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Jack's avatar

I will turn this quote a bit on its head: “I take my pleasure in walking alone,” Ignorance explains. Isn’t this always the way of ignorance? It’s not that he’s an introvert (nothing wrong with that!), but rather it’s that he stubbornly resists the element of “iron sharpening iron” that happens in community. He’d rather “do his own research” than humbly learn from others more knowledgeable and experienced than he.” Ignorance may be at fault but so is the Christian community that allows him to languish on the sidelines in his beliefs. This is a product of our autonomous culture - every person a master of his fate! Alan Noble’s “We Are Not Our Own” is a wonderful antidote to this condition. I have introvertish tendencies but find that when people are interested in me, I respond and engage in conversation and am enlightened. I read Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror” about her growing up in a Houston mega-church before rejecting the faith as a college student. I noticed that not once in her book did she mention an adult woman who came alongside her to engage in conversation about her faith. I also noticed that Molly Worthen, once a confirmed atheist, found Christ through conversations with Tim Keller and JD Greer.

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Holly A.J.'s avatar

I was thinking as I read Hopeful's account of his salvation that the insistence on having a vision of the Lord was more charismatic than modern Baptists would approve. I also thought that Ignorance might represent Bunyan's view of the Established church.

Yes, Bunyan's religious scrupulousity is in full view in Christian's conversations with Hopeful and Ignorance - he brings out all the frightening verses that terrified me at my lowest points. He really needed someone like my old pastor to teach him on the work of the Holy Spirit.

On Christian's difficult passage through the waters, I have known it to happen. More than one of my relatives, who were shining lights in their lives, struggled at the end. "The sorrows of death compassed me", a phrase David uses more than once in Psalm 18 and 116. I think Bunyan was courageous to portray it to the rather judgemental religious circle in which he moved.

In Christian's case, his old fears from the Valley of the Shadow of Death crowd in on him. As the body weakens, the mind can also weakens, and things thought forgotten may return. My religious scrupulousity symptoms reappear when I am exhausted and stressed. When I came close to death as a result of a serious asthmatic flare up while working overseas, my fears resurged with it.

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