John Bunyan

John Bunyan had almost none of the advantages of the other reformers — no university, no Latin, no patron. He was a tinker, a mender of pots, from a poor Bedfordshire family, who after a tormented spiritual struggle (recorded with raw honesty in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners) found peace in the free grace of Christ and became a powerful nonconformist preacher.

It made him a criminal. After the Restoration, preaching outside the established church without a license was illegal, and Bunyan refused to stop. He spent twelve years in Bedford jail rather than promise silence — and there, separated from his blind daughter and his family, he began to write. Out of that prison came The Pilgrim's Progress, the allegory of Christian's journey from the City of Destruction, through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair and the Valley of the Shadow, to the Celestial City.

The book did what a thousand treatises could not: it put the whole Reformed understanding of sin, grace, perseverance, and glory into a story that anyone could follow and no one could forget. For two centuries it was the most widely read book in English after the Bible itself, translated into hundreds of languages and carried by missionaries around the world. Bunyan proved that the deepest theology could be preached by a tinker — and that a jail cell could become one of the most fruitful pulpits in Christian history.