a university graduate; but the fervour of his preaching and the warmth of his personality brought him a wider following than that attained by nearly all of his university-trained contemporaries His theology cut through the impersonal, scholastic mold commonly imposed on English Calvinism in the seventeenth century, until its core was a living vibrant awareness of divine grace. The ability to communicate that living awareness to others made Bunyan immensely successful as a preacher to the common man. Bunyan himself, as this study demonstrates advocated by the strict Calvinists. Unlike most English writers of the seventeenth century, however, he was definitely indebted to the writings of Martin Luther for various emphases in his thought. Such emphases tended to give his own thought something of a hybrid character was significant: Luther's influence gave to his writing and preaching a more personal appeal that would have been the case had he relied solely on the more logic-bound orthodox Calvinism." Richarch L. Greaves.