David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden on the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at epistles and writings that occurred in prison. And today I want to talk about the most popular book in English after the Bible and how it happened to be written in prison. So John Bunyan, sixteen twenty eight, sixteen eighty eight, was born in Bedford, England. He had almost no formal education at all. His father was a tinker and so he became a tinker by trade. That is an itinerant person who goes around fixing pots and pans. This is Bedford, England, today on the River Ouse o. U s e. So he became a Christian after hearing a voice say, well, tell leave those sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell. As soon as he heard this, he joined the Bedford meeting, which was a nonconformist group. The building is still there today. Now, we call them Puritans in the US. In England, they were called nonconformists. And in the United States, we know who the Puritans are. They were the people around Boston. But in England, the story is much more complicated. Various regions of the country having different kinds of nonconformist movements. Bunyan was never ordained. The sixteen sixty two act of uniformity required preachers to be ordained in the Anglican Church of England tradition and required the use of the Book of Common Prayer in any kind of meeting that might be considered religious in nature.The charges against Bunyon were that he, quote, devilishly and perniciously abstain from coming to church to hear Divine Service and spoke at several unlawful meetings and Kevin articles to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom. Here we have a wax figure of Bunyon in the John Bunyan Museum in Bedford, UK, and a tradition there is to dress him up, according to the holidays, the wax figure there. So you see what’s going on. He was a good puritan in that he joined the parliamentary army during the English revolution, fought on the side of parliament, which was the Puritan side of things against royalty. Then the restoration occurs. The monarchy comes back in sixteen sixty, and these laws begin to be passed against nonconformists because they are clearly the people who are revolutionary and are resisting government interference in their religious traditions. So he’s going to become a preacher and preacher’s unlawfully because he has not been ordained within the Church of England tradition. This would be a way of controlling the kind of speech that’s coming out of the preachers mouths, and thus he was imprisoned for twelve years. Now, I should hasten to add that his imprisonment is a bit interesting in that the real terms of imprisonment for his offense was three months. But he continued to say over and over again, they would say, John, are you going to preach again? And he would say, heck, yes, I am.And so they couldn’t let him out of jail for twelve years. It was he was a prisoner of conscience in that way. He said, I will stay in prison until the moss grows on my eyelids rather than just obey God. However, interestingly enough, in Bedford, he was released occasionally. He did preach during that twelve year period and his last child was conceived during his imprisonment and he wrote the book. The Pilgrims progress was written during Bunyan’s imprisonment, but not published until sixteen seventy eight. Six years after his release. It’s been translated into more than two hundred languages and has never been out of print since its publication in sixteen seventy eight. The estimates are that it is the most read book in English.