Bunyan in Bedford jail
Pilgrim's Progress written in prison
John Bunyan is a tinker — a mender of pots and pans — from a poor family in Bedfordshire, who has had a conversion experience so prolonged and agonizing that he later writes a spiritual autobiography about it called Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. He is not educated in any formal sense. He preaches anyway, without a license, in the fields and barns of Bedfordshire, and people come by the hundreds.
When Charles II is restored to the English throne in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity requires all worship to be conducted within the Church of England by licensed ministers, Bunyan refuses. He is arrested in November 1660 for preaching without a license.
He could be released by promising to stop. He refuses.
He spends twelve years in Bedford jail, with a brief release in the middle. During this time he preaches to his fellow prisoners, pastors his congregation by correspondence, and writes. He writes constantly — commentaries, doctrinal treatises, spiritual autobiography.
And he writes the book.
The Pilgrim's Progress — published in 1678 after a second, shorter imprisonment — is the story of a man named Christian who flees the City of Destruction and makes his way, through the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, to the Celestial City.
It is the most widely read book in the English language after the Bible. It has been translated into more languages than any book except the Bible. It has never been out of print.
“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.”
— John Bunyan, opening of The Pilgrim's Progress, 1678 AD
“A highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it, but is shall be for for him who walks in the Way. Wicked fools will not go there.”
Bunyan wrote the most widely read Christian allegory in history in a prison cell in Bedford.
He was there because he would not stop preaching. He could have been released at any point by promising to stop. He did not promise.
The Pilgrim's Progress is the overflow of a man who has been through the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death in his own interior life — who has written Grace Abounding about his own years of spiritual anguish — and is now writing from the other side of it.
The authority of the book comes from the fact that Bunyan has been where Christian goes. The valley he describes is the valley he walked. The burden that falls from Christian's back at the cross is the burden Bunyan himself laid down.
You can only give away what you have received. You can only describe what you have been through.
What has your journey through the difficult terrain given you to offer others who are still in it?