THE idea that the spirit from which we act is more important than the external form of the action had been essential to protestantism from the start. The orthodox were always having to defend Bunyan’s favourite Luther from the charge of antinomianism. Mere ceremonies mean nothing in religion if they do not express the deepest feelings of the heart. At the day of judgment, Bunyan said, ‘it is the principle as well as the practice that shall be enquired into, … whether the spirit from which you acted was legal or evangelical.’ Works therefore are valid only if done from faith. This was a reason for rejecting set forms of prayer. Without the Spirit, ‘though we had a thousand Common-Prayer-Books, yet we know not what we should pray for as we ought.’ One of the ‘dying sayings’ attributed to Bunyan was, ‘When thou prayest, rather let thy heart be without words than thy words without a heart.’ Popish ceremonies—penance, pilgrimages, flagellation, sackcloth, confession, indulgences—all arise from a slavish fear of God induced by priestcraft: the doctrine of justification by faith banishes this fear, and with it these ceremonies.2
Sometimes Bunyan expressed this rather slackly:
Sincerity! Grace is thereto entailed,
The man that was sincere, God never failed.
‘He is already a bad man that doth bad deeds’, proclaimed Mr. Wiseman in Mr. Badman. The essential basis for commercial morality was the spirit in which transactions were conducted. ‘Every true Christian’, Lewis Bayly had written, ‘as soon as he is regenerate begins to keep all God’s commandments in truth, though he cannot in absolute perfection.’3
Antinomianism was always potentially present in predestinarian theologies, as critics like Fowler did not fail to point out. Bunyan and his like rejected what they saw as the spiritual pride of those who believed they could be saved by their works; but they were in danger of slipping into the equally arrogant belief that the godly cannot sin. In the liberty of the 1640s many drew antinomian conclusions from the doctrine of justification by Christ’s imputed righteousness. The word ‘antinomian’ indeed dates from that decade. Bunyan’s friend George Cokayne wrote a preface for the posthumous Christ Alone Exalted of Tobias Crisp, the well-known antinomian whose father-in-law, Colonel Rowland Wilson, was a prominent member of Cokayne’s church. ‘In way of condition of the covenant’, declared Crisp, ‘you must do nothing’. ‘Under Dr. Crisp’s doctrine’ Lawrence Clarkson was influenced towards the ‘sect’ of antinomians. But he was even more impressed by Paul Hobson.4 Baxter said that Hobson was one of those responsible for spreading antinomianism in the New Model Army. Like Bunyan later, Hobson ‘was once as legal as any of you can be.… But I am persuaded that when I used all these duties, I had not one jot of God in me.’ Hobson believed that saints ‘are admitted and have some entrance into heaven here; they live as saints,… they trade as saints.’ John Owen in 1653 wrote a Preface recommending the antinomian William Eyre’s Justification without Conditions.5
Bunyan knew that his theology tended towards antinomianism. He gave hostages to fortune. In Law and Grace he described a new law—an idea popular with antinomian radicals. Traditionalists thought there was only one law, and that the old one. It was Gerrard Winstanley who had published a treatise called The New Law of Righteousness in 1649. Bunyan, like Milton, stressed the liberation of the elect, in a way that verged on antinomianism. But unlike Clarkson and Ranters, Bunyan knew that liberated saints would want to maintain monogamous marriage and the work ethic. They could not possibly let consciousness of election open the doors to antinomian immorality. It was always a theoretical danger; but in practice the argument could be used only by those—Ranters—who were manifestly not godly.
Hence the apparent danger from Quakers, who appeared godly but seemed too uncritical in their reliance on the inner light: as Quakers themselves came to see after the Nayler case, after Perrot, after the Story-Wilkinson separation. Henceforward they differentiated themselves more sharply from Ranterism, established the peace principle and withdrawal from political activity, restored emphasis on sin and on the authority of the Bible, abandoned eccentricities like going naked for a sign. They approached normal sectarian behaviour, modified only by greater unwillingness to compromise on shared principles. In the 1650s they had been carried away by the intellectual release of being able to rely on the inner light, as well as by the apparent millennial possibilities. The test, for them as for Bunyan, as for Milton, came ultimately to be the preservation or not of the authority of the Bible. Bunyan emphasized the Law and the historical Jesus against what he saw as the anarchy of the inner light, which had tempted him in his youth. Quakers sobered down as their leaders aged; restoration persecution and the failure of the millennium to arrive forced discipline on them if they were to survive.
‘All the power of God cannot shake anything that hath been done for us by the Mediator of the New Covenant’, declared Bunyan. ‘No sin is to be charged’ against us. ‘Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free, and be not again intangled (nor terrified in your consciences) with the yoke of bondage.’ To the objection ‘then one need not care what they do, they may sin and sin again’, Bunyan initially tried to avoid answering, but finally replied, rather testily, ‘They that are in Jesus Christ are so far off from delighting in sin, that sin is the greatest thing that troubleth them …’ ‘The Covenant … doth allow of repentance, in case thou chance to slip or fall by sudden temptation.’ ‘Set the case thou hast committed abundance of treason, he hath by him abundance of pardons.’ The greatest sinner can ‘roll upon free grace’.6 Later Bunyan wrote ‘election is absolute, not conditional, and therefore cannot be overthrown by the sin of the man that is wrapt up therein.… No sin in us shall frustrate or make election void.’ So concerned was Bunyan with the freedom of the elect and the dangers of legalism that he declared that sin
will make a law, where God has made man free,
And break those laws, by which men bounded be.
‘Repent, believe and love’ was still Bunyan’s message in 1688.7
In 1674 Bunyan referred to ‘those aspersions that the adversaries cast upon our doctrine, … that because we preach justification without the works of the Law, therefore they pretend we plead for looseness of life.’ In the posthumous The Jerusalem Sinner Bunyan admitted again that ‘the world, when they hear the doctrine that I have asserted,… that Jesus Christ would have mercy offered in the first place to the biggest sinners, will be apt, because themselves are unbelievers, to think this is a doctrine that leads to looseness and that gives liberty to the flesh.’ Historically the critics had some justification. Tobias Crisp also held that the elect were saved from all eternity and so their salvation was totally unconditional. ‘As soon as [a believer] hath committed this sin’, he wrote, ‘the Lamb of God … hath already taken away this very sin.’ Coppe and Clarkson used this doctrine to justify libertinism.8
Though aware of the problem, Bunyan, like Crisp, Milton, and other antinomians, found it difficult to give an answer which would convince doubters—no doubt ‘themselves unbelievers’. ‘They surely did never come to God by Christ’, he said in one attempt, ‘that will from the freeness of Gospel grace plead an indulgence for sin.’ Although antinomianism ‘is a doctrine tending to looseness and lasciviousness, … the doctrine of free grace believed is the most sin-killing doctrine in the world’, Bunyan asserted. It may well have been awareness that his own doctrines tended towards antinomianism that made Bunyan so anxious to dissociate himself from Ranters. ‘Thy desires are only good’, he told believers, ‘for that thou hast desired against thy sin, thy sinful self, which indeed is not thyself but sin that dwells in thee.’ It is rather unfortunate that this precise phrase had become notorious from its alleged use by a servant girl who denied any responsibility for stealing because ‘it was sin in her’, as well as by the near Ranter, Robert Norwood.9
Bunyan was concerned above all with ‘the great cheat that the devil and Antichrist delude the world withal, … to make them continue in the form of any duty, the form of preaching, of hearing, of praying, etc.’, accepting the form of godliness but denying the power. Holiness and liberty should be joined together, he argued in 1684: liberty to do good must not be resisted.10 Antinomianism flourished in the revolutionary decades, fostered by the millenarian hope. Hobson, Dell, Denne, and Milton flirted with it, as well as Cokayne and Bunyan. But as the reign of Christ came to seem less imminent, so men expressed their antinomianism more cautiously.
Fowler (or his curate) asserted that the object of The Design of Christianity had been ‘to root out the doctrine of antinomianism’. He must have annoyed Bunyan very much by saying that he was ‘as rank and Ranting an antinomian as ever fouled paper’. ‘This monstrous piece of impertinence saith that the saints on earth are as perfectly holy as Christ himself.’ He attributed to Bunyan the view that ‘he that hath but confidence enough strongly to believe (though he hath no more reason to do so than because he believes so) that his sins are forgiven, hath justifying faith.’ ‘Can any Ranter talk at a madder rate?… How sottish is this Ranter!’ Baxter, whom Fowler quoted with approbation, attacked Law and Grace as antinomian.11
One great objection to antinomianism was its appeal to the lower classes—servant girls, for instance. Richard Sibbes in 1639 called it ‘an error crept in amongst some of the meaner, ignorant sort of people.’ Similar points were made about antinomianism in New England in the 1630s, in old England in the 1640s. Baxter observed that ‘the vulgar sort are attracted to antinomianism, not the learned’, who tended towards Arminianism. Antinomianism is ‘so easy a way, which flesh and blood hath so little against, as being too consistent with men’s carnal interest.’ The antinomian doctrines coincided ‘in almost every point’ with what is ‘naturally fastened in the hearts of the common profane multitude.’ ‘God doth not say, I love you if you be holy, but I love you to make you holy’, wrote Hobson in 1640.12
It may be that the millenarian hope, so powerful in the 1640s and early 1650s, pushed believers either towards free grace and antinomianism, or to the God within, the God of Winstanley, Ranters, Quakers. Rejecting the Quakers’ God within, Bunyan had difficulty in avoiding antinomianism; and the dilemma remained with him. Increasingly—as in The Holy War—he saw the millennium as something that would come from outside, from Emanuel’s conquest, from kings and rulers. That had not really been the message of The Pilgrim’s Progress. But Bunyan also rejected Winstanley’s conviction that humanity must save itself, without relying on the vicarious sacrifice made by an external Saviour from above the sky. So he was forced into a harsh determinism, a ‘waiting millenarianism’ without a timetable.
Ultimately the hopes of those who had turned from Levellers to the Army Grandees on political realist grounds withered. Milton too appears to have come to expect liberation from outside, as in Samson Agonistes. Individual heroism might contribute to its coming, but the people who stood outside the temple were spared by miracle, through no merits of their own.