Saints CVs – John Bunyan (1628-1688)

One Saturday evening shortly after I had passed my driving test, I set out in my car heading to Peterborough to attend a Bible study. Sadly, I got completely disorientated and arrived in Bedford, some forty miles away from my intended destination. But all was not lost! I spent a pleasant evening looking around and discovering several landmarks celebrating Bedford’s most famous son, John Bunyan.

Bunyan was a massively influential Christian author from the 17th century, whose works include The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Holy War, and his autobiographical Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. For 350 years, his books have been best-sellers. In particular, The Pilgrim’s Progress has never been out of print.¹ Remarkably, Bunyan was self-taught. He was a tinker by trade, repairing pots and pans in villages around Bedfordshire. At a time when religious scholars invariably attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities, Bunyan received little formal education.

Bunyan relates his conversion experience in his autobiography.² He describes meeting ‘three or four poor women sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the things of God … their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts … how God had visited their souls with His love in the Lord Jesus’. He explains how their joy and understanding of scripture led him to conviction. He remembers the expression from the parable, ‘Yet there is room’, Luke 14. 22, as ‘Sweet words to me; for truly I thought that by them I saw there was place enough in heaven for me; and moreover, that when the Lord Jesus did speak these words, He then did think of me’.

Bunyan’s salvation story echoes that of his fictional pilgrim who walked to Calvary to have his weight of guilt removed. These are the most famous of Bunyan’s poetic lines,³

‘Thus far did I come laden with my sin;
Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in,
Till I came hither: what a place is this!
Must here be the beginning of my bliss?
Must here the burden fall from off my back?
Must here the strings that bound it to me crack?
Blest cross! blest sepulchre! blest rather be
The Man that was there put to shame for me!’

His unorthodox style and outspoken manner earned him a lifetime of persecution from the authorities. He was several years in Bedford prison. From this dismal location, he gained inspiration for some of his most beautiful allegorical writing.

At the age of fifty-nine, Bunyan died. He anticipated his entrance to glory, again via the fictional experience of two of his pilgrim characters, Christian and Hopeful, as they reached the celestial city.⁴

‘Now I saw in my dream that these two men went in at the gate: and lo, as they entered, they were transfigured, and they had raiment put on that shone like gold. There was also that met them with harps and crowns, and gave them to them - the harps to praise withal, and the crowns in token of honour. Then I heard in my dream that all the bells in the city rang again for joy, and that it was said unto them, “Enter ye into the joy of your Lord”’.

John Bunyan left a rich legacy of illustrative truth. The Holy War refers to eye gate and ear gate as entrances to the city of Mansoul; you may still hear preachers talking about these portals today. Bunyan’s most famous work is The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly the first part that narrates the journey of Christian from the city of destruction to the celestial city. Many adaptations have been undertaken by modern writers including Enid Blyton⁵ and C. S. Lewis.⁶

of you be even better monuments of John Bunyan than

A bronze statue of John Bunyan was placed in Bedford in 1874. At the statue’s unveiling, the Dean of Westminster declared,⁷ ‘Every one of you who has not read The Pilgrim’s Progress, if there be any such person, read it without delay: those who have read it a hundred times, read it for the hundred and first time. Follow out in your lives the lesson which The Pilgrim’s Progress teaches, and then you will all this magnificent statue’.