Justified True Belief

(●) A Bedford metalworker with nothing but a village schooling, who spent twelve years in jail rather than promise to stop preaching, and wrote there the book that taught English-speaking Christians to picture their own lives as a journey. + In the deeds he put his name to, Bunyan called himself a brazier: a man who mended pots, kettles and pans, carrying a small anvil on his back from village to village and setting up wherever there was work. The courts and his opponents preferred the blunter word, and the 1675 warrant for his arrest names "one John Bunnyon of your said towne, Tynker." Both words describe the same trade. What neither of them describes is a scholar. He had no university, no Latin, no patron, and no library beyond a shelf of ordinary Puritan books. He matters to anyone weighing the reasons for Christian faith, for two reasons. The first is that he wrote one of the earliest sustained accounts in English of what a conversion feels like from the inside, and he wrote it as a man who had spent years convinced that he had already committed the one sin God does not forgive. Doctrine in his hands is never abstract, because it was tested against a mind that gave him no peace. The second is that he turned that doctrine into a story, and the story went further than any argument of his century. A reader who will not sit through a treatise on justification will follow a man with a burden on his back all the way to a river. The book is The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in February 1678 by a London bookseller named Nathaniel Ponder. Eleven editions of it appeared before Bunyan died ten years later. W. R. Owens, who edited it for Oxford, writes that it has never since been out of print and has been translated into over two hundred languages.

(●) 1628 AD: He was baptized at Elstow in Bedfordshire, into the poorest rank of village trade. + The parish register of Elstow before 1641 is lost, but the transcript returns preserve the entry: "1628. John the sonne of Thomas Bonnionn, Junr. the 30th of Novemb." That is a baptism, not a birth. Nobody knows what day he was born, and any birthday offered for him has been supplied by a later hand. His father Thomas was a brazier at Harrowden, a hamlet in Elstow parish, and described himself that way in his will. His mother was Margaret Bentley, of the same village. Bunyan’s own summary of the family, written when he was about thirty-eight, is not flattering and was not meant to be: his descent, he says, was "of a low and inconsiderable generation; my father’s house being of that rank that is meanest, and most despised of all the families in the land." Yet they did the one thing that made everything else possible. "It pleased God to put it into their hearts," he wrote, "to put me to school, to learn both to read and write." He is equally hard on his own boyhood, and here a reader needs to hold the account a little loosely. A Puritan conversion story is written by a man grading himself against the holiness of God, and Bunyan grades severely: cursing, swearing, lying, blaspheming, and "but few equals" at any of them. His own pages, read closely, show a young man who played tipcat on the green, which was the village game of flicking a tapered stick into the air with a bat and then hitting it as far as you could, and who rang the bells in the parish tower. He was not a criminal. He was an ordinary village lad who later came to see ordinary sin as the enormous thing it is.

(●) 1644 AD: His mother and his sister died in one summer, and at sixteen he was carrying a musket for Parliament. + Margaret Bunyan was buried in June 1644 and her daughter Margaret, John’s sister, a month later. Their father remarried within two months. Whatever a boy of fifteen made of that, he does not say, and the many biographers who have told us what he felt are guessing. What happened next is documented in muster rolls rather than memoirs, which is a piece of luck for anyone who wants the plain facts. A muster roll is an army’s own attendance list, the paperwork a garrison kept of which men were in which company and drawing which pay, and it has no opinions about anybody. England was in the middle of its civil war, and Newport Pagnell, eleven miles from Elstow, was a Parliamentary garrison town under Sir Samuel Luke. Bunyan’s name appears there in the company of Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Cokayne from 30 November 1644, then in Major Robert Bolton’s company in the spring of 1645, and finally in Captain Charles O’Hara’s company in June 1647, which Parliament disbanded that July. Three years of garrison duty, in other words: guard shifts, foraging, drill, boredom, and the company of men who argued about religion and politics half the night. The nineteenth-century historian J. A. Froude thought Bunyan had probably served the king instead, reasoning from his father’s conformity. The muster rolls settled it against him. One incident from those years stayed with Bunyan for life, and it is the only one he bothered to record. Drawn out with others to besiege a town, he was replaced at the last moment by a man who asked to go in his place. "Coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket-bullet and died." A sketch of his life printed in 1700, by a man claiming to have known him, ran the two halves of that story together and had Bunyan himself standing sentinel at the siege of Leicester. Bunyan names no town, and says plainly that he did not go.

(●) 1651 AD: Three or four poor women talking in a Bedford doorway showed him that he had never understood a word of what he thought he believed. + About 1649 he married. Her name is not recorded anywhere, and the "Mary" that appears in popular accounts comes from a nineteenth-century family pedigree that the documents disprove. They began, he says, "as poor as poor might be (not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both)," and her entire dowry was two books her godly father had left her: Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety. They read them together. Their first child, Mary, was baptized at Elstow on 20 July 1650, and she was blind. Then came the morning that turned him. He gives it no year, and the usual placing is somewhere about 1650 or 1651. Working at his trade in Bedford, he came down a street where "there were three or four poor women sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the things of God." Bunyan by this time went to church twice a day and thought no man in England pleased God better. He stopped to join in, being, as he says, "a brisk talker also myself, in the matters of religion." He could not follow them. "I heard but understood not; for they were far above, out of my reach." They were talking about a new birth, about God’s work on their hearts, about the temptations of the devil and the promises that had carried them through. They spoke, he wrote afterwards, "as if joy did make them speak." Those women belonged to a small congregation in Bedford gathered under John Gifford, a former royalist officer turned preacher, whose church met in the parish of St John’s and admitted members on faith and holy living "without respect to this or that circumstance or opinion in outward and circumstantiall things." Bunyan came under Gifford’s ministry, was received into the congregation in the early or middle 1650s, and moved into Bedford itself in 1655, the year Gifford died. None of that was quick, and none of it was peaceful. What lay between the doorway in the sun and anything like a settled peace was years of torment, and the worst of it took a form that sounds absurd until you have had a sentence of your own lodge in your head and refuse to leave: the words "sell Him, sell Him" ran through his mind so long and so hard that he came to believe he had actually said them, and from there he concluded that he had traded Christ away in a bargain he could never undo. Out of that condition, slowly, came a preacher. By about 1655 the brethren were asking him to speak a word of exhortation, which, he says, "did much dash and abash" him, and soon he was preaching in the villages.

(●) 1660 AD: Arrested at a farmhouse meeting, he told the bench he would preach again the day they let him out. + Charles II had come back to the throne that May, and the old laws against unlicensed preaching came back with him. On 12 November 1660 Bunyan rode to Lower Samsell, near Harlington, to teach at a farmhouse. A justice named Francis Wingate had heard of it and issued a warrant, and a strong watch was set around the house, "as if we that were to meet together in that place did intend to do some fearful business, to the destruction of the country; when alas! the constable, when he came in, found us only with our Bibles in our hands." He knew the warrant was out. He had an hour in which he could have walked away, and he spent it in a field thinking it through, and came back in. His reasoning is worth having in full, because it is not the reasoning of a man in love with martyrdom: "If I should now run, and make an escape, it will be of a very ill savour in the country. For what will my weak and newly-converted brethren think of it, but that I was not so strong in deed as I was in word?" At the quarter sessions in January 1661 he came up before a bench chaired by John Kelynge. The quarter sessions were the county court, sitting four times a year and staffed by local gentlemen rather than professional judges, and the charge read out against him there came from a statute of 1593: abstaining from church, and upholding unlawful meetings. The sentence was three months in prison, and if he still would not conform, banishment from the realm, and hanging if he came back. Then the machinery simply stopped: no further indictment was brought, and he was held in the county gaol for twelve years. He had married again in 1659, a young woman named Elizabeth. She was carrying a child when he was taken, and the news, she said afterwards, sent her into labour eight days long, at the end of which the baby died. In August 1661 she stood before the judges at the assizes, the travelling court where royal judges rode a circuit round the counties twice a year, and pleaded for him, telling them she was "but mother-in-law" to his children, "having not been married to him yet full two years." Prison in 1661 was not solitary confinement. He had his Bible, he had Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, he preached to the other prisoners, he was let out at times, and he made and sold long tagged laces to keep his family fed. What he could not put down was the thought of them outside. "The parting with my wife and poor children," he wrote, "hath often been to me in this place, as the pulling the flesh from the bones," and of his blind daughter, "who lay nearer my heart than all besides," he said: "Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world!"

(●) 1672 AD: He walked out of prison into the pastorate of a church that had elected him while he was still in the cell. + The Bedford congregation had spent months of prayer and conference over it, and on 21 December 1671, by "solemne lifting up of their hands," they called their imprisoned brother John Bunyan to the pastoral office. (John Brown, his Victorian biographer, read the church book’s "10th moneth" as January and dated it 1672; the usual date now is December 1671.) Then the politics moved in his favour, briefly. That spring Charles II issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the penal laws against dissenters, which was the standing word for Protestants who would not worship inside the Church of England and were fined and jailed for staying away, and on 9 May 1672 a licence went out in the king’s name, signed by Lord Arlington, allowing "the House of Josias Roughed in Bedford to be a place for the use of such as doe not conforme to the Church of England." That August Bunyan and five of his brethren bought Ruffhead’s orchard and barn for fifty pounds, and a meeting house has stood on the spot ever since. His formal pardon passed the Great Seal on 13 September 1672, the Great Seal being the king’s own stamp pressed into wax on a document, the mark that turned a pardon into law rather than a favour somebody might think better of. It did not last. The Indulgence was withdrawn, the prosecutions resumed, and in March 1675 thirteen Bedfordshire justices signed a warrant charging that Bunyan "hath divers times within one month last past... preached or teached at a Conventicle meeteing." A conventicle was the legal word for exactly the sort of gathering the constable had walked in on at Lower Samsell: five or more people met for worship that did not follow the Church of England’s prayer book, and for that reason alone a crime. This time the machinery was different. Rather than the criminal courts, his prosecutors used the church’s own, which had their own long reach into a man’s life. He was presented by the churchwardens of St Cuthbert’s, which is to say formally reported by the two laymen whose parish duty it was to notice such things, for refusing to come to church and receive the sacrament. He did not appear to answer the charge, so he was excommunicated for the non-appearance, and once a man stood excommunicate the sheriff could take him under a writ issued for that purpose. How long they held him we owe to a scrap of legal paperwork. A bond of 21 June 1677, preserved in a Buckinghamshire registrar’s formulary and published in 1949 by the county archivist Joyce Godber, records his release on the sureties of two men of St Giles Cripplegate in London, and the imprisonment seems to have run about half a year, from the end of 1676. As for who arranged it, one report survives. According to a memoir of John Owen published in 1721, it was Owen, the most eminent of the dissenting theologians, who got him out, writing to Bishop Thomas Barlow of Lincoln, his old tutor, and finally obtaining an order from the Lord Chancellor. The sixteen years that followed were the busiest of his life. He preached in the villages, rode regularly to London, and was called Bishop Bunyan, partly in jest, by people who noticed how many congregations deferred to him. Charles Doe, a London comb-maker who knew him at the end, counted the crowds himself: "about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by seven o’clock on a working day, in the dark winter-time," and about three thousand one Lord’s Day at a meeting house on the edge of London, where "half were fain to go back again for want of room."

(●) 1678 AD: The book he had begun in jail went on sale in the Poultry, and it never stopped selling. + The trade paperwork lets us watch it arrive. Nathaniel Ponder entered it in the Stationers’ Register on 22 December 1677, which was how a London bookseller staked his claim to a title before he printed it, and it was advertised in the Term Catalogue of 18 February 1678, the seasonal list of new books the trade put out four times a year: The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to Come, a small octavo at eighteen pence bound, from the sign of the Peacock in the Poultry, near the church. An octavo is a book made by folding a printer’s sheet three times over, so what came off the press was small enough to go in a coat pocket. Bunyan tells the story of how it happened in the rhymed apology he put at the front. He had been writing a sober book about the way and race of saints, and "fell suddenly into an allegory" about their journey; the episodes bred "like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly," until he set them aside in a separate book to stop them eating the first one. Which prison it was written in is genuinely disputed and worth stating as such. Bunyan’s own marginal note on the "den" of the opening sentence reads "the Jail," so the setting is certain. The older tradition, argued at length by John Brown, put the writing in the short second imprisonment in the town gaol on Bedford bridge. The modern editors have gone the other way. Roger Sharrock, Richard Greaves and W. R. Owens all place the beginning in the long first imprisonment instead, which fits the apology’s account of a book interrupted by another book. Begun in Bedford gaol and finished by 1677 is as far as the evidence safely goes. It sold as no religious book in English had sold before. Eleven editions of Part One appeared by 1688, the last one Ponder published. A General Baptist named Thomas Sherman, signing himself T. S., brought out a spurious Second Part in 1682, which is probably what moved Bunyan to write the real one, published in 1684, in which Christian’s wife Christiana and her children walk the same road. Charles Doe reckoned in 1691 that "about a hundred thousand" copies had been printed in England, besides editions in France, Holland, New England and Welsh. That is a bookseller’s reckoning rather than a sales record, and we have only his own word for it: eleven editions at the ordinary print runs of the seventeenth century would come to a good deal less than a hundred thousand copies. Either way, no bookseller in London had seen anything like it.

(●) 1688 AD: He rode through the rain to reconcile a father with his son, and the fever killed him before his sixtieth birthday. + The errand is reported in the anonymous Continuation of Mr Bunyan’s Life, printed four years after his death. A young neighbour had fallen out with his father, who was threatening to disinherit him, and the young man "pitched upon Mr. Bunyan as a fit man to make way for his submission." Bunyan rode to Reading, talked the father round, and then rode on the forty miles to London through driving rain, carrying the manuscript of a book on the broken and contrite heart. On Sunday 19 August he preached to John Gammon’s congregation in Boar’s Head Yard, off Petticoat Lane, on the text about those born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God (John 1:13). He was taken ill on the Tuesday, and died on Friday 31 August 1688, three months short of sixty, at the house of John Strudwick, a grocer, at the sign of the Star on Snow Hill. He was buried in Strudwick’s vault in Bunhill Fields, the dissenters’ burial ground; the register carries no entry for him, and the date is given variously as 2 or 3 September. He left an estate of forty-two pounds and nineteen shillings, and that was the whole of it. Elizabeth administered it, and outlived him by about two and a half years. In Bedford the grief went straight into the church book, where three days were set aside that September for humiliation and prayer, "for this Heavy Stroak upon us, y[e] Death of deare Brother Bunyan."

What He Taught

(T1) The Christian life is a road out of a doomed city, and every reader is already somewhere on it. + A man is standing outside his own house reading a book, and he cannot stop crying. He has a great burden strapped to his back that he cannot get off, and he has just read something that tells him the city he lives in is going to burn. That is the first thing Bunyan shows you, and every reader who has ever lain awake at three in the morning with a weight on the chest knows the man before a single doctrine has been named. What follows is an allegory: a story in which the people and places carry the names of the things they stand for, so that the shape of an idea becomes something you can walk through. The man is called Christian, the city is Destruction, and the road runs past the Slough of Despond (the bog of discouragement that new believers sink into), up the Hill Difficulty, through the fair at Vanity where everything is for sale, into the dungeon of Giant Despair at Doubting Castle, and finally to a river with no bridge. Early on the burden comes off, and Bunyan is careful about where: not at the wicket gate, not after any effort of Christian’s own, but at the foot of a cross, where it rolls away into an open grave and is never seen again. The idea Bunyan builds the whole book on is the one Scripture uses of Abraham and the patriarchs, who "acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth" (Hebrews 11:13) and were looking for a country of their own. A pilgrim is someone travelling through a place he does not belong to, toward a home he has not seen. Take that seriously, Bunyan says, and your present address stops being the point of your life. An allegory has its costs, and this one can leave a reader with the impression that the journey is made alone; Bunyan knew it, and in Part Two he filled the same road with a family, a guide and a crowd of the weak.

(Q) "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream." + Source: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part One (1678), opening sentence (modernized spelling). The first readers would have taken "Den" for a wild beast’s hole in the rock. Bunyan settled the matter in the third edition of 1679 by printing a note in the margin beside the word: "the Jail."

(T2) A sinner’s righteousness is a person standing in heaven, not a record kept on earth. + Think of a man who cannot stop taking his own pulse. Every hour he checks, and every reading worries him, and the checking itself is making it worse. That was Bunyan for years. He graded his own heart daily, and when he found it warm he hoped, and when he found it cold he despaired, and the whole weight of his standing before God rested on a measurement he was taking of himself. The answer, when it came, came in a field. A sentence dropped into his mind: "Thy righteousness is in heaven." He saw, as he puts it, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand, and understood that the righteousness God was looking at was not in Bedford at all. Theologians call this justification, God’s verdict declaring a guilty person righteous, and they call the righteousness itself imputed, meaning credited to someone who did not produce it, the way a debt can be paid into an account by a hand other than the account holder’s. Paul puts it in a sentence: God "justifies the ungodly" (Romans 4:5). Two details make the episode worth more than a hundred pages of theory. The first is what Bunyan noticed next: "it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse." The pulse-taking was over, because the thing being measured had never been the point. The second is what happened when he got home. He went looking for "Thy righteousness is in heaven" in his Bible and could not find it, and his heart began to sink again, until he was brought to a verse that says the same thing in other words: Christ Jesus, "who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). He did not trust the impression because it had arrived with force. He trusted it because it turned out to be in the book.

(Q) "But one day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand: there, I say, was my righteousness." + Source: John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), paragraph 229, in the text as printed by the Religious Tract Society in 1905. He goes on: "Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed." He was writing that sentence, as it happens, in Bedford gaol.

(T3) God is more honoured by a wretch who trusts him than by one who despairs of him. + Anyone who has prayed while certain that praying was pointless will recognize what follows. For months Bunyan lived with the conviction that he had committed the unpardonable sin, the sin Scripture warns of that is not forgiven, and that his case was closed. The form it took was a phrase that ran in his head until he believed he had consented to it: "let Him go, if He will." He thought he had sold Christ, as Esau sold his birthright for a meal and afterwards "found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears." He read that verse about Esau, he says, the way a man reads his own death sentence. What he did in that condition is the whole of his counsel to people in it. He went to prayer anyway, and argued with the accusation while he prayed. Notice the shape of the argument, because it is not a claim about himself at all. He does not say he is better than he feared, or that his sin was smaller than it looked. He asks which of two beings he is going to honour: the one who says God cannot save him, or God. This is why Grace Abounding has outlasted a thousand better-organized books of Puritan divinity. It was not written by a man who was never afraid. It was written by a man who took years to get free, who at one point could not bear to hear his own children speak, and who tells you the bad parts at the same length as the good. Readers who have been told that a real Christian does not go through this have handed it to each other for three hundred years.

(Q) "Lord, Satan tells me, that neither Thy mercy, nor Christ’s blood, is sufficient to save my soul: Lord, shall I honour Thee most, by believing Thou wilt, and canst? or him, by believing Thou neither wilt not nor canst? Lord, I would fain honour Thee, by believing Thou wilt and canst." + Source: John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), paragraph 200, in the text as printed by the Religious Tract Society in 1905. The double negative in the third clause is Bunyan’s own. The tempter had told him his sin was unpardonable and that prayer was wasted. Three times over, Bunyan records his reply: "Well, said I, I will pray."

(T4) What God has given a man to say, no magistrate has the authority to cancel. + The constable who came through the farmhouse door at Lower Samsell was half expecting weapons. What he found was a room of country people holding Bibles, about to begin. That gap, between what the authorities suspected an unlicensed meeting must be and what it actually was, is the whole of the political question Bunyan spent twelve years answering with his body. The law he broke was an Elizabethan statute of 1593 aimed at seditious sectaries, which in the language of 1593 meant members of religious groups outside the national church whom the government suspected of plotting against it. It was revived after 1660 along with a series of acts that made worship outside the established church a crime. Under that law a licence was not a formality. It was the state deciding who might speak about God. And the deal on offer to Bunyan was mild, which is exactly what makes the case clean: nobody asked him to deny a doctrine, recant a book, or curse his friends. He was asked to promise to stop preaching, and he would have gone home that night. Twelve years of his life, and his family’s, turned on that one promise. He was not arguing for religious liberty as a modern constitution states it, and it would flatter him to pretend otherwise. He told the bench he was no despiser of magistrates, and set out his own rule: "the law hath provided two ways of obeying: the one to do that which I, in my conscience, do believe that I am bound to do, actively; and where I cannot obey actively, there I am willing to lie down, and to suffer what they shall do unto me." His claim was narrower and older than a right to free speech, the one Peter made to the Sanhedrin: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). A man who believes he has been given something to say by God cannot accept that a magistrate has the authority to cancel it, because the magistrate did not grant it. What that conviction produced, over the century that followed, was a body of English dissenters with a long memory and a documented case, and eventually a Toleration Act.

(Q) "I told him, as to this matter, I was at a point with him; for if I were out of prison to-day, I would preach the Gospel again to-morrow, by the help of God." + Source: John Bunyan, A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr John Bunyan, written in prison and first printed in 1765. Justice Kelynge had just finished passing sentence: three months, then banishment, and if he came back, "you must stretch by the neck for it, I tell you plainly." This was Bunyan’s reply, spoken as the jailer was pulling him away.

(T5) Truth carried in a story reaches people that a treatise never touches. + Every parent knows the experience. You explain something carefully six times, and the child nods and has not got it, and then you tell a story about a boy and a dog and you watch it land. Bunyan had this argument with his own friends before he published, and he printed the exchange in his rhymed apology so we could hear both halves of it. "But they want solidness," they said. "Speak, man, thy mind," he answered. "They drown the weak; metaphors make us blind." His answer is not that stories are easier. It is that God got there first. The law God gave Israel taught by types: physical objects and ceremonies that stood for realities they could not yet see, a lamb for a substitute, a curtain for exclusion, a scapegoat for guilt carried away. Bunyan runs through the list with obvious pleasure, "by calves and sheep, by heifers and by rams, by birds and herbs, and by the blood of lambs," and asks what sober man would accuse the author of that of wanting solidness. The prophets spoke in pictures; so did Christ, whose commonest way of teaching was a short story about farming, money or a family quarrel. There is a real cost, and Bunyan takes it seriously enough to answer it in verse at both ends of the book. A picture can be misread. An allegory can be enjoyed as entertainment and put down. So he closes by warning the reader not to be "extreme, in playing with the outside of my dream," but to "put by the curtains, look within my veil," throw the dross away and keep the gold. That is the discipline that separates his method from mere illustration: the story is a container, and the reader is responsible for opening it.

(Q) "My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold / The truth, as cabinets enclose the gold." + Source: John Bunyan, "The Author’s Apology for his Book," prefixed to The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), modernized spelling. The apology is a defence in rhyme, written because Bunyan’s friends were divided about whether the book should be printed at all. "Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so."

(Q) "Then said the other, Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good." + Source: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part One (1678), the crossing of the river, modernized spelling. Christian is drowning within sight of the gate, convinced after the whole journey that he is going to be lost at the last. It is Hopeful, standing in the same water, who says this. Bunyan gives the final word about dying not to the man who has the answers but to the friend who is in it with him, and the verse he puts in Christian’s mouth a moment later, once the fear breaks, is the one about passing through the waters (Isaiah 43:2). Three hundred years of English-speaking Christians have asked for that page at deathbeds.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His book went where the church could not, and reached readers who owned almost nothing else. + For two centuries, in English cottages that held perhaps four books, two of them were the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was cheap, it was short, it could be read aloud in the evening, and it required no education whatever. Then it travelled. Missionaries translated it wherever they went, often before they translated much of the Bible, because it could be put into a new language by someone who knew a story better than he knew Hebrew. Isabel Hofmeyr’s study of those translations, The Portable Bunyan, follows it through some two hundred languages, eighty of them African, and shows it being rewritten at every stop by the people who received it. The literary establishment came round too, which for a jailed tinker took some doing. Thomas Babington Macaulay, reviewing the book in 1831 for a magazine that had no particular use for Puritans, ended his essay by naming the only two English minds of the later seventeenth century that he thought possessed imagination in a very eminent degree: "One of those minds produced the Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim’s Progress." Charles Spurgeon, the most-read preacher of Victorian England, put it from the other side: "Next to the Bible, the book that I value most is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I believe I have read it through at least a hundred times." It was Spurgeon who said of Bunyan that you could prick him anywhere and "his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him." The plainest measure of the reach is the one the Oxford editor gives. Since February 1678 the book has not been out of print, and it has been translated into over two hundred languages. The claims that go beyond that, the copy counts and the "best-selling book in English after the Bible," rest on nothing anyone can check, and Bunyan does not need them.

(†) Christians who agreed with each other about very little went on reading him together. + Part of this is simply that he refused to build the walls. Bunyan owned water baptism to be God’s ordinance, a practice Christ himself laid on the church to keep, and said so in print, "but I make no idol of it," and he would not make it the test of who could sit down at the Lord’s table with him. He would not even take the party name: asked what he wished to be called, he answered "a Christian, a Believer, or other such name which is approved by the Holy Ghost," and said the titles of Anabaptist, Independent and Presbyterian "came neither from Jerusalem, nor Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon." He put the reason for the open table in one of the flattest sentences he ever wrote: he would not "let water baptism be the rule, the door, the bolt, the bar, the wall of division between the righteous, and the righteous." The Bedford congregation had been built that way from the start, and its book records a man received into fellowship "though differing in judgement about some outward things." It cost him. Four men, William Kiffin, Thomas Paul, Henry Danvers and John Denne, all came at him in print in the 1670s, and what they printed was rough even by the standards of a century that enjoyed a quarrel: by his own account there were "some comparing me to the devil, others to a bedlam, others to a sot." A bedlam was a madman, named for the London asylum, and a sot was a fool, the word Bunyan had turned on himself in Grace Abounding when he wrote that he was an ignorant sot. He answered them, and then he let it go: "I am thine to serve thee, Christian, so long as I can look out at those eyes, that have had so much dirt thrown at them by many." Something similar happened from above him in the world. John Owen, Cromwell’s chaplain, vice-chancellor of Oxford and among the heaviest theological minds in England, took trouble over the Bedford brazier: a memoir of Owen published in 1721 says that he wrote to Bishop Barlow of Lincoln on Bunyan’s behalf and finally got the Lord Chancellor’s order that released him from the second imprisonment. The much-repeated story that Owen told Charles II he would gladly trade all his learning for the tinker’s power of preaching is a tradition rather than a record; Joseph Ivimey printed it in his history of the Baptists in 1814, and introduced it himself with the words "it is reported." The reading never became denominational property. Anglicans, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists and Catholics have all claimed him, and the twentieth century’s best-known Christian apologist took him up as literature rather than as a tract. C. S. Lewis gave a talk on it for the BBC in 1962, printed as "The Vision of John Bunyan," in which he argued that the book would be immeasurably weakened as a work of art if the flames of hell were not always flickering on the horizon. Lewis had noticed what a sentimental reading loses: the road matters because the city really is going to burn.

(†) Where his own record is against him: he wrote his opponents out of the mercy of God, and never took it back. + Bunyan’s first two books, written at twenty-seven and twenty-eight, were attacks on the Quakers. There was a genuine dispute underneath them. The Friends he met in Bedfordshire, Friends being the name the Quakers used among themselves, spoke of Christ chiefly as a light within, and Bunyan, who had fought his way to peace by looking away from his own inside altogether, heard that as the loss of the actual man who died at Jerusalem and is now bodily in heaven. He reports one exchange that he clearly found decisive: a Quaker woman named Anne Blackly "did bid me in the audience of many, ’To throw away the scriptures.’ To which I answered, ’No, for then the devil would be too hard for me.’" That is a disagreement, and it can be argued. What he did with it is the trouble. In Some Gospel Truths Opened he wrote of the Quakers as men "whose consciences are seared with an hot iron, and they being sealed up unto destruction," and told his readers that they "must give heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils." In the Vindication a year later he set out to prove "that the Quakers are liars." Sealed up unto destruction is not a claim about an argument. It is a verdict on where particular souls will spend eternity, and no man is in a position to hand it down. Edward Burrough, answering for the Quakers, gave as good as he got and called Bunyan "one of Gogs Army," so nobody in this quarrel has clean hands. But Burrough is not the subject here. Bunyan is, and Bunyan did not soften. A decade later, in The Heavenly Footman, he was still telling readers to "have a care of Quakers, Ranters, Freewillers," and in the same breath not to keep too much company with some Anabaptists, "though I go under that name myself." Anabaptist was the label pinned on anyone who baptized believers rather than infants, and it was a term of abuse long before it was anything else, which is what makes that aside worth sitting with: he knew exactly what it was like to be named by his enemies, and he went on naming. In the sixth edition of Grace Abounding, the last one he revised before he died, he went back into his own conversion story and added a numbered list of eight Quaker errors that the 1666 edition had not contained, with the comment that "many more vile and abominable things were in those days fomented by them." Thirty-two years after the quarrel began, his last thought about it was to put more in. It is worth setting that beside the sentence about baptism and the wall of division, because the two together show a man who knew perfectly well how to disagree without shutting the door, and did not do it here. There is a second place where readers have flinched, and it is fair to name it: in Part One, Christian leaves his wife and children behind, putting "his fingers in his Ears, and ran on crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life." Bunyan did not think that a fault. He printed Christ’s hardest word about family in the margin beside it (Luke 14:26), and when he came to write Part Two he did not apologize for Christian; he sent Christiana after him, and had her blame herself for staying behind. The scene is his considered judgment, not his oversight, and it should be argued with on those terms.