As a child one of my favourite books of all time was a children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress but I have to admit that before reading John Bunyan: The Christian by Gordon Wakefield my knowledge of the great author was a bit, well, basic. I knew he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, of course, and I knew he wrote it in jail (or gaol!) and that he was from Bedford. Which, fairly accurately sums up the extent and limit of my knowledge of the man credited by Rudyard Kipling no less, as father of the novel. So reading this biography really was an education.

The biography focuses on the theology of Bunyan, his deep and profound wrestling with despair and doubt, which for Bunyan was both exacerbated and resolved by his Calvinist theology. Wakefield, as a Methodist, doesn’t follow Bunyan here and intriguingly introduces the later John Wesley as conversation partners over the issue of predestination, which for Bunyan and most of the Reformed Baptists meant that the number of elect was pretty small and preaching to the lost was more an exercise in confirming their damnation than procuring their salvation.

A fair amount of space is given to Bunyan’s early writings and it was evident that he was a great controversialist. There’s nothing these Puritan Christians liked better than to prove someone else’s theology wrong, a trait still very much in evidence by their 21st century admirers. I was also helped by being better able to place Bunyan in history, post the English civil war (in which Bunyan briefly fought in Cromwell’s New Model Army) and amongst the religious fervour of the day with Ranters, Quakers, diggers, Levellers and the forces of reaction (otherwise known as Anglicans).

The focus of the book leads to Bunyan’s great allegory and it’s less than great successors, a fact which in itself had escaped me. The shortfall of Wakefield’s biography is that he really fails to do justice to the impact of Pilgrim’s Progress. There is no discussion of its reception, critical or popular, no discussion of its enduring legacy, no reference points to assess its popularity in Bunyan’s lifetime or since. I think Wakefield takes this knowledge for granted and I felt the lack of this.

Wakefield also gives too short shrift to Bunyan the preacher, little space is devoted to the thousands that used to gather to hear him in London, the fact is just mentioned in passing and yet how did that come to pass? Was it the fame from Pilgrim’s Progress that gained him the hearing or the years in jail, which weren’t all that remarkable for a non-conformist?

This book stands out as an introduction to the writings and theology of Bunyan but not so much to his life as preacher or pastor. His early life and his battle to come to faith, beautifully illustrated in the progress of Christian is clear and profound. The light thrown on his later years, less so. It was also evident that Wakefield has command of a much larger vocabulary than me and so I had to look up words such as ‘obloquy’ and ‘gallimaufry’ proof perhaps that in the last 20 years standards of reading at a popular level have slipped a bit.

I don’t know if there is a more accessible and popular level biography of Bunyan around, but I’d be interested in reading it if there was. Wakefield, to his credit, has reawakened a desire to re-read Pilgrim’s Progress and understand a bit more about this great author and preacher.