The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. A few snippets from Roy and Dorothy Porter’s classic study, In Sickness and in Health, encapsulate this pes-simism: they speak of the ‘universal sickness, suffering, and woe’ of the early mod-ern past, a time in which ‘people died like f…
In all my reading of Bunyan, what has gripped me most is his sufering and how he responded to it—what it made of him, and what it might make of us. All of us come to our tasks with a history and many predispositions. I come to John Bunyan with a growing sense that sufering is a normal, useful, essential, and God-ordained element in Christian life and ministry—not only for the sake of weanin…