2 - Bunyan's World

Summary

It is a commonplace of contemporary literary criticism that looking into an author's life for the ultimate explanations of his or her writing is at worst a futile and at best a frustrating exercise because the meanings and effects of texts are created through the way that they are read and interpreted by diverse readers at different times. It would be a foolhardy critic, however, who suggested that one would make the most of reading the writings of John Bunyan without knowing something of his dramatic life and of the turbulent times in which his writings were composed and first published. Bunyan's life was inextricably bound up with the momentous political, social and religious changes of the seventeenth century and his writings responded to and intervened in the debates and arguments that accompanied and occasioned those changes.

Some readers may value his writings as a source of information about society in the period of their composition, while others look to knowledge about the period to illuminate aspects of Bunyan's writings that are unclear today, yet others, of whom I count myself one, are fascinated by the dialectic process we may see at work between text and context.

There is another vital dimension to Bunyan's world that this chapter will explore, which is for some readers the greatest challenge in appreciating his writing and for others its greatest gift. Bunyan was, without doubt, a man of his time but he was also, and profoundly, a writer working in the service of a particular religious understanding of the place of human beings in the world. While many of the details of Bunyan's beliefs, his approach to living in their light, and of communicating them to others, will be explored in the sections of this study that focus on individual texts, this chapter will offer an introduction to the particular strand of Protestant theology that informed his writings and defined his life.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

John Bunyan lived through some of the most tumultuous days of English and British history when the world was, in the scriptural phrase that took on particular resonance in the period, ‘turned upside down’ (Acts 17.6).