Introduction

For one hundred and twenty six years, from 1534 to 1660, there existed in Great Britain something that to us now seems almost unimaginable: an unbroken line of Evangelical Calvinists who were among those who occupied the highest ranks of aristocratic, political, economic, and cultural life in England and Scotland. Noblemen like the Third Earl of Huntington; courtiers and gentlemen poets like Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the Countess of Pembroke; scholars at Cambridge University, like Hugh Lattimore and Martin Bucer; pastors and theologians like Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, Samuel Rutherford, John Owen, and Richard Baxter, statesmen like Oliver Cromwell, and even, for six glorious years, the monarch himself, the boy king, Edward the VI.

The churchmen and Puritan gentry of the day did not sit at the periphery of the nation’s consciousness, but at its very center. Even when their countrymen maligned and resisted them, they could ignore neither them nor the effects of their labor: the 1549 and 1552 editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the Forty-two Articles written by Cranmer in 1553, the King James Bible in 1611, the Canons of Dort in 1618, the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647, and the Savoy Declaration in 1659.

In many respects our church and denomination today exists in the spiritual and theological world they built.

But we do not live in the political or cultural world they built. That world was destroyed in 1660 and has never returned, either to England or to any other nation.

When that world was destroyed, John Bunyan was 32 years old. He had been a baptized Christian for approximately seven years and a pastor for only five.

What happened in 1660 was that the monarchy in England was restored and the son of the executed Charles I ascended to the throne. The moment the feet of Charles II touched English soil, Puritanism as a political and cultural force was destroyed. Anyone who failed to subscribe to the Established Church of England had their lands taken, their wealth confiscated, their titles removed, and their sons barred from university or from serving in the officer class in the military. Any one found preaching without a license would be thrown in jail.

The young preacher John Bunyan was one of those men. He would remain in jail for twelve years. And even when he was released he ministered under the threat, and sometimes the reality, of renewed imprisonment. His was a world where the hopes and labors of the previous generations had been destroyed and where it would have been easy to be discouraged, or lose heart, or compromise, or even give up. Indeed, many did.

Where John Owen had preached before the great men of Parliament, Bunyan preached to farmers and shopkeepers in the fields. Where John Knox had preached to the queen, herself, Bunyan would preach to his fellow prisoners. Yet Bunyan endured in the teeth of that persecution and God blessed the fruit of his labors beyond any of his generation.

Tonight I have three goals:

1. Is to tell the story of the rise and fall of English Reformation. We study history because history is the record of God’s activity among men and men’s response to God.
2. The second goal is to put before us a man of our own spiritual and theological ancestry as a man worthy of our attention. He is our great-grandfather in the faith and we should honor him as the Third Commandment commands us to honor our physical fathers.
3. My third goal is to highlight certain aspects of his life and character as both examples and warnings.