Presenting: Past, Present, Future

Today, April 4th, I'm presenting at the Evangelical Theological Far West Regional Meeting in my very own building at Biola where Talbot School of Theology is hosting the event. My talk is entitled: "Three Shackled Ones after the Cross in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Doubling Down on the Three Shining Ones as Church." If you're in the area, walk-ins are welcome to register on campus for the afternoon. The overall theme of the conference is Sanctification, and my former dean, Clint Arnold gives the kick-off plenary at .

My paper is at 5:30pm. It's what I call a cheerful interpretation of The Pilgrim's Progress that builds on an article I published a couple of years ago, which was called "Three Shining Ones at the Cross in The Pilgrim’s Progress:Angels, Trinity, or Church?" JETS 66.2 (June 2023) 323-341.

If it is plausible to interpret the Three Shining Ones at the cross as glorified Christians, part of the great cloud of witnesses, it would be handy if the literary structure of Bunyan's text gave close support to the notion. So today, I am arguing that this is exactly what we have in Christian's immediate encounter after the cross with the three sleeping men: Simple, Sloth, and Presumption. They are bound in fetters at the heel, so I should really call them the "fettered three" but I couldn't resist the alliteration with the three Shining Ones, hence "three shackled ones."

I recognize that Simple, Sloth, and Presumption might all be embodiments of Scriptural vices in the book of Proverbs - after all, Bunyan explicitly quotes Proverbs in the episode. Most interpreters who care to ponder a biblical provenance stop here. But instead of siding with the "Proverbs Posse" I am wanting to recruit for the "Hebrews Crew." Hebrews is so influential in The Pilgrim's Progress, so I trace echoes and exegetical readings of the episode in conversation with that scriptural locale for a Christian churchly argument for the "three shackled ones" as the anti-church to the three Shining Ones' church. The meeting of three at "the bottom" is a contrastive narrative parallel to the meeting of the three up on the hill just before.

So that's the present. The past was a couple of weeks ago: I presented on the prominence of the word Dream on The Pilgrim's Progress's title page, along with the famous frontispiece of the dreaming Bunyan at the West Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature. I surveyed the gradual shrinking of the word Dream in title pages, to its eventual disappearance along with Bunyan's Hosea 12:10 "I have used similitudes" epigraph. Bunyan himself becomes less passive, more authorial, and eventually awake and erect in frontispieces, too. All this to explore the radically prophetic positioning of the original publication and the loss of that edge, as well as hints of its endurance or retrieval.

Lastly, the future holds out the promise of a few different participations at this summer's Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society in Prince Edwards Island, Canada. More on that later, but why not think about visiting Anne of Green Gables country for a welcoming and intimate gathering of Bunyanists? See you there?