In an interview back in the summer of 2003, J.I. Packer praised Puritan literature, a massive and intimidating body of work. So where should an inquiring reader start? Here’s an excerpt from his answer, as published in Reformation and Revival 13/4 (2004), page 170:

Q: Where would you advise a person to go to begin to understand the Puritans?

JIP: There is indeed a lot of material, but the Puritans were a single school of thought and an extraordinarily homogeneous one. For years now I have been telling people that if they want to start exploring Puritan wisdom they must read Pilgrim’s Progress. (I am quite emphatic about this!) What you have in Pilgrim’s Progress is a kind of pictorial index to all the topics relating to the Christian life that the Puritans thought about, preached about, and wrote about. All the perplexities, all the temptations, all the forms of opposition, all the encouragements, all the ups and downs of Christian living, the trials in the form of depression and the trials in the form of overconfidence, and the ways that Satan arranges to test Christians who are overconfident are all there, these pictured in a beautifully vivid form.

Q: But people will say, “Pilgrim’s Progress is just a children’s book.”

JIP: They will say it, and they will be wrong.

Haha! Classic Packer. You can download and read PP free in a fresh edition edited by my colleague Jonathan Parnell, here.