Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: With a Biographical Introduction
John Bunyan, Dr. David W. Sloan
Paperback
(Independently published, April 12, 2020)
Regimen Books Christian Classics publishes books of superior quality, with particular attention to textual editing and book design. Each includes an informative, insightful introduction written today by an expert. John Bunyan is best known for his allegorical novel The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is thought that the book has been, in the West, the most read book after only the Bible. Yet Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners ranks as one of the true classics among spiritual autobiographies. One of Bunyan’s biographers says the book is “without a counterpart except in The Confessions of St. Augustine.” Written in the 1660s while Bunyan was imprisoned because of his preaching, Grace Abounding tells of his spiritual conflict: “the sudden alternations of hope and fear,” as one of his biographers described it, “the fierce temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated texts, the harassing doubts of the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the elevations of joy through which he passed ‘as with a pen of fire.’” The struggle lasted three years, finally bringing Bunyan to peace through Christ and giving the world a “marvelous piece of religious autobiography.” A NOTE ABOUT THIS VOLUME: John Bunyan wrote Grace Abounding in the 1660s. This Regimen Books edition has updated a variety of language usages — particularly spelling and punctuation — to conform to modern American practices and forms. For example, Bunyan put people’s names in italics and italicized quotations rather than putting them inside quotation marks. This book has modernized such usages.