John Bunyan: Tinker, Prisoner, Pilgrim

There is a particular kind of pride that comes from having nothing, the kind that refuses to apologize for where it started. John Bunyan had that pride, and he wore it like a badge. He was born in 1628 in Elstow, a small village just south of Bedford, England, to a family so low on the social ladder that he himself would later describe his father’s house as belonging to “that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land.” He was not exaggerating to fish for sympathy. He was making a theological point: if God could do anything worthwhile with a boy from that family, then God deserved every ounce of the credit.

His father, Thomas, was a tinker, a mender and seller of pots, pans, and small metal household goods. It was honest work, and nobody pretended it was anything more than that. John learned the trade from childhood, working the bellows, shaping metal, traveling the lanes of Bedfordshire from village to village with his tools and his wares. He had some schooling, enough to learn to read and write, but it was a bare-bones education, nothing to boast of. The world he grew up in was not one of libraries and lectures. It was mud, and smoke, and the clang of the forge.

What is worth noting, especially given what John Bunyan would eventually write, is that from the very beginning, his inner life was louder than his outer circumstances suggested. Even as a boy, he was troubled by dreams and nagging fears about his soul, disturbed by nightmares vivid enough to leave a mark. He grew up in a world where Calvinist theology was the air everyone breathed, and the doctrine of predestination, the terrifying idea that your eternal destiny might already be decided, and you had no way of knowing which way it went, had a way of lodging itself in a child’s imagination and refusing to leave. The tinker’s son would spend the better part of two decades trying to pry it loose.

The year 1644 hit the Bunyan family hard. John was sixteen years old when both his mother and his sister Margaret died within months of each other. His father, with what must have seemed to the grieving teenager like indecent haste, remarried before the year was out. It was also the year that the English Civil War, Parliament against the King, made its demands on ordinary young men. In November 1644, John Bunyan was conscripted in a county levy and mustered into the Parliamentary army, reporting as a private to the garrison at Newport Pagnell.

The details of his military service are sparse. Newport Pagnell saw no great battles, and Bunyan makes no claim in his later writings to having been a soldier in any particularly heroic sense. What he does record is a story that lodged itself in his memory for the rest of his life: he was drawn out one day to go to a siege, but at the last moment, another man in his company asked to go in his place. Bunyan stepped back. The man went forward. And as that soldier stood sentinel at the siege, he was shot in the head with a musket ball and died. John Bunyan walked away from that moment carrying something that would later become one of the most powerful theological convictions of his life, that God’s hand is in the small, unchosen moments as much as the large and deliberate ones.

He served roughly three years before his company disbanded and he returned to Elstow. The army had changed him in ways he probably couldn’t fully articulate at the time. He had been exposed to the full range of what men do when the social structures that normally restrain them are loosened by war, the swearing, the gambling, the coarseness, the violence. He had also been exposed, for the first time in any sustained way, to serious Puritan preaching and Puritan ideas. Both of those exposures would matter. The corruption would come out first. The Puritanism would take a few more years to catch up.

Back in Elstow, Bunyan picked up his father’s trade again and dove headlong into the pleasures available to a young man with no particular religious conviction and no one telling him otherwise. By his own accounting, and he was, if anything, harder on himself than the facts strictly required, he was a dedicated and enthusiastic sinner. He swore with remarkable creativity and frequency. He lied. He played games on the village green on the Sabbath. He loved bell-ringing in the church tower with a passion that might charitably be called spiritual if it hadn’t been quite so obviously just fun. He danced. He read cheap popular stories. None of this would strike us today as particularly scandalous, but Bunyan lived in a world where the distance between bell-ringing on Sunday and the gates of hell was theologically measurable, and he knew it.

Around 1648, he was about twenty, he married a local woman whose name history has, with a certain cruel irony, entirely failed to preserve. She was a godly woman, raised by a godly father, and she brought to the marriage exactly what her family had to offer: almost nothing in the way of material goods, and two books. Those books were The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent and The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly. Bunyan records that they “came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household-stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.” But those two books began to do something to him. He started reading them with his wife. He started attending church. He was not yet converted, not even close, but the wheels had begun to turn.

The birth of their first child deepened the crisis. The baby’s name was Mary, and she was born blind. There is something about the arrival of a blind child that has a way of cutting through the noise of a young man’s life and asking very direct questions about what he actually believes and who he actually is. Bunyan began to look at his life with new and uncomfortable honesty. He was not the man he wanted to be. He was not sure, in fact, that he was any kind of man at all, not in the way that mattered. He gave up his most beloved pastimes, grudgingly and in stages. He stopped swearing, at least for a while. He tried church more seriously. He was, as he would later describe it, beginning to sink, and sinking is, sometimes, the beginning of swimming.

One Sunday, he was playing a game of tip-cat (I have heard of cow tipping, but I honestly have no idea how this game is played). While playing tip-cat on the Elstow village green, Bunyan heard a voice inside him, or what felt like a voice, asking a question so direct it stopped his game cold: Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell? He stood there on the green with his stick in his hand and the question hanging over him like a sky. He went home different than he had arrived. He wasn’t converted. But something had cracked.

What followed was one of the most documented and agonizing spiritual crises in the history of Christian literature. Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, is an almost clinical account of a man being pulled apart by his own conscience and the Calvinist theology he had absorbed. The central terror was this: What if he was not among the elect? What if his name was not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, not because of anything he had done or failed to do, but simply because God had not chosen him, had never chosen him, would never choose him? He would work himself into states of near-madness trying to determine his own election. He would find a Scripture that gave comfort, lean his whole weight on it, and then find another that seemed to kick the support out from under him. He experienced this cycle for years. Not weeks. Years.

The lowest point came when a phrase battered its way into his mind and would not leave: Sell Christ. Sell him. Sell him. He described it as a temptation so violent that it felt like someone else was doing the whispering, that the command came at him “again and again and again.” And one terrible morning he felt as though he had given in to it. He records that he felt as though he had sold the Lord Jesus, as Judas had, that a great transaction had taken place in his soul against his will, and that it could not be undone. He believed himself damned. For two years he lived under that shadow, barely functional, working his tinker’s trade through a fog of spiritual terror that no amount of outward behavior could touch. This was the furnace. He would come out the other side changed in ways that almost no amount of ordinary Christian formation could have produced.

The turning point came not through a sermon, not through a dramatic vision, but through something much quieter and more unexpected: he overheard some women talking. Walking through the streets of Bedford one day, he passed by a doorway where three or four poor women were sitting in the sun, talking with each other about the things of God. He stopped and listened. He later wrote that they “spoke as if joy did make them speak,” and that their conversation carried a quality he had never encountered before, a lightness about Scripture, a genuine pleasure in the grace of God, as though they had discovered something so good it simply had to be talked about. He said they seemed to have found “a new world.”

Those women belonged to a small nonconformist congregation called the Bedford Meeting, gathered in St John’s Church, and led by a remarkable pastor named John Gifford, a man who had himself been a dissolute Royalist soldier before his own dramatic conversion. Bunyan began to seek Gifford out. Something about Gifford’s theology and pastoral manner was precisely what the tormented tinker needed: a practical Calvinist who knew that the doctrine of election was meant to be a comfort, not a rack. Gifford helped Bunyan to see that his very desperation, his very anguish over sin, was itself a sign of the Spirit’s work. The man who couldn’t care less about his own damnation was the man to worry about. Bunyan cared desperately. That, Gifford helped him see, meant something.

By around 1655, the crisis had, not ended exactly, but resolved. The terror did not vanish all at once; it faded like a fever breaks, gradually, unevenly, leaving a man weak but alive. Bunyan entered full communion with the Bedford Meeting, was baptized by immersion, and began attending with the regularity and hunger of someone who has been starving for a long time and has finally found food. He was twenty-seven years old. He had four children, a blind daughter among them, a trade that kept bread on the table, and a faith that had been tested in ways that would lend everything he wrote afterward a specific gravity that no amount of theological education could have manufactured. He knew what it felt like to hang over the abyss. He had been there. He had come back.

It did not take long for the congregation to realize that John Bunyan could preach. He had a gift for it that was, in the honest estimation of those around him, simply inexplicable in ordinary terms. He was not trained. He had no formal education to speak of. He had read widely but haphazardly. What he had was a command of ordinary English that cut through pretension like a good blade, an instinct for the concrete image drawn from the world of physical labor and village life, and perhaps most importantly, a firsthand knowledge of the spiritual terrain he was describing. When he talked about the Slough of Despond, he had been there. When he described the burden on Christian’s back, he knew the weight.

He began preaching in the villages around Bedford in the mid-1650s, and his reputation spread beyond Bedfordshire. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II returned to the throne, the legal landscape shifted dramatically. Under the restored crown, it was illegal for anyone not ordained in the Church of England to preach publicly. Bunyan was an ordained nobody, a tinker licensed by no ecclesiastical body and answerable to no bishop. He kept preaching anyway. He was arrested in November 1660 while preparing to preach at a farmhouse in the village of Samsell, charged with violating the Conventicle Act, and brought before the local magistrate.

The hearing was not exactly a showcase for English jurisprudence. The magistrate offered Bunyan a simple deal: stop preaching, and go home. Bunyan declined. He was not trying to make a political statement, exactly, he simply could not agree to a condition that would require him to disobey what he believed was a direct call from God. He was not combative about it. He was calm, clear, and immovable. The magistrate, apparently exasperated, sent him to Bedford County Gaol to await the next quarter session. Bunyan went. He had been given multiple opportunities between his arrest and his final sentencing to recant and walk free. He refused each one. He was sentenced to imprisonment for an indefinite period, until he agreed to stop preaching, which meant, in practice, for as long as he chose to keep being John Bunyan.

The cell was not comfortable, but it was not solitary. Bedford County Gaol was a county jail, not a dungeon, and Bunyan was allowed a degree of movement and interaction that we might find surprising for the era. He was permitted visitors. He made tagged laces to help support his family financially, his hands would not stay idle. He preached to his fellow prisoners. He was occasionally allowed out on parole, though always under the shadow of re-arrest. And he wrote. He wrote with two books beside him, the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and he produced a body of work during those twelve years that would have been a respectable lifetime output for most writers who spent their whole careers in comfortable freedom.

His first wife did not survive to see his release. She died in 1658, before his imprisonment even began, leaving him with four children, including blind Mary. He had married his second wife, Elizabeth, in 1659, just one year before his arrest, and Elizabeth proved to be one of the most extraordinary figures in the whole story. Twice she went before the judges to plead for her husband’s release, carrying herself with a composure and courage that left the courtroom observers startled. She was young, she was new to this family, and she had not signed up for a husband in prison and four stepchildren to raise. She stayed anyway, and she fought. The judges told her flatly that they could not release Bunyan without his submission. She told them flatly that he would not submit. She went home without him, again and again, and got on with the business of keeping the family alive.

By 1672, the political winds had shifted enough that Charles II issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the penal laws against nonconformists. Bunyan was released, after twelve and a half years. He walked out of Bedford Gaol in May of 1672, a free man. He was forty-four years old. He had gone in as a preacher of local reputation and a tinker by trade. He came out as the author of multiple published works, a man tempered by suffering in ways that had burned away the dross and left something remarkably pure behind. He would have one more brief stint in prison, six months in 1677, in the town jail on the bridge over the River Ouse, and it was during that second, shorter imprisonment that he began work on the book that would change everything.

The book begins with a man, his name is Christian, standing in a field with a great burden on his back, reading a book, weeping, and crying out, What shall I do? That cry was not invented. That cry had come straight out of John Bunyan’s own chest, sometime in the late 1640s, when he stood on the Elstow village green and felt the weight of his sin and his terror and his lostness all at once. The genius of The Pilgrim’s Progress is that Bunyan took the most private, internal, agonizing spiritual experience of his life and translated it into a story that a child could follow and a scholar could spend a career unpacking, and both would find themselves in it.

He wrote it in the form of a dream, a literary device borrowed from a long tradition, but one he deployed with unusual freshness. Christian leaves his home, his wife, and his children, and travels toward a distant Celestial City. Along the way he encounters the Slough of Despond (a boggy, sucking depression that swallows progress), the Hill Difficulty, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the town of Vanity Fair with its distractions and its violence, the Giant Despair, and the Delectable Mountains from which the destination can finally, just barely, be seen. Every one of these was, for Bunyan, a real place, not on a map, but in the soul. The Slough of Despond was Squitch Fen, a wet morass near his old cottage. The Wicket Gate was the actual wicket gate at Elstow Abbey church. The Evangelist who points the way was, in some sense, John Gifford. He was not writing fantasy. He was writing autobiography in disguise.

Part One was published on February 18, 1678, by a London publisher named Nathaniel Ponder. It was an immediate sensation. It went through edition after edition, eleven printings before Bunyan’s death, a pace that almost nothing achieved in that era. It was the kind of book that found its way into homes that owned almost no other books, sitting beside the Bible on a cottage shelf, read aloud in the evenings, passed hand to hand until the pages fell apart. It spoke to ordinary people in their own language about the most universal thing there is: the feeling that you are a long way from where you are supposed to be, and you desperately need to find the road.

Released from prison in 1672, Bunyan was formally called as pastor of the Bedford Meeting in January of that year. He had been its de facto spiritual center for years already; the congregation simply made it official. He threw himself into the work with the energy of a man who had spent twelve years sitting still and had a great deal of stored velocity to burn off. He preached at Bedford. He rode on horseback through the villages of Bedfordshire and into neighboring counties. He traveled to London, where he preached to crowds so large they strained the buildings. On one occasion, it was said that twelve hundred people gathered to hear him preach on a weekday morning at seven o’clock, in winter, in the dark.

The nickname that attached itself to him, “Bishop Bunyan,” was partly affectionate and partly ironic, since the Baptists regarded bishops with approximately the same warmth they extended to plague. He had no official title, no bishop’s palace, no ecclesiastical robes. What he had was an authority that came from somewhere the institutional church could not grant and therefore could not revoke. People traveled long distances to hear him. The Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Shorter, became a friend and presented him with a silver-mounted walking stick. He corresponded with people he would never meet. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most influential preachers in England, and he was still, in his own estimation, a tinker from Elstow who had no business being any of this.

Through all of it he kept writing. The second part of Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in 1684, following Christian’s wife Christiana and her children on their own journey to the Celestial City. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman had come in 1680, a grim, unsentimental portrait of a man who never repents and dies badly. The Holy War followed in 1682, a sprawling military allegory about the soul as a city besieged, conquered, recaptured, and defended. By the end of his life he had published nearly sixty works. He refused, despite everything, to leave Bedford for London or any other city that offered him a larger platform. He had been called where he had been called. He stayed.

In the summer of 1688, John Bunyan undertook what would be his last act of pastoral ministry. A young man in Reading had fallen into a serious quarrel with his father, a rupture bad enough that someone thought to ask Bunyan to intervene. He went. He rode the distance from Bedford to Reading, sat down with the father and the son, and apparently said whatever needed to be said, because by the time he left, the estrangement was healed. He had spent his whole life doing this sort of thing, bridging, mending, reconciling, and he did it one last time in August of 1688, at sixty years old, without fanfare.

On the road back, he was overtaken by a storm. Wind and rain came down hard, and by the time he arrived at the house of his friend John Strudwick, a grocer and chandler on Snow Hill in London, he was drenched through and already feeling the chill settle into his chest. A fever followed. It moved fast, the way fevers did in the seventeenth century, before anyone knew quite what to do with them. He died on the morning of August 31, 1688, at Strudwick’s house, surrounded by friends, sixty years old, with the storm already behind him and the Celestial City, if his theology was right about anything, considerably closer than it had been.

He was buried in Bunhill Fields in London, the great Nonconformist cemetery, a fitting resting place for a man who had spent his life outside the established walls of English religion, preaching without license, writing without credentials, and believing without apology. By the time of his death, The Pilgrim’s Progress had already been translated into multiple languages and read by people who would never know what a tinker was or what a Bedfordshire lane looked like in the winter. His grave in Bunhill Fields is still visited today, by people from countries he had never heard of, carrying a book he wrote in a jail cell on a bridge over a river in a town he refused to leave. There are worse epitaphs than that.