John Bunyan's spiritual autobiography introduces many of the linguistic and religious tensions that appear in his fictional works, as well as those of Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel. In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners Bunyan tries to move from a reprobate existence to participate in the life and language of the righteous elect. This process is problematic, in part because of the conflict between his Calvinist theology and the structural demands of his source narrative, the Bible. An examination of Grace Abounding will clarify Bunyan's attitude toward language and the Bible and will highlight the difficult relationship between Bunyan's subjective reading and its goal, namely, the discovery of an objective, divinely ordained, hidden truth.

The protagonists in these chosen works experience two stages in the process of becoming storytellers. First they learn to interpret their experiences and then they learn to tell them to others. In Grace Abounding Bunyan describes how he learns to understand his personal experiences by learning to read the Bible. He provides positive evidence of his election by presenting his story as a narrative that agrees with biblical teaching, uses biblical language, and follows a loosely biblical structure.

In order to understand the importance of language and the Bible to Bunyan, it is necessary briefly to consider the importance of language in the religious developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The central debates of the Protestant Reformation have a linguistic aspect.