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‘Most Fit for a Wounded Conscience” The Place of Luther's “Commentary on Galatians” in Grace Abounding*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Vera J. Camden
Vera J. Camden*
Affiliation:
Kent State University
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Extract

After a score of years, filled with fear and trembling and temptations, which were so terrible that — note well! — scarcely one individual in each generation experiences… this as Luther did.

— Kierkegaard

Many critics of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, perhaps “embarrassed by the rawness and repetitive misery of his lived experience,” have structured Bunyan's obsessive vacillations between hope and despair through identifying conventional stages in his autobiography, as if the intensity of Bunyan's narrative might be contained by placing him within a set of literary or theological conventions. Patricia Caldwell questions this critical focus on “thought” and doctrine, noting that “it is almost as if the literary people themselves are taking their cue from the Puritans themselves” by denying the affective power of a text which appears to follow conventional stages.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1997 , pp. 819 - 849
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

A version of this essay was read at the Bunyan Session of the International Milton Symposium, Bangor, Wales, 1995. I would like to thank Michael J.B. Allen and the Renaissance Quarterly reviewers, as well as Professor Richard Greaves, for their helpful suggestions.

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