Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Summary

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion. Bunyan begins with his low descent and his boyhood in Elstow, where at nine or ten he is terrified by dreams of devils and hell, yet cannot leave swearing, lying and Sunday sports. He records narrow escapes, including a fall into the Bedford river and service as a young soldier when the man who took his place at a siege was shot. After marriage his wife brings two devotional books, and he becomes outwardly religious, loving the bells, the parson and the forms of the church. In the middle of a game of cat on a Sunday a voice seems to ask whether he will leave his sins and go to heaven or keep them and go to hell. He gives up swearing, then bell-ringing and dancing, and then hears three or four poor women of Bedford, sitting in the sun at a door, talking of the new birth, and realizes that he knows nothing of it. Through the pastor John Gifford he joins their congregation, but there follow years of torment: doubts whether he is elect, temptations to test his faith by miracles, blasphemous thoughts, and above all an inner voice urging him to sell Christ, to which he at last seems to consent. For two years he believes he has committed the unpardonable sin and shares the fate of Esau, who sold his birthright. Luther's commentary on Galatians, found as an old book falling to pieces, steadies him, and texts of Scripture come and go like warring armies. Relief comes in a field when the sentence Thy righteousness is in heaven falls upon his soul, and he sees that his righteousness is Christ himself, unchanged by his own moods. Two appended sections describe his call to preach, his sense of preaching what he felt, and his arrest in 1660, with the anguish of leaving his wife and his blind daughter. A conclusion lists lessons he drew from temptation. The library text, the Religious Tract Society edition of 1905, follows the later enlarged editions and adds A Relation of the Imprisonment, first printed in 1765, with his examinations before the justices and his wife Elizabeth's plea to Judge Hale, plus a continuation of his life by an early admirer.

Top Lessons

• Outward religion is not the new birth

  For about a year after the voice in the game of cat, Bunyan keeps the outward forms of religion and enjoys being thought godly. The talk of the poor women at Bedford shows him that he has reformed his manners without knowing the change of heart they describe. The book separates reformation of conduct from the faith that rests on Christ.

• Temptation can be survived by the Word

  During the long trial over the temptation to sell Christ, Bunyan describes texts of Scripture meeting in his mind like opposing forces, the threat to Esau against the promise that whoever comes will not be cast out. He learns to hold on to promises even when feelings point the other way. His Conclusion presents temptation as something that taught him what grace is.

• Righteousness outside oneself

  The turning point in §229 is the discovery that his righteousness is Christ at God's right hand, not his own good or bad frame of heart. This frees him from measuring himself moment by moment. The book shows how the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith was experienced by an ordinary believer.

• Conscience and the cost of obedience

  Bunyan could have left prison by promising not to preach. He describes the parting from his wife and children as the pulling of flesh from bones, yet he concludes that he must venture them all with God. The appended Relation shows him arguing courteously but firmly with the justices for the liberty to preach.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Grace Abounding is one of the most detailed early-modern first-person records of prolonged religious despair, and it is often cited in the history of psychiatry. Bunyan describes childhood nightmares of devils, fears that a church bell or the steeple would fall on him, intrusive blasphemous thoughts he did not want, an inner voice repeating Sell Him as many as a hundred times together while he resisted it so hard that his hands and elbows moved, and about two years of conviction that he was beyond pardon. In his own framework these were temptations of Satan and trials permitted by God, and the cure he describes is theological: a text of Scripture applied to his soul. Seventeenth-century readers would have known such states as religious melancholy, the subject of a section of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). William James used Bunyan as a case of the sick soul in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and modern clinicians have sometimes read the intrusive thoughts as resembling what is now called scrupulosity or obsessive-compulsive disorder; any such reading is retrospective and interpretive. The book also records an illness Bunyan took to be the beginning of a consumption, which vanished as his spirits recovered, the grief of separation in prison, and his concern for his blind daughter Mary.

• §§5-8

  Childhood dreams and visions of devils and hell-fire at nine or ten years old, and their eventual fading.

• §§33-34

  His fear, while watching the bell-ringers, that a bell or the steeple itself would fall and kill him.

• §§132-141

  The repeated inner voice urging him to sell Christ, his bodily efforts to resist it, and the moment he believes he consented.

• §§142-228

  The long period of despair under the example of Esau, with physical sensations he attributes to guilt.

• §§255-262

  A spring illness he thought was consumption, his spiritual darkness during it, and his recovery in body and mind together.

• §§327-328

  The grief of separation from his wife and children in prison and his fear for his blind daughter.