John Bunyan

John Bunyan was born in the fall of 1628, in Bedford, England. His father was a tinker and made his small living repairing and making metal work and household utensils. John’s mother died when he was only sixteen, and his little sister died a month later.

These were days of turmoil in England. In 1645 Parliament ordered that his county must provide 225 men for soldiers. Historians do not agree on which side of this Civil War John fought, but the weight of evidence indicates that he was one of the Roundheads. He narrowly escaped death more than once. He was selected to go with a small group to besiege a certain place, “...but when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room: to which, when I had consented, he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket bullet, and died.”

Following the victory of the Puritan forces, the army was disbanded. John returned to Elstow, took up his trade of tinkering, and married a pious young lady. Up till this time his life was far from admirable, being bound by bad habits, fond of coarse amusements, thoughtless, and lazy. His wife, with her example, words, and some books (The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety) had a profound effect. He gave up most of his old ways, and attached himself to a church, seeking to win his own salvation. He was under such conviction that he spent years in intense spiritual struggle and deep depression before finally understanding, believing, and receiving the free gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ. The story of his conversion is told in detail in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, described Bunyan’s personality as “a typical case of psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.”

Bunyan began preaching in 1655, soon after his second birth. He preached with such sincerity and success that opposition began to arise. When Charles II was called to the throne by Parliament in 1660, one of his first acts was to re-establish the English church as a high Anglican church, removing the Puritans from their pulpits. John Bunyan refused to stop preaching, so he was confined in the Bedford county jail for the next twelve years. During this period he wrote many books including his autobiography. He had three years of freedom, then spent another six months in jail. During the second imprisonment he wrote most of the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Pilgrim’s Progress is Bunyan’s most famous work. It is said to have been more widely read than any other book in the English language, except the Bible. In allegory form, he traces the journey of one Pilgrim, later named Christian, from the land of Destruction to the Celestial City. Bunyan himself wrote, concerning the spiritual power of the allegory,

“This book is writ in such a dialect
As many the minds of listless men affect:
It seems a novelty, and yet contains
Nothing but sound and honest gospel strains.”

The article on his life in Encyclopedia Americana concludes, “The reasons for its extraordinary vogue lie in the simplicity of the style, the fervor of the imagination, the universality of its spiritual appeal; no book is more widely intelligible or freer from sectarian dogmas.”

If William James correctly analyzed him, Bunyan was insane. Thank God he didn’t go to a psychiatrist for help, but met the living God.