Bunyan, John (1628–1688)

BUNYAN, JOHN (1628–1688)

BUNYAN, JOHN (1628–1688), English Nonconformist author. John Bunyan was born in Elstow, Bedfordshire, England, where his father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier. Educated at a petty school and perhaps briefly at a grammar school, John Bunyan served during the civil war in the parliamentary garrison at Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, from November 1644 until about September 1646 and reenlisted briefly in 1647. By 1649 he had married, and his wife's dowry consisted of two books by Lewis Bayly and Arthur Dent that influenced Bunyan's religious development.

Following his spiritual awakening in 1650, Bunyan experienced recurring bouts of depression and spiritual doubt that lasted until late 1657 or early 1658, recounted in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). During this period of crisis he joined the open-membership congregation at Bedford in 1655 and under its auspices began to preach. Among his earliest religious foes were "Ranters," by whom he meant antinomians and deniers of a physical Resurrection and external worship. He also challenged the Quakers, engaging in a literary dispute with Edward Burrough in 1656–1657, and he wrote a tract, now lost, against witchcraft. In the late 1650s he was influenced by the millenarian tenets of the Fifth Monarchists.

Refusing to cease preaching at the Restoration, Bunyan was arrested in November 1660. Although he would have been released had he promised to relinquish his preaching, he refused and was incarcerated in the Bedford county jail until the spring of 1672. Some of his time was spent making shoelaces to support his family, including his second wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1659 following the death of his first wife the preceding year. In prison he continued to write, manifesting a discipline that enabled him to produce some sixty books during his career. His most important theological work, The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded, an exposition of covenant thought, had appeared in 1659, and his early prison writings included poetry, an attack on the Book of Common Prayer (I Will Pray with the Spirit [1662]), and a millenarian tract, The Holy City (1665). Following the completion of Grace Abounding, he turned in 1667 to a sermon about the Christian life, The Heavenly Foot-Man (1698).

While working on this sermon, Bunyan was inspired to write his famous allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, begun about March 1668 and completed three years later, though not published until 1678, partly because some colleagues deemed it insufficiently serious. The allegory was both a guide to the Christian life and a contribution to the debate over liberty of conscience that raged in the late 1660s and the 1670s. Drawing extensively on the Bible, Bunyan was also influenced by the pilgrimage theme in the Christian tradition and his own experience. The allegory denounced persecution and provided a critique of the Church of England, the restored monarchy, and society.

While still in prison, Bunyan entered the debate over church membership and baptism in A Confession of My Faith (1672), which sparked attacks from the Baptists Thomas Paul and John Denne. Bunyan defended himself in Differences in Judgment about Water Baptism (1673) and Peaceable Principles (1674); his position was that of an open-membership Baptist. In the meantime he engaged the debate over justification by attacking Edward Fowler's The Design of Christianity (1671) in A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, by Faith (1672), his last imprisonment work. Shortly before Bunyan's release, the Bedford church appointed him a pastor on 21 December 1671. When on 4 March 1675 a new warrant for his arrest was issued, accusing him of teaching at conventicles, he went into hiding. He was apprehended in December 1676 and was confined until June 1677.

As the nation divided over alleged Catholic conspiracy, the anticipated succession of James, duke of York (James II; ruled 1685–1688), allegations of arbitrary rule, and the treatment of dissenters, Bunyan wrote some of his best work. Those contributions include The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), a searing critique of Restoration society; The Holy War (1682), a complex allegory about soteriology as well as an attack on Charles II (ruled 1660–1685) and the Tory-Anglicans; Of Antichrist (1692), a treatise criticizing the Stuarts, Catholicism, and the Church of England; and the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress (1684), which focuses on the dissenting pastor Great-heart and Christian's wife Christiana.

After James II introduced his policy of toleration, Bunyan was cautiously cooperative. Seven members of his church were named to the Bedford Corporation, and another was considered for appointment as a justice of the peace. On 31 August 1688 Bunyan died in London, and he was buried several days later in Bunhill Fields. He was survived by his wife, three sons, and two daughters; his blind daughter, Mary, had predeceased him. Transcending its polemical context, The Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most widely published works in history, reaching more than 1,300 editions by 1938.

See also Dissenters, English ; England ; English Civil War and Interregnum.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bunyan, John. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. Edited by Roger Sharrock. 13 vols. Oxford, 1976–1994.

——. The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come. Edited by James Blanton Wharey. 2nd ed. Revised by Roger Sharrock. Oxford, 1960.

Secondary Source

Greaves, Richard L. Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent. Stanford, 2002.

Richard L. Greaves