A Reader’s Guide to John Bunyan

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. PSALM 119:105

Bunyan wrote around sixty works in the thirty-odd years of his ministry — treatises, sermons, controversies, allegories and verse — and all of them are long out of copyright. Most readers need only a handful. Here is a short map.

Begin here

The Pilgrim’s Progress. Begin here, and come back here. Read the First Part through, preferably in an edition that keeps Bunyan’s margin references, since half the meaning is in the Scriptures he cites. Then read the Second Part, which is slower and gentler and repays patience. Both parts are in the Ochorus library. Many readers find it helps to read aloud; Bunyan wrote for the ear.

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. His spiritual autobiography, published in 1666, and the key to everything else. It is in the Ochorus library, with the short accounts of his call to preach and his imprisonment. Read it for its honesty about temptation and for the sentence in the field. If you are prone to anxious fears about your salvation, read it with a friend and keep going to the end.

The other allegories

The Holy War. A long allegory of the siege, fall and recapture of the town of Mansoul, contested between Shaddai and Diabolus. It is more elaborate and more military than The Pilgrim’s Progress, and less loved, but full of shrewd observation about the soul.

The Life and Death of Mr Badman. A dialogue tracing the life of a thoroughly bad man from boyhood to a quiet death — Bunyan’s grim counterpart to the pilgrim’s journey, and a sharp portrait of ordinary wickedness in a seventeenth-century town.

Sermons and treatises

Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ. An extended exposition of John 6:37, him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. Perhaps the warmest of all his books, and the best companion to the chapter on the wicket gate.

The Jerusalem Sinner Saved. Written near the end of his life, on Christ’s command that the gospel be preached first at Jerusalem: that the worst sinners are especially invited.

The Heavenly Footman. A short, vigorous sermon on running the race so as to obtain. Good for the sluggish.

Saved by Grace, The Fear of God and The Acceptable Sacrifice are sound, pastoral treatises, plainer than the allegories but full of the same spirit. I Will Pray with the Spirit, written in prison, is his short book on prayer and on the freedom of Spirit-led prayer against set forms.

Approach with care

Bunyan’s controversial writings — against the Quakers early in his ministry, and on baptism and communion later — show him as a vigorous, sometimes harsh debater. They are worth reading for the history, and his case that disagreement over water baptism should not bar believers from fellowship still speaks. But they are not the place to begin. A Few Sighs from Hell, an early sermon on the rich man and Lazarus, is powerful but relentless, and anxious readers may wish to leave it aside.

About Bunyan

John Brown’s John Bunyan: His Life, Times and Work (1885), by a later minister of Bunyan’s own Bedford congregation, remains a full and affectionate life. Christopher Hill’s A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People (1988) sets Bunyan in the radical world of the English Revolution; it is learned and illuminating, though its interests are more political than devotional. Richard L. Greaves’s Glimpses of Glory (2002) is the most thorough modern scholarly study. For a warm and readable introduction, Faith Cook’s Fearless Pilgrim (2008) is a good place to start. And the Ochorus biography of Bunyan, on his author page, tells the story briefly.

Counsels for reading him

Read him with the Bible open. His margins are a running concordance; follow them, and you will learn more Scripture than you expected.

Read him as a friend, not a rule. He is describing a road, not setting an examination. Your journey will not match Christian’s in every detail.

Read him for Christ. Bunyan asks his readers, at the close of the First Part, to throw away his dross and keep his gold. The gold is always the same: Christ crucified, Christ our righteousness in heaven, Christ with us in the river.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7–8