John Bunyan
- Born:
- November 1628, Elstow, Bedfordshire, England
- Died:
- August 31, 1688, London (aged 59)
John Bunyan (born November 1628, Elstow, Bedfordshire, England—died August 31, 1688, London) was a celebrated English minister and preacher, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the book that was the most characteristic expression of the Puritan religious outlook. His other works include doctrinal and controversial writings; a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666); and the allegory The Holy War (1682).
Early life
Bunyan, the son of a brazier, or traveling tinker, was brought up “among a multitude of poor plowmen’s children” in the heart of England’s agricultural Midlands. He learned to read and write at a local grammar school, but he probably left school early to learn the family trade. Bunyan’s mind and imagination were formed in these early days by influences other than those of formal education. He absorbed the popular tales of adventure that appeared in chapbooks and were sold at fairs like the great one held at Stourbridge near Cambridge (it provided the inspiration for Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim’s Progress). Though his family belonged to the Anglican church, he also became acquainted with the varied popular literature of the English Puritans: plain-speaking sermons, homely moral dialogues, books of melodramatic judgments and acts of divine guidance, and John Foxe’s The Book of Martyrs. Above all he steeped himself in the English Bible; the Authorized Version was but 30 years old when he was a boy of 12.
Bunyan speaks in his autobiography of being troubled by terrifying dreams. It may be that there was a pathological side to the nervous intensity of these fears; in the religious crisis of his early manhood his sense of guilt took the form of delusions. But it seems to have been abnormal sensitiveness combined with the tendency to exaggeration that caused him to look back on himself in youth as “the very ringleader of all . . . that kept me company into all manner of vice and ungodliness.”
In 1644 a series of misfortunes separated the country boy from his family and drove him into the world. His mother died in June, his younger sister Margaret in July; in August his father married a third wife. The English Civil Wars had broken out, and in November he was mustered in a Parliamentary levy and sent to reinforce the garrison at Newport Pagnell. The governor was Sir Samuel Luke, immortalized as the Presbyterian knight of the title in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. Bunyan remained in Newport until July 1647 and probably saw little fighting.
His military service, even if uneventful, brought him in touch with the seething religious life of the left-wing sects within Oliver Cromwell’s army, the preaching captains, and those Quakers, Seekers, and Ranters who were beginning to question all religious authority except that of the individual conscience. In this atmosphere Bunyan became acquainted with the leading ideas of the Puritan sectaries, who believed that the striving for religious truth meant an obstinate personal search, relying on free grace revealed to the individual, and condemning all forms of public organization.
Some time after his discharge from the army (in July 1647) and before 1649, Bunyan married. He says in his autobiography, Grace Abounding, that he and his first wife “came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household-stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.” His wife brought him two evangelical books as her only dowry. Their first child, a blind daughter, Mary, was baptized in July 1650. Three more children, Elizabeth, John, and Thomas, were born to Bunyan’s first wife before her death in 1658. Elizabeth, too, was baptized in the parish church there in 1654, though by that time her father had been baptized by immersion as a member of the Bedford Separatist church.
Conversion and ministry
Bunyan’s conversion to Puritanism was a gradual process in the years following his marriage (1650–55); it is dramatically described in his autobiography. After an initial period of Anglican conformity in which he went regularly to church, he gave up, slowly and grudgingly, his favourite recreations of dancing and bell ringing and sports on the village green and began to concentrate on his inner life. Then came agonizing temptations to spiritual despair lasting for several years. The “storms” of temptation, as he calls them, buffeted him with almost physical violence; voices urged him to blaspheme; the texts of Scriptures, which seemed to him to threaten damnation, took on personal shape and “did pinch him very sore.” Finally one morning he believed that he had surrendered to these voices of Satan and had betrayed Christ: “Down I fell as a bird that is shot from the tree.” In his psychopathic isolation he presents all the features of the divided mind of the maladjusted as they have been analyzed in the 20th century. Bunyan, however, had a contemporary psychological instrument for the diagnosis of his condition: the pastoral theology of 17th-century Calvinism, which interpreted the grim doctrine of election and predestination in terms of the real needs of souls, the evidence of spiritual progress in them, and the covenant of God’s grace. Both techniques, that of the modern analyst and that of the Puritan preacher, have in common the aim of recovering the integrity of the self; and this was what Bunyan achieved as he emerged, from his period of spiritual darkness, gradually beginning to feel that his sin was “not unto death” and that there were texts to comfort as well as to terrify. He was aided in his recovery by his association with the Bedford Separatist church and its dynamic leader, John Gifford. He entered into full communion about 1655.
The Bedford community practiced adult Baptism by immersion, but it was an open-communion church, admitting all who professed “faith in Christ and holiness of life.” Bunyan soon proved his talents as a lay preacher. Fresh from his own spiritual troubles, he was fitted to warn and console others: “I went myself in Chains to preach to them in Chains, and carried that Fire in my own Conscience that I persuaded them to beware of.” He was also active in visiting and exhorting church members, but his main activity in 1655–60 was in controversy with the early Quakers, both in public debate up and down the market towns of Bedfordshire and in his first printed works, Some Gospel Truths Opened (1656) and A Vindication of Some Gospel Truths Opened (1657). The Quakers and the open-communion Baptists were rivals for the religious allegiance of the “mechanics,” or small tradesmen and artificers, in both town and country. Bunyan soon became recognized as a leader among the sectaries.
The Restoration of Charles II brought to an end the 20 years in which the separated churches had enjoyed freedom of worship and exercised some influence on government policy. On Nov. 12, 1660, at Lower Samsell in South Bedfordshire, Bunyan was brought before a local magistrate and, under an old Elizabethan act, charged with holding a service not in conformity with those of the Church of England. He refused to give an assurance that he would not repeat the offense, was condemned at the assizes in January 1661, and was imprisoned in the county jail. In spite of the courageous efforts of his second wife (he had married again in 1659) to have his case brought up at the assizes, he remained in prison for 12 years. A late 17th-century biography, added to the early editions of Grace Abounding, reveals that he relieved his family by making and selling “long Tagg’d laces”; prison conditions were lenient enough for him to be let out at times to visit friends and family and to address meetings.