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New Life Fine Arts presents...

All the exciting music from the "Celestial City" performances is available on audio cassette.

Audio Cassette Available: $5.00

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Listen to samples from "Celestial City" cassette below:

Make Your Way

Someday (Heaven)

Perhaps You're a Pilgrim?

Mail Order Cassette or Attach PDF with an email to info@newlifefinearts.org

“Celestial City” tells John Bunyan’s imaginative quest story, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, within the context of events in his own life that inspired much of the allegory.

Whereas “The Pilgrim’s Progress” is indeed Bunyan’s story, it is also our story. Many have found it to be a proven map for their own spiritual pilgrimage.

Born in 1628 in Elstow, Bedfordshire, Bunyan was the son of a brazier, a traveling tinker. He was not privileged with any more formal education than what was provided by his local grammar school, but his alert mind and vivid imagination absorbed the popular language, thought and experience of his generation. His many years as a prisoner of conscience enabled him to both reflect upon and write about “the journey of life”.

In his teen-age years Bunyan became very sensitive to the turbulence in the external world in which he lived and the internal world of his own soul. He struggled both for peace with God and himself. He grew up in a period of immense political and spiritual unrest. The dissatisfaction with the monarchy of Charles I led to Civil War between the King and Parliament and the subsequent capture and execution of the King. This led to the establishment of a Commonwealth under the rule of a Commoner, Oliver Cromwell. At the age of 16, Bunyan was called to serve in the parliamentary army. Just prior to this, his personal life had gone through sudden trauma, with the death of his mother, his sister a month later, and then within three months the all too quick remarriage of his father. He was not unhappy to leave home at this time.

During the siege of Leicester a comrade took his place in battle and was killed. This made a deep impression upon Bunyan. Later he felt that his life had been providentially preserved for a particular purpose.

His three years in military service exposed John Bunyan to the preaching captains of Cromwell’s army, the Quakers, Seekers and Ranters who questioned all authority but that of the individual conscience. Established ideas were called into question. “Is there a God?” “Should there be a State Church?” “How can the church be restored to its original purpose and purity?” “What kind of society should we aspire to?” “Should wealth be equally distributed?” This kind of vigorous discussion, in addition to his acquaintance with Puritan thought, provided a great education for Bunyan.

Shortly after his discharge from the army in 1647, Bunyan met his first wife-to-be, Mary. Her father was a preacher who was persecuted by Archbishop Laud because he refused to wear vestments or put up an altar rail. He wrote a book entitled, “The Mask Unveiled” and had his ears cut off and his nose slit before being cast into jail. He died there of jail fever and his daughter was thrown out to starve. John met her in this state. During their marriage he learned more of Mary’s father and he gained the ambition to be like him. This proved to be difficult, as Bunyan had no inner conviction or spiritual life with which to pursue this ideal. Perhaps this is represented by his fictitious Pilgrim’s detour to the Town of Morality and Civility only to be overwhelmed with the Mountain of death.

Bunyan witnessed the hardship of those who did not wholly submit to the state church. He had seen his aunt’s house stripped because she went to a funeral of a man excommunicated for not paying a church rate. Another aunt had a skillet of milk taken by the bishop’s men who broke into her home.

According to his autobiography, “Grace Abounding”, John and his wife (we assume her name was Mary), “came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much house-hold stuff as a dish or spoon between us both.” Mary brought as part of her dowry two evangelical books, Arthur Dent’s “The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven” and Lewis Bayly’s “The Practice of Piety”. Their first child, Mary, was born blind. Three more children were born to his first wife before her death in 1658: Elizabeth, John and Thomas.

John had no real interest in reading Scripture until he was married. Until then he saw himself as a ring leader among the unruly men of the village and was known for his love of sport, free use of language, sometimes blasphemous and rude. Through his exposure to the teaching of the Bible, Bunyan began to feel the pricks of his own conscience which seemed to plead the question “Will you leave your sin and go to heaven, or will you have your sins and go to hell?

In Bedford he overheard three or four women speak with great joy of their personal relationship with God (The Sisters of Virtue in The Pilgrim’s Progress). This was a contrast to the hopeless condemnation he felt, despite his efforts of reformation, under the Law of God. His encounter with the genuineness of these women and their experience of God’s grace, led him to an association with a Separatist congregation (the Palace Beautiful) and their pastor, John Gifford (Evangelist).

While walking in a field, he fell upon the sentence in his soul, “Thy righteousness is in Heaven, John!” He realized that God was not demanding righteous performance from him, because the righteousness He required was in his Son, Jesus standing risen and ascended before him at His right hand. “I also saw that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, today and forever.”

The Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 brought an end to the 20 years in which Dissenters, including both Puritans (those who wished to reform the church from within) and Pilgrims (those who sought restoration outside the organization of the State Church, in local congregations) had enjoyed greater freedom of worship and some influence in government. On November 12, 1660 Bunyan was arrested while preaching in Lower Samsell, in South Bedfordshire.

Bunyan remarried after his first wife’s death and prior to his arrest. His second wife, Elizabeth was a woman of great courage who consistently challenged the injustice of her husband’s jail sentence and boldly labored for his release. Despite her noble efforts, which included a trip to Parliament, Bunyan was imprisoned for 12 years. This was the equivalent of a death sentence considering the unsanitary conditions of English prisons at the time. He relieved some of Elizabeth’s hardship and kept his family from destitution by making long tagged bootlaces while in prison.

John Bunyan was extremely resourceful and creative in prison. He whittled a broken leg from his prison stool into a flute. He wrote nine books there. He ministered to his fellow prisoners, bringing both his fellow captives and captors to a relationship of faith in Christ. Jailers sometimes permitted him to escape to visit friends, family and conduct meetings. One jailer reported that Bunyan woke him up one evening and insisted that he be let back into jail. Shortly after this, the governor of the prison made his inspection rounds and was relieved to know that Bunyan was safe behind bars. That jailer began to trust Bunyan’s judgement for coming and going better than his own!

His creative fever ultimately led to his crowning literary achievement at the end of his imprisonment. It was as if all the conflicting desires within his soul, the swirling ideals and memories in his mind, and the genuine faith found in his heart were projected outwards in the form of an allegorical journey to heaven full of characters of every type, titled “The Pilgrim’s Progress”.

The hero, much like Bunyan, is troubled by a world of meaningless selfishness and flees the City of Destruction towards the Celestial City across a landscape set with snares including the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, the Mountain of Death, Vanity Fair, the Castle Doubting, By-pass Meadows and places of refuge and refreshment such as the House of the Interpreter, the Palace Beautiful, and the Delectable Mountains.

Bunyan is released from prison through the efforts of men like the distinguished John Owen, former chaplain to Cromwell. He is immediately invited to pastor the congregation in Bedford.

When released from the Beford Jail he had 10 years of ministry. Men like John Wildman of the Beford congregation sought to scandalize his name. Bunyan preached under continued threats of imprisonment.

“The Pilgrim’s Progress” was published in 1678 and enjoys immediate success. The images of the City of Destruction are made credible with the fresh memory of the 1666 Great Fire of London. The lively writing makes the memorable characters accessible to both the rich and poor.

It is the success of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” that causes John Bunyan to became an itinerant preacher and ultimately that leads to his dying act of reconciling a father to his son. Judge William Beecher, according to J.J. Ellis’ biography of Bunyan, was one of the judges responsible for Bunyan’s imprisonment. “Old Sir William Beecher had taken sore offense at his only son, who had of late attended the meeting of Bunyan’s congregation, and had acquired a love for the doctrines preached by the tinker. Yet Sir William himself had begun to read “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and declared himself astonished at the wonderful book, as yet unknown to reading or rich men! “Tis beautiful”, he said, “I shall live to look upon the man who wrote it.”

His son, having heard of this, begs Bunyan to journey to Reading to speak with this father and prepare the way for reconciliation. Bunyan at first hesitated because of his weak physical condition. But young Beecher ultimately persuades John to ride to Reading to gain the favor of his father. He is well received in Reading, and had the deep joy of returning good for evil, and not only reconciling father to his son, but of leading a soul from the city of destruction into the narrow way beyond the wicket gate.”

Ellis describes the following event: “With a glad heart he returned through forty miles of weary road between Reading and London. The heavy rain all the way drenched him, and weary and sick he alighted at the four story house on Snow Hill, London, where, under the sign of the Star, John Strudwick obtained his livelihood as a grocer.”

After preaching in London, “the fever that had hold of him increased, and on Friday, 31st August 1688, he passed away.”

According to Ellis, sometime later, young William Beecher, married Bunyan’s daughter, Liza, Elizabeth.

Kipling refers to Bunyan as “The Father of the Novel, Salvation’s first Defoe”. Bunyan had of course no thought of writing a novel; indeed, we read it as a novel today simply because of the amount of felt and observed reality it contains…Bunyan was a transcendent genius, the first to appear in English prose fiction of any kind, and his work as original as anything in literature can be.

Kipling wrote:

“The craft that we call modern,

The crimes that we call new,

John Bunyan had them typed and filed in 1682.”

“Within a comparatively short time after its appearance “The Pilgrims Progress” became the peculiar possession of the English people, of all classes, to an extent beyond any other work except the Bible. Its influence, like the Bible’s, is therefore strictly incalculable. One can only say that if it had not been written, the English people would be different from what they are. At the lowest, it set a standard in story-telling, vivid characterization, and natural dialogue which must have influenced, however little they may have realized it, a host of later novelists.”

Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” gives shape and form for future thought. It defines the Puritan vision and becomes a landmark, a reference point, for later works such as Thackery’s “Vanity Fair”, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Celestial Railroad”. References from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” are scattered through world literature, ranging from Alcott’s “Little Women” to Gore Vidal’s “Burr”.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) wrote a modern “Pilgrim’s Progress”, “The Celestial Railroad”, in 1843. The book is a parody on the modern society that no longer sees its need for so basic a quest as that of the traditional Pilgrim. It is thought that everything in our society is new and improved, including our religion. Pilgrims are encouraged to travel by train, where the Celestial City is the promised destination (for a fee). Rather than slogging it out on the ancient narrow way, the road of revelation, all are invited to become passengers on a modern train of ease. Apollyon, formerly the archenemy of the pilgrim soul, is now the railroad’s chief engineer. The Slough of Despond, once a clear illustration of the impotence of human wisdom to remedy the human dilemma, is now a landfill, healed by dumped volumes of French philosophy and German rationalism, as well as sermons, tracts and essays by modern clergymen. Vanity Fair, which in Bunyan’s day was blatant godlessness, has become quite civilized, with churches on almost every street, and its clergy is now held in high regard. “The Rev. Mr. Shallow-Deep, the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth, that fine old clerical character, the Rev. Mr. Thistoday, who expect shortly to resign his pulpit to the Rev Mr. That-Tomorrow; together with the Rev. Mr. Bewilderment, the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-Spirit, and last, and greatest, the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-Doctrine.”

Hawthorne writes, “Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity Fair, my manner and deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants. The place began to seem like home; the idea of pursuing my travels to the Celestial City was almost obliterated from my mind.”

Finally, all are encouraged to board a steamboat that promises passage across the bridgeless River. However the boat crashed and he passengers are thrown into the water. As the waves come crashing in, Hawthorne, awakes, “and behold it was a dream”.

“In the story of the Pilgrim, whether we call him Christian or John Bunyan, the Puritan struggle for freedom of worship merges into the eternal struggle of man to find unity with God and becomes, in the widest and deepest sense, the epic of the soul.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica concludes, “The genius of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ remains valid. Nothing illustrates better the profound symbolic truth of this noted work than its continuing ability, even in translation, to evoke responses in readers belonging to widely separated cultural traditions.”

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