Bunyan, John
BUNYAN, JOHN (1628–1688), English Nonconformist and author of The Pilgrim's Progress. The son of a brazier, John Bunyan was born in the village of Elstow, near Bedford, and may have attended a local grammar school. During the Civil War he served with the parliamentary forces at Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, where he came into contact with various religious sects. In the early 1650s he underwent prolonged spiritual turmoil, at the nadir of which he was convinced that he had betrayed Christ by allying himself with the devil. About 1655 Bunyan joined the open-communion Baptist church at Bedford, whose pastor was John Gifford, a former royalist officer. Some members of the congregation were sympathetic to the tenets of the Fifth Monarchists, a radical millenarian group to which Bunyan himself was apparently attracted for a time.
Bunyan launched his career as a preacher and prolific author before the monarchy and the Church of England were restored in 1660. For preaching illegally, he was arrested in November 1660 and imprisoned for twelve years in the county jail at Bedford. While imprisoned, he spent much of his time making laces to support his family and writing new books, but near the end of his incarceration he also worked closely with representatives of four other churches to organize a network of preachers and teachers in northern Bedfordshire and contiguous areas in order to resist the uniformity imposed by the Church of England and thus help to ensure the survival of Nonconformity during future periods of persecution. In January 1672 Bunyan was chosen pastor of the Bedford church, although he was not released from prison until the following September. The period of intense ministerial activity that ensued was threatened when a warrant for his arrest was issued in March 1675. Although Bunyan eluded this warrant by temporarily fleeing Bedford, he was rearrested late in 1676, only to be freed the following June. The last dozen years of his life were devoted to preaching in the Midlands and London, as well as to further writing. When the Roman Catholic monarch, James II, tried to win support by granting toleration to Nonconformists. Bunyan was cautious, although some members of his congregation accepted positions in the reorganized Bedford Corporation. Bunyan did not live to see James deposed in the Glorious Revolution, for he died in London on August 31, 1688.
Of Bunyan's approximately sixty works, the most popular is The Pilgrim's Progress, the first part of which was composed during his long imprisonment but not published until 1678. A virtual epic of the Christian life couched in Puritan ideals, the story of Christian's struggles from the Slough of Despond to the Eternal City draws heavily on Bunyan's own religious experience. The dramatic power of the narrative is enhanced by vivid symbolism, homely colloquialisms, and myriad human touches. The same ground is traversed in more quiescent fashion by Christiana and her children in the second part, published in 1684, in which Bunyan paid more attention to women. Both parts depend extensively on Bunyan's spiritual autobiography, Grade Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), a sine qua non for understanding all his works. In its pages such psychologists as William James and Josiah Royce have sought the key to Bunyan's personality. Whether he was in fact troubled by psychotic disorders is difficult to ascertain, for Grace Abounding, like other works of this genre, follows a rather commonplace thematic pattern: the path to sainthood commences with denunciations of one's utter depravity.
Bunyan's attempt to repeat the success of The Pilgrim's Progress with The Holy War (1682), a ponderous albeit technically superior allegory, produced a sophisticated but less personal work. Its complex allegorical levels embrace world history, recent English events, the experience of the individual soul, and probably an apocalyptic vision. Bunyan abandoned allegory to depict the wayward reprobate in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), which, although it lacks the emotional intensity and dramatic tension of The Pilgrim's Progress, has captured the interest of both literary specialists, as a possible forerunner of the novel, and historians, for its incisive comments on English society.
Bunyan's theological views were substantially shaped by the Bible, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Martin Luther's commentary on Galatians, and works of two early seventeenth-century Puritans, Arthur Dent's The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayly's The Practice of Piety (1612). Bunyan's views were essentially compatible with those of other strict Calvinists of his period, such as the Nonconformists John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. This is notably manifest in his exposition of the key concept of the covenants, particularly as expounded in his major theological treatise, The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded (1659). Bunyan's emphasis on God's role in establishing the covenant of grace set him apart from such moderate Calvinists as Richard Baxter, who gave greater prominence to human responsibility, but Bunyan stopped short of the antinomians by insisting that the moral law has a valid and significant place in the covenant of grace. Unlike most strict Calvinists, however, Bunyan repudiated the idea of a baptismal covenant, for in his judgment water baptism was necessary neither for admission to the Lord's Supper nor for church membership. Bunyan hotly debated this subject with such traditional Baptists as Henry Danvers, Thomas Paul, and John Denne. As a controversialist he also engaged in literary debates with the Quakers Edward Burrough and William Penn and with the latitudinarian Edward Fowler. Another prominent theme in Bunyan's theology was millenarianism, the loci classici of which are The Holy City (1665) and Of Antichrist and His Ruin (1692, posthumous).
Although Bunyan achieved virtually instantaneous recognition with the publication of The Pilgrim's Progress, especially in lay Protestant religious circles, critical acclaim was slow to follow. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift referred kindly to his masterpiece, but Edmund Burke and David Hume sneered. With the onset of romanticism and the evangelical revivals, interest in Bunyan soared, and by the Victorian period he was commonly referred to in evangelical circles as a genius. Copies of The Pilgrim's Progress poured from the press—more than thirteen hundred editions by 1938—accompanied by numerous popular commentaries, nearly all from evangelicals. Predictions at the turn of the twentieth century of Bunyan's theological and literary obsolescence proved premature when the atrocities of World War I brought new relevance to his works. Although religious interest in him waned in the late twentieth century, his reputation is now firmly established among students of religion, history, literature, and psychology.
Bibliography
The standard critical edition of Bunyan's works includes The Pilgrim's Progress, edited by James Blanton Wharey and revised by Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1960); Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, edited by Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962); The Holy War, edited by Roger Sharrock and James Forrest (Oxford, 1980); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, edited by Roger Sharrock and James Forrest (Oxford, 1988); and The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan under the general editorship of Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1976–). The best biography is still John Brown's enthusiastic John Bunyan, 1628–1688: His Life, Times, and Work, revised by Frank Mott Harrison (London, 1928). For Bunyan's thought and its antecedents, the standard account is Richard L. Greaves's John Bunyan (Abingdon, U.K., and Grand Rapids, Mich., 1969). A provocative analysis of Bunyan's relationship to his contemporaries is provided in William York Tindall's John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher (New York, 1934). For a full bibliography of Bunyan studies, see James Forrest and Richard L. Greaves's John Bunyan: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1982).
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