Dr Paul Allen

Ardel Caneday Would a reasonable Christian read John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress allegorically or figuratively? The answer is Neither because the adverbs “allegorically” and “figuratively” describe not how to read his similitude but how Bunyan wrote it.  Thus, he requires us to read it for what it actually is, an allegory. Authors of literature, not readers, have authority over their texts to assign symbolic or figurative properties to settings, events, persons, and things they embed within their texts.  Readers are obligated to comprehend how an author represents the world being portrayed textually, whether the realm portrayed is fictional or real. Thus, we are not at liberty to read The Pilgrim’s Progress according to our whims. We are not free to assign our own arbitrary meanings to the author’s text. Bunyan wrote it as an allegory. He assigned figurative representational significances to the settings, events, persons, and things. Readers do not have that role. However,

The Bible is not, overall, a piece of coded literature written in an elaborately allegorical manner with all sorts of hidden meanings, which needs to be decoded to be understood.  Thank goodness.  Just to be clear what allegory is– it is a story that has a surface meaning within the story, but in fact, those story elements refer primarily to things outside the story.   Typical allegories are the Christian example Pilgrim’s Progress or the literary example Spencer’s The Fairy Queen.  One has to be able to distinguish between a straight-up allegory where so very many of the elements in the story are symbolic and refer to something outside the story, or an allegorizing of a non-allegory, which is what we find in Philo in various of his books, or once in Paul in Galatians where he allegorizes the story of Sarah and Hagar, and finally, there can be a few allegorical elements in a non-allegory, for example in a parable. Perhaps the most classic example of the over-allegorizing of a non-alleg