Nov – Week 3: John Bunyan – Sonshine Cottage

Bio

We will be starting our literary journey through Pilgrim’s Progress next week.

In order to better appreciate the book, it is important to have some biographical background to the author, John Bunyan, and the conditions under which the story was written.

Born in 1628 at Elstow, near Bedford, to Thomas Bunyan and Margaret Bentley.
Thomas Bunyan, a brazier or tinker, was poor but not destitute
John Bunyan was not educated well. He became rebellious, frequently indulging in cursing.

It was my delight to be taken captive by the devil at his will: being filled with all unrighteousness; that from a child I had but few equals, both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God
– John Bunyan

In 1648, Bunyan married a God-fearing woman whose name remains unknown, and whose only dowry was two books: Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety. When Bunyan read those books, he was convicted of sin.

One day, as I was passing in the field, this sentence fell upon my soul:

Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ, at God’s right hand;

there, I say, as my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was a-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.

Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away.

Now I went home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.

I lived for some time very sweetly at peace with God through Christ. Oh! methought, Christ! Christ! There was nothing but Christ that was before my eyes. I saw now not only looking upon this and the other benefits of Christ apart, as of His blood, burial, and resurrection, but considered Him as a whole Christ!

It was glorious to me to see His exaltation, and the worth and prevalency of all His benefits, and that because now I could look from myself to Him, and would reckon that all those graces of God that now were green in me, were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunk at home!

Oh, I saw that my gold was in my trunk at home!

In Christ my Lord and Saviour!

Now Christ was all

-John Bunyan,(Grace Abounding, paragraphs 229-32, pp. 129-31).

Prior to his arrest, Bunyan had remarried, this time to a godly young woman named Elizabeth.
- She pleaded repeatedly for his release, but judges such as Sir Matthew Hale and Thomas Twisden rejected her plea.
- So Bunyan remained in prison with no formal charge and no legal sentence, in defiance of the habeas corpus provisions of the Magna Carta, because he refused to give up preaching the gospel and denounced the Church of England as false .

If I am freed today, I will preach tomorrow.
-John Bunyan

In the mid-1660s, Bunyan wrote extensively, with only the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs at his side.
His prison years were times of difficult trials, however. Bunyan experienced what his Pilgrim’s Progress characters Christian and Faithful would later suffer at the hands of Giant Despair, who thrust pilgrims “into a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking.” Bunyan especially felt the pain of separation from his wife and children, particularly “blind Mary,” describing it as a “pulling of the flesh from my bones.”
John Owen, minister of an Independent congregation at Leadenhall Street, London, successfully appealed for Bunyan to Thomas Barlow, bishop of Lincoln, who used his influence at court to secure Bunyan’s release from prison on June 21, 1677.
In 1685, he published the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress, dealing with Christiana’s pilgrimage.
In 1688, Bunyan died suddenly from a fever that he caught while traveling in cold weather.
- After telling his friends that his greatest desire was to be with Christ, he raised his hands to heaven, and cried, “Take me, for I come to Thee!” and then died.
- He was buried in Bunhill Fields, close to Thomas Goodwin and John Owen.

Weep not for me, but for yourselves. I go to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will, no doubt, through the mediation of his blessed Son, receive me, though a sinner; where I hope we ere long shall meet, to sing the new song, and remain everlastingly happy, world without end”
-John Bunyan, on his deathbed

source: read the full article on Monergism.com

Learn More

Pilgrim’s Progress

The story is an allegory of the christian life. We will cover analysis of this classic in more detail in the next lesson.

ASSIGNMENT

Create a post on your blog that summarizes your thoughts on the movie.
Use the List block
Use the Video block to embed the movie
Due tomorrow Fri 11.21.24