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For a few generations, our contemporary English-speaking church has received sensational teachings on Antichrist, fabricated to sell novels and whatnot. This has understandably created a distaste for the concept and deprived God's people of a meaningful, biblical lens through which to consider this important doctrine.
John Bunyan has bequeathed to us a timeless biblical category for the combustion that occurs when a wicked establishment attacks a faithful church. Antichrist endeavours to usurp Christ's headship over His bride, the church, "to prostrate her to his lusts, to deflower her, and to make her an adulteress." Antichrist "hath turned the sword of the magistrate against those that keep God's law," rendering the ordinary coercive power of the state "the ruin of the good and virtuous, and a protection of the vile and base."
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John Bunyan (baptised 30 November 1628 - 31 August 1688) was an English writer and Puritan preacher best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, which also became an influential literary model. In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.Bunyan came from the village of Elstow, near Bedford. He had some schooling and at the age of sixteen joined the Parliamentary Army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist group in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next twelve years in prison as he refused to give up preaching. During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim's Progress, which was not published until some years after his release.
