I’ve been reading Pilgrim’s Progress on and off again for a while now. To be honest? It seems a lot like reading Job. Lots of Scripture, lots of dialogue, and lots of angles I’m not quite sure what to do with.
Care to share any thoughts about Pilgrim’s Progress from a Lutheran point of view? Or can you relate to the experience of reading Job-like books? For that matter, you could recommend reading on the Book of Job itself.
Ha, I used to work in a certain worship office and we started to follow the lectio continuo suggested in the LSB introductory page. Reading through Job in a chapel setting was SO ODD. Do you say, “This is the Word of the Lord” no matter who speaks in that book?! CRAZY!
I’m glad our Lord–and many other people!–have things more figured out than I do. 🙂
Happy reading and happy writing!
I was always a little uncomfortable with “Pilgrim’s Progress”. I think the title caused me to read the book as legalistic. But then after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, “Celestial Railroad” I re-read “Pilgrim’s Progress” and was able to appreciate it, and see it from a different angle.
Would you recommend “The Celestial Railroad”?
Oh yes, it’s one of his short stories. I appreciate what he is doing in writing against transcendentalism.
Mary,
Several thoughts:
1. Look back through the Rightly Divided blog that Bryan Wolfmueller and the Around the Word guys do. Find Job. Their daily comments were excellent on that; I took notes. Many of the days, they have a one-sentence summary of what is going on, and it’s a nice overview. Sort of when I learned from John Kleinig’s commentary how to read Leviticus: many of the chapters are: 1) God speaks to Moses and Aaron. 2) He tells them what to tell the people. 3) They tell the people.
2 The People’s Bible volume on Job was done by longtime Bethany Lutheran College (ELS) Prof. Rudy Honsey. It is worth its weight in gold. He was such a Gospel-predominant, cheerful, kind, God-fearing man, and all of this comes through. His section on “I know that my Redeemer lives” is so great, he is not afraid to diss the NIV translation that the series uses, and showed me what “when my skin is destroyed” really should be, which shows that the hymn Jesus Christ, My Sure Defense, gets it right.
3. The very completely totally absolute best book I’ve ever read on Job is “The Book of Job” by Ludwig Fuerbringer, a thin little book CPH published back in the 30s. It was really a pastors’ conference paper. But he presents it as a book that belongs alongside the pastoral epistles in teaching how to do Christian counsel in suffering. He does a thorough job in only 73 pages. I’ve photocopied it to give to friends.