Bunyan and Authority: the Rhetoric of Dissent and the Legitimation Crisis in Seventeenth-Century England

• Published in: Bunyan Studies no. 9; p. 79
• Main Author: Keeble, N H
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.1999
• Subjects: Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Rhetoric
• ISSN: 0954-0970

With the break-down of central authority and the proliferation of competing sects no one ecclesiastical or doctrinal position could any longer command unchallenged assent: 'in the desperate search for legitimation procedures undertaken by each new sect, we have the constant production of what Lyotard calls "diffferends", irresolvable disputes between discrete phrase regimes which call for the development of ever more elaborate rhetorical skills in the defence of one's position' (13). Situating Bunyan in this period of crisis, and reading his works as engagements with the dilemmas it posed, Sim and Walker set out to trace the contestation of such differends in his work, 'to examine what happens if we see the author as located at a critical juncture in a cultural transition that, in several striking ways, approximates to the transition from the modern to the postmodern that Western society has undergone in the last few decades' (12). Rather than assess the merits of their respective cases, Sim and Walker are impressed by the impossibility of any resolution or any authoritative adjudication between their rival claims, by the absence of an agreed rule, measure or criterion by which competing parties might determine their disputes: 'What do you do when the grand narrative that guarantees the authority of your discourse starts to erode?' (15). In Sim and Walker's reading, it is precisely these debates which reveal Bunyan as a postmodern author, and in these discussions that the real progress takes place: 'There always seems to be someone willing to engage with Christian, and we gain a sense of a society in which, for all the efforts of the prevailing grand narrative, a wide range of social and theological positions is nevertheless to be found' (148).