to advance a position on the relationship between nature and grace. It might best be seen as a mixture of Puritan theology and spiritual testimony—a stylized account of his life story as he understood it through his own reading of the biblical narrative. With his evocation of 1 Tim 1:15 in the title and his lacing of biblical allusions throughout his work, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding offers a profound reflection on human existence lived east of Eden.
The tumultuous British political and religious history of the seventeenth century provides the background for approaching Grace Abounding. The political battles between the king and the Parliament as well as the theological tensions between the Church of England and the Independent churches both impact the course of Bunyan’s life. During the Civil War (1642–51) Bunyan served in the Parliamentary army, but when his regiment was disbanded in 1649 he returned to his trade as a tinker.49 In 1653 Bunyan became a member of the Independent church in Bedford and a few years later began preaching in public. Following Oliver Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored under Charles II (1660) and public preaching by those not licensed to do so became a matter of importance to local magistrates. In November of 1660 Bunyan was arrested for preaching and sentenced to three months in prison. His release was contingent upon his assurance that he would not preach in public again. At the end of his initial sentence, Bunyan refused to offer this assurance and so he remained in prison for the next twelve years. In 1666 Bunyan published Grace Abounding. Granted a royal pardon in 1672, Bunyan was released from prison. That same year the congregation at Bedford called him to be their pastor. He was imprisoned again for six months in 1677, probably for refusing to attend the parish church, and in the following year The Pilgrim’s Progress first appeared in print. During a trip to London he fell ill and died in 1688.
The last work that Bunyan completed before serving his twelve-year prison sentence was The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded in which he expounded his “covenant theology,” an area of great interest among Puritan thinkers. A number of Puritan concerns clustered around the idea of covenant (e.g., election, assurance of salvation, justification by faith), but at the heart of the debate was the issue of the individual’s relationship to God. Bunyan himself speaks of a “covenant of works” and a “covenant of grace” (Heb 8:8–13). The covenant of works existed between God and Adam before the fall. The Lord commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge under punishment of death (Gen 2:16–17). The Ten Commandments, in Bunyan’s view, are identical in substance to the command given to Adam.50 With the fall, all of humanity falls under the punishment for Adam’s disobedience. In his work on Bunyan, Pieter de Vries describes the new condition created by the fall. “Bunyan regarded the fall as a radical breach between God and man. From a human perspective it may be said to constitute a severance forever, without any likelihood whatsoever to bridge the chasm between man and God. The gloomiest hues are hardly adequate to paint man’s predicament. He is dead in trespasses and sin.”51 The only escape for this bleak situation is a sharing in the covenant of grace established between the Father and the Son. This is established through faith, understood not as a human achievement but as a divine gift. In terms of the experience of the individual, a life lived under the covenant of works would produce a personality that is “sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by fears and insistent ideas” as well as one marked by a “fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair” as William James described Bunyan.52
The Bunyan scholar Michael Davies argues that the distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace provides the key to understanding Grace Abounding. “Far from being a random sequence of unconnected experiences, impossible to fathom or to follow by convert and reader alike, Grace Abounding can be read according to a lucid process of salvation, charting the sinning believer’s journey from a guilt-ridden state of enslavement under the covenant of law and works (according to the terms of Bunyan’s covenant theology) to the liberty offered by a covenant of grace, faith in which brings blessed release for Bunyan from incarcerating fears and doubts.”53 As we discover, the blessed release is not a permanent state of being for Bunyan. In fact, the reader of Grace Abounding is struck by Bunyan’s on-going vacillation between the terror of a life under the covenant of works and the serenity of a life under the covenant of grace. “Thus, by the strange and unusual assaults of the tempter, was my soul, like a broken vessel, driven, as with the winds, and tossed sometimes headlong into despair; sometimes upon the covenant of works, and sometimes to wish that the new covenant, and the conditions thereof, might so far as I thought myself concerned, be turned another way, and changed.”54
Viewed from the perspective of the person living under the covenant of grace, Grace Abounding recalls Paul’s dichotomy between the old Adam and the new Adam. “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom 5:18–19). Experiencing the covenant of works, Bunyan writes, “I was more loathsome in mine own eyes than was a toad, and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too: sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain.”55 In a later reprise from his afflictions, he experiences the covenant of grace when he considers the righteousness of Christ. “Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed, I was loosed from my affliction and irons, my temptations also fled away: so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now I went also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God . . .”56
Many readers of Bunyan’s autobiography would most likely agree with Vincent Newey’s assessment: “Reading Grace Abounding is like travelling in a mighty maze whose plan is far from clear, and where at every turn we meet some new and puzzling psychodrama suggesting not so much providential design as solitary struggle in a spectacular universe of the mind’s making.”57 Bunyan begins by recounting the nightmares that he suffered as a young boy of nine or ten when fearful visions of the fires of hell plagued his sleep. After marrying his first wife around 1648, Bunyan became convinced of his sinfulness, but tried unsuccessfully to reform his life. Once after hearing a sermon on the evil of breaking the Sabbath, he soon began playing a game of “cat” in which the player strikes a wooden dart that has been placed on the ground with a cudgel and then hits the airborne dart. “But the same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole; just as I was about to strike it the second time, a voice did suddenly dart from the heaven into my soul, which said, Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to heaven? Or have thy sins, and go to hell? At this I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to heaven, and was as if I had with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if he did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for these, and other my ungodly practices.”58
He first had his eyes opened when “the good providence of God” brought him to the town of Bedford. While he was there he “came where there was three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, and talking about the things of God; and being now willing to hear them discourse, I drew near to hear what they said; for I was now a brisk talker also myself in matters of religion: but now I may say, I heard, but I understood not; for they were far above out of my reach, for their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts, and also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature: they talked how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported against
