John Bunyan

The Tinker

Bunyan was born in 1628 in Elstow, a village just outside Bedford, into a family of tinkers — itinerant menders of pots and pans, working at the bottom of English class society. He had perhaps two years of formal schooling. He served briefly in the Parliamentary army during the Civil War. He took up his father's trade. He married, by his own account, a woman so poor that she brought to the marriage only two devotional books her father had given her.

By his own description Bunyan was, in his early twenties, a champion swearer. Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company in all manner of vice and ungodliness. He played tipcat on the village green on Sundays, danced, swore with such vigor that a woman of the village — herself, by his own description, a very loose and ungodly wretch — stopped him in the street and told him he was the worst-mouthed man she had ever heard, and that he was spoiling the children. He considered the gospel something for other kinds of people.

He stood there with nothing to say. The town's worst had just outranked him.

The Awakening

The rebuke from the swearing woman cut him in a way nothing had cut him before. He began going to church. He read his wife's books. He started reforming his outward behavior. He gave up tipcat and dancing. He even became, in the eyes of his neighbors, a religious man. And he himself thought, for a while, that he was making real progress.

Then he overheard, by accident, three or four poor women in Bedford sitting in a doorway in the sun, talking about the things of God. They were not talking about religious duty. They were talking about the new birth. They were talking about their own wretchedness of heart, their unbelief, the comforts and supports of grace. And Bunyan listened in agony, because he realized he did not know what they were talking about. They had something he did not have.

This is the fault line in every honest conversion. There is the moral reformation that fallen religion can produce — and then there is the new birth, which is something altogether different in kind. The reformation can be done by the will. The birth has to be done to you. Bunyan saw, listening to those women in the sun, that he had been busy with the first and had nothing of the second. He started to seek God in earnest.

The Long Despair

And then came the years of horror. Grace Abounding is named for what God did at the end of the story, but most of the book is the catalog of what Bunyan suffered to get there. He became convinced — at first vaguely, then with terrible specificity — that he had committed the unforgivable sin. He had “sold Christ” in his own mind by once entertaining the thought, in a moment of inner temptation, of letting Christ go. He could not unsay the inner sentence. And once he believed he had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit, every passage of warning in Scripture rose up to confirm his condemnation.

The book reads like a man in psychological siege. He hears verses sounding in his head like cannons: Esau sold his birthright. There is a sin unto death. He cannot pray. He cannot sleep. He sometimes cannot eat. He walks the fields in such torment that he says he envied the toads and the dogs because they had no souls to lose. He felt himself, in his own words, shut up unto the judgment to come.

Three things must be said about this. First, the depth of Bunyan's despair was not exaggeration; it was the ordinary face of a sensitive conscience that has begun to see the holiness of God and the depravity of self with biblical accuracy and has not yet seen Christ. Second, the persistence of the despair was the work of God, not the failure of God. The Spirit was tearing down a fortress of self-righteousness so completely that when the rescue came, there would be no part of Bunyan left that could claim credit for the result. Third, this is what the ground actually disappearing looks like up close. It is not pretty. But the arms underneath are real.

The Sentence

And then, on an ordinary day, walking through a field, the sentence came into his mind. He was not reading Scripture. He was not praying. The words simply dropped. Thy righteousness is in heaven.

He stopped where he stood. He looked, with the eyes of his soul, and saw it: that Christ was at God's right hand, my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, He wants my righteousness, for that was just before Him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

This is the gospel hitting the precise nerve in a soul that the entire previous decade of religion had inflamed. Bunyan's torment was that he could not produce a righteousness adequate to a holy God. The sentence that rescued him did not say try harder. It said: your righteousness is not in your hands at all. It is in heaven. It is Christ Himself. It is fixed at the right hand of the Father. It does not waver because your mood wavers. It does not vanish because you sin. It does not improve because you obey. It is who Christ is, accounted to who you are, by faith.

And then Bunyan did the thing that ought to be recorded every time this story is told, because it is the whole difference between a man rescued by God and a man comforted by a mood. He went home and looked for the sentence in his Bible. He could not find it. He turned the pages of a book he knew well, hunting for the words that had just lifted a decade off his chest, and they were not there — and he felt his heart begin to sink again. He kept looking. And then a second sentence came to him, and this one had an address: “It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). There it was, in Paul's own hand. The words in the field had been true after all, and now he could show you where they lived.

Bunyan would not rest his soul on a sentence he could not find in the Bible. Do not rest yours on this page. Go and check.

This is the doctrine of justification not as a textbook entry but as a chain dropping off a man's neck in a Bedfordshire field. Bunyan ran home. He could not stop weeping with relief. He records that for days afterward he was, as it were, walking on air. The unforgivable sin — that long-held conviction that had left him weary of his life and yet afraid to die — simply could not survive in the same room with the truth that his righteousness was a Person, located in heaven, and not contingent on him at all.

What He Did With It

Bunyan was rescued so thoroughly that the rest of his life became one long preaching sermon on the rescue. He became a Baptist preacher in Bedford. He preached with the directness of a man who had been on the brink of hell and back, in language a tinker could follow, because he was one. The Restoration government re-criminalized non-Anglican preaching, and Bunyan refused to stop. They threw him in Bedford jail in 1660. He stayed there twelve years.

And in jail he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress — the dream-allegory of Christian fleeing the City of Destruction with a great burden on his back, losing it at the cross, and walking through every danger and slough until he crosses the river into the Celestial City. It has been carried into more than two hundred languages, has never once gone out of print, and is by most reckonings the most widely read Christian book in English after the Bible — a portable conversion sermon for three and a half centuries of readers who never met Bunyan and never went to Bedford.

What the book carries — what makes it imperishable — is exactly what Bunyan had received in the field. The pilgrim does not save himself. He cannot lay down the burden by trying. The burden falls off only at the cross, of its own weight. And what the pilgrim faces afterward — Doubting Castle, the Slough of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, the river of death itself — he faces with the steady confidence of a man whose righteousness is in heaven, not on his back.

Why the Chain Had to Be That Heavy

Bunyan's testimony is the working-class proof of what Augustine's and Luther's testimonies prove in the academy. It does not matter how educated, how well-positioned, how consciously religious you are. The fortress of the self has to come down. The conscience has to be stripped of every false comfort it has built. And then — only then — the sentence drops, and the chain falls off, and the burden rolls away, and the soul that thought it was finished discovers it was being prepared the entire time.

The sentence does not always drop in a field. It drops wherever the fortress finally comes down, and those places are rarely picturesque. But here is what makes this more than a moving story: the sentence is true whether or not it has yet dropped on you. Christ's righteousness is at the right hand of the Father this minute. It did not improve when Bunyan's mood improved and it did not fall when he fell. It is held out, in the open, to anyone who will have it — and it is the only righteousness that was ever going to be enough for anybody.

Bunyan did not manufacture that righteousness in a Bedfordshire field. He found out where it was kept.

It is not in your hands. It never was.