Elisabeth Elliot: A Life
The portrait of Elisabeth Elliot that emerges in Lucy S. R. Austen’s nuanced, thought-provoking new biography is of a woman with a sharp mind, an innate sense of curiosity, and a boundless zeal. It’s also the portrait of a woman whose outlook changed continually—amidst apparent contradiction—throughout her life. After reading Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (Crossway), I find myself admiring Elliot in ways I never had before, even while remaining conflicted about key aspects of her work and legacy. In the end, though, I’m left wishing Elliot were alive so I could give her a hug.
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Elliot described the Christian faith of her youth as fundamentalist. And indeed, there’s a lot of spiritual and emotional rigidity to be seen in her upbringing. Rather than chafing at those strictures, though, she seems if anything to have thrived. Elliot’s fundamentalist faith propelled her into life as a missionary in Ecuador and it shaped the books for which she remains best known today, nearly ten years after her death.
Austen cites a passage in These Strange Ashes where Elliot recalls becoming a missionary with “a deep conviction that God will bless those who obey Him and work things out in beautiful, demonstrable ways for those who have given themselves to do His work.” But that “deep conviction” would be complicated—if not utterly destroyed—by what was soon to come, with the deaths of her husband Jim and four fellow missionaries, murdered while trying to make contact with members of the isolated (and understandably fearful) Waorani tribe.
Later on, Elliot would become acquainted with the language of grief, and also with the maddening imperceptibility of God in the face of catastrophic loss. But all of this would take time. Initially, Elliot responded to the death of her husband with a stiff upper lip, working diligently to keep her emotions in check, according to her stern understanding of godliness. “I have shed no tears,” she wrote to her mother in the weeks following the murder. “I just go over and over all the happiness we knew together, all the way the Lord led us . . . and the privilege that has been mine in having him. I try not to think about the future.”
By the first anniversary of the killings, grief had caught up with her. “I suppose they imagine that we have ‘gotten over it’ by now,” Elliot wrote to her family. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Grief changed Elliot in fundamental ways. It changed her relationship with God. It strained her relationships with fellow missionaries. And little by little, it transformed her view of the world—as well as how she wrote about it. Later, long after returning from Ecuador to the United States, Elliot would find new audiences through her writing, public speaking, and radio programs on topics like complementarianism and sexual purity. But in the decade or so after Jim’s death, Elliot entered a phase I hadn’t been aware of, a period of time in which her views became less predictably “conservative.”
During this time she read widely: Shakespeare, Susan Sontag, and Flannery O’Connor, as well as old favorites like the missionary Amy Carmichael. She joined the Episcopal Church, attracted by the sense of reverence she found in worship there. And she began to criticize some of the fundamentalist views she had grown up with—not having rejected any central tenets of doctrine, but rather having realized that fundamentalism as a way of being in the world offered inadequate resources for a vibrant life of faith. “Elliot had become painfully aware that there was more than one side to most questions, that often there were so many sides, she could not even see them all,” Austen writes. “The triumphal tone of Through Gates of Splendor had been replaced by a more subdued acknowledgment of complexity.”
Here’s one example of that newfound awareness. Following the Six-Day War of 1967, Elliot traveled to the Middle East to write a book about Jerusalem. At the beginning of those ten weeks, she said, she had arrived as “a Christian who is saturated in the Book and has been for years blown by every wind of prophetic teaching about Israel.” But she hadn’t given much thought to political, cultural, and historical considerations. The complexity she encountered as she interviewed Jews, Muslims, and Christians was bewildering. “Everywhere she looked,” Austen writes, “things clashed with the picture she had formed by listening to American evangelicals.” The book that would eventually come from her time in Jerusalem is called Furnace of the Lord. Needless to say, most American evangelicals have never heard of it.
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If you’ve had the grave misfortune of being anywhere near the internet over the past month, you’ve likely come across a whole range of reactions to the revelations in this biography and another recent “authorized” one about Elliot’s troubled marriages to Addison Leitch and Lars Gren. Those revelations are weighed by Liz Charlotte Grant in this article (whose sensationalist title, surely the work of some SEO-savvy editor, does it no favors). Grant writes, “Widowed twice, a wife of three husbands in all, her marital relationships appeared to become more dysfunctional the older she got, culminating in a third marriage both biographers describe circumspectly as loveless, disappointing, and manipulative, to put it mildly.”
I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the discourse surrounding these sad revelations, except to say that in Austen’s telling of the story, it does seem incontrovertible that with her second marriage, Elliot’s views on all kinds of things underwent a marked shift yet again, this time in line with Leitch’s way of seeing the world. For the rest of Elliot’s working life, until dementia would rob her of the ability to speak and write, her views—and her posture in espousing those views—seem a far cry from those of the woman we meet in those fascinating (if short-lived) middle years. Grappling with the nuances of complexity would no longer be the animating feature of her work that it had been before.
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One final thing I want to say about Elisabeth Elliot, on a more personal note. At one point in my twenties—roughly the age Elliot was when she moved to Ecuador—I was serving with an NGO in Cambodia. It had been a good thing for me. But I was at a vocational crossroads, trying to decide whether to stay on in a new capacity or to return home and start figuring out the rest of my life. On paper, the position I was considering made perfect sense. I was able to make good arguments for staying. But I was feeling miserable about the prospect of actually doing it. One might say I did not “have peace” about the whole thing. Having Skyped and emailed with my parents, pouring out all my frantic hopes and anxious uncertainties, Mom sent me a copy of Elliot’s God's Guidance: A Slow and Certain Light.
This book—published in 1976, during those somewhat less nuanced years—was written by the same woman who had long taught, as Austen summarizes it, that “when faced with two otherwise acceptable paths, the follower of Jesus is obligated to choose the more difficult.” Elliot was also skeptical of the role of emotions in the life of faith.
“Nevertheless,” Austen writes, “the overall tone of [God’s Guidance] is generous and gentle.” And all these years later, that’s exactly how I remember it. In part because of that book, I made the decision to leave Cambodia and return home. On the face of it, this was the easier of the two paths. But it was also the right one. I remain grateful that Elisabeth Elliot helped me choose it, emotions and all.
