CHC Episode 8
Global Bunyan and Visual Art
More than Pilgrim's Progress
with host Nick Walters
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A tinker-turned-preacher changed the way Christians learned to see their faith.
Episode 8 of Chronicles explores the enduring visual power of the writings of John Bunyan, focusing especially on the imaginative world created in The Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways that world has been interpreted, illustrated, and reimagined across more than three centuries. Though Bunyan worked with words rather than paint or stone, his influence on Christian imagery has been immense, shaping how generations of readers pictured salvation, struggle, temptation, perseverance, and hope.
Written in the late seventeenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress emerged from a period of intense religious conflict in England. Bunyan, a Nonconformist preacher, spent years imprisoned for refusing to conform to the Church of England’s requirements for licensed preaching. During this confinement, he reflected deeply on Scripture, personal spiritual experience, and the long Christian tradition of allegory. The result was a narrative that transformed theology into landscape: a road stretching from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, a heavy burden carried on a pilgrim’s back, valleys of humiliation, rivers of death, and gates that open only through grace.
What made Bunyan’s work so powerful was not simply its doctrinal clarity, but its ability to invite readers into a vivid mental world. His characters are embodiments of spiritual realities, his settings function as moral and theological maps, and his scenes linger in the imagination long after the text is closed. From its earliest editions, The Pilgrim’s Progress was accompanied by illustrations, signaling that readers were meant not only to read Bunyan’s allegory but to visualize it. Over time, these images multiplied and evolved, appearing in engravings, children’s editions, stained glass, political cartoons, missionary tracts, films, stage productions, and contemporary visual art.
This episode also highlights the scholarship of Angelica Duran, whose recent work examines how Bunyan’s imagery has traveled across cultures and artistic media. Her research places Bunyan within a global and visual context, showing how The Pilgrim’s Progress has been continually reinterpreted by artists and communities far removed from seventeenth-century England. Rather than remaining fixed on the page, Bunyan’s imagery has proven adaptable, crossing linguistic, cultural, and denominational boundaries while retaining its core Christian symbolism.
By examining Bunyan through the lens of imagery and visual culture, Chronicles invites viewers to reconsider why this single book has remained so influential for so long. The Pilgrim’s Progress endures not merely because it explains Christian belief, but because it gives those beliefs form, space, and movement. It teaches readers how to imagine the Christian life, providing a shared symbolic vocabulary that has shaped sermons, hymns, art, and personal devotion for centuries.
This episode situates Bunyan at the intersection of faith, literature, and visual imagination, demonstrating how a man with no formal education and limited means produced one of the most influential imaginative works in Christian history. Through Bunyan’s legacy and Dr. Duran’s scholarship, Chronicles traces how Christian ideas are carried not only through doctrine and confession, but through images that continue to speak across time.
Chronicles is a long-form historical series produced by the Center for Christian History, dedicated to exploring the people, texts, and ideas that have shaped Christianity across the centuries. Each episode connects rigorous scholarship with accessible storytelling, illuminating the Christian past and its continuing influence on the present.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (title page), 1678. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons (British Library).
