Three points about Russell Moore’s opinion of John Bunyan & Pilgrim’s Progress

By Elizabeth Prata

I listened to the podcast of Russell Moore and Karen Prior that people are up in arms about. It’s called Losing Our Religion: Evangelical Imagination with Karen Swallow Prior.

Russell Moore is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and had been the President of the ERLC. He holds a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Karen Swallow Prior had until very recently been the professor of Christianity & Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is an author, speaker, and podcaster.

It is sad. Prior could be so interesting & the topic of imagination, literature, and how God uses us to create, would be wonderful to delve into, IF she wasn’t such a liberal and Moore so far from evangelical. There was one thing Prior said that I agree with: for too long we have neglected the aesthetic in literature. As modernists, I also think we have neglected the aesthetic in music, art, and architecture, too.

I’ve often studied this topic- imagination, art, and the Christian. I’ve blogged on “Writing, and writing for the Lord“. I enjoy Sheehan Quirke’s “Cultural Tutor” twitter threads and his newsletter “Areopagus”. For example, here, he talks about minimizing design too much.

And when Sheehan Quirke does talk about beauty, wow. Beauty in music, art, architecture, literature. It is God-honoring to attribute creativity and means to the Lord.

I took and completed a wonderful course at Ligonier called “Recovering the Beauty of the Arts”. RC Sproul taught it. The premise is that “the first step in recovering the lost beauty of the arts — God’s glory — is to begin to think critically and clearly about the Christian’s relationship to art and aesthetics. … and to motivate you to support
God-honoring art within and without the Church, so that we can heed more fully the apostle’s charge by meditating on “whatever is true, . . . honorable, . . . just, . . . pure, . . . lovely, [and] commendable” (Phil. 4:8).”

Beauty. In Ezra 3:12-13, the young men wept with joy when the temple foundation was laid, but the old men who had seen the glory and splendor and beauty of the previous one, Solomon’s temple, they wept and mourned. The second Temple would not be as beautiful or grand. Not even close.

Beauty is important. It moves us, it brings tears to one’s eyes. So does the lack of it. It is sad to see a graceful building decay…a glorious piece of art slashed…a masterpiece of literature rejected. And that brings us to Moore and Prior.

Youtube video with transcript here
Podcast website, episode here

There are two levels to discuss here. But first, let’s see what they said. Excerpt:

Moore: I don’t like John Bunyan. I like the person of John Bunyan. I like the life of John Bunyan, but Pilgrim’s Progress leaves me cold and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners even more so. And I think because I’ve seen so many people who started reading some Puritan literature from that time period who became so morose and so introspective and believing there’s no way they could really be a Christian.

And all of the tests that they were giving to themselves, then they would test whether or not they had the objectivity to go through the tests, you know, all of that. That Puritan era, I think, brought some things that just really creeped me out.

But you talk about in the book just how significant Pilgrim’s Progress really was in terms of shaping everything around us, which I don’t think I’d ever thought about before. I mean, I knew it was at one point the most popular book other than the Bible, but I didn’t really think about how the story actually changed the way we see things.

Prior: I’m going to be completely honest here. I mean, the Pilgrim’s Progress is kind of a drag to read. I mean, even teaching it, my students love to hate it, and I love to teach it to try to hate it with them and help them see it. And I’m so glad, actually, that I came to it as a student of literature before more than a Christian. I mean, I was a Christian, but I approached it as literature.

Point #1: Rejection of some books is more telling than just having an opinion about them

First, it is correct to say that people have opinions of books and authors and they are just opinions. Moore expressed his high opinion of southern writer Flannery O’Conner. I’m not a huge fan of O’Conner, I enjoy Zora Neale Hurston more. OK fine.

However Pilgrim’s Progress is not just any book. It is obviously sparked by God in a man whose imagination had been influenced by the Hos word. It is a book designed to evoke vivid mental pictures and emotional responses toward God. No, it’s not the word OF God, but is closely parallels it. For Moore to say it ‘leaves him cold’ raises questions in people who understand that a book that has been in print for 346 years, and until recently was the 2nd most printed book after the Bible.

Point #2: Hating on the writing from the entire Puritan era.

Even if we put that aside, my second of three points here today is this: Moore dismissed the entire era of Puritan writing. THE WHOLE THING. “It really creeped me out,” he said.

Let’s look at the Puritan era for a moment. The era, though nebulous, is generally considered to have lasted from 1533 to 1740. Two hundred years. Why would a professor and an editor such as Moore dismiss the entire two hundred years of writing from evangelical reformers? The article at the First Amendment Encyclopedia at Middle Tennessee State says,

“The bravery and initiative of the Puritans served as a source of inspiration for colonists during the Revolutionary War. Later, the framers of the Constitution would look to the Puritan era in history for guidance when crafting the First Amendment rights for freedom of religion.”

The Founding Fathers considered the Puritan writings to be ‘warm’ enough to include their precepts into the Constitution. In fact, the first civil agreement in the US was the Mayflower Compact, and so became the first document to establish self-government in the New World. “Mayflower Compact laid the foundations for two other revolutionary documents: the Declaration of Independence, which stated that governments derive their powers “from the consent of the governed,” and the Constitution” writes The History Channel.

But the Puritan era really creeps Moore out.

Point #3: Liberals love their emotions and decide things based on them. Moore is no exception.

The third thing is that he not only dismissed an obvious and enduring work of God in rejecting Pilgrim’s Progress, and not only rejected important writing from a 200-year-period of our history, but he did so on the basis of emotions.

And that is the liberal to a T. How they FEEL about a thing becomes their truth about the thing. “It left me cold”. “It creeped me out”. Moore observed others becoming “morose”, ‘doubtful’ and “introspective.” These are emotions.

Feelings are everything to a liberal. Truth is what they feel, not what they know. Feelings are their guide, not what is objectively true.

Prior later complained amid the outcry, “So you can listen to a very clipped clip that’s circulating, or you can read the books. (Yeah, we know what the click-baiters will choose.)”

She is being disingenuous. It’s a clip but it’s the entire part about Bunyan. I listened to the whole podcast and the clip of their discussion and rejection of Bunyan’s works is presented in its entirety. It didn’t range over long hours with only a minimal clip cherry picked for spitefulness, as Prior seems to allude. It extends from minute 26:00 to 27:28. A minute and a half. That’s all the talk of Bunyan there was. So, it IS a clipped clip, Mrs Prior. ANd since your talk was public and you were free to say all you wanted to say about Bunyan and the writing and aesthetic from “the Puritan era”, we are likewise free to comment publicly on your and Moore’s comments.

If you are interested in aesthetics and God, as good old RC used to say, what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true, then here are some for you-

RESOURCES

Here are some more solid resources for you on the topic of imagination, aesthetic, and God:

Article: The Triune God, Good, beautiful, and True, by Harry Reeder

Book: The Liberated Imagination: Thinking Christianly About the Arts, by Leland Ryken.

Pamphlet: Art for God’s Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts, Leland Ryken

Novelette: Art & The Bible, by Francis Schaeffer

Art Book: Visual Exegesis Vol I, by Christopher Powers of the ministry Full of Eyes, a ministry that “seeking to help people see, savor, and sing the beauty of God in Jesus Christ.”

Course: Recovering the Beauty of the Arts: Ligonier.org, RC SProul

Online article: Aesthetics and Worship by James S. Spiegel