Sometimes he burst into self-condemning talk about his excessive emotionalism. In a typical passage, Elisabeth wrote that no one could tell “another what God wants him to do.” In discerning God’s will, God would cause “circumstances, the witness of the Word, and your own peace of mind to coincide.” Jim masked his indecision about Elisabeth in pious sentiments about waiting on the Lord. Austen seems to regard this type of piety as exasperating and hyperindividualistic.ĭuring their courtship, Elisabeth’s and especially Jim’s decision-making appeared governed mostly by feelings and proof texts. It proceeded into levels of ever-deeper emotional intimacy and physical affection, but Jim remained adamant for years that he had not received God’s go-ahead to propose marriage. Their romantic relationship was intense and often perplexing, in ways that may seem familiar to graduates of Christian colleges. The Brethren also produced the massively influential orphan-care and “faith mission” pioneer George Müller, who argued that missionaries should never solicit financial support, instead trusting God to provide meticulously for all needs.Ĭoming from this background, Elisabeth Howard seemed destined for a missionary career, even before meeting Jim Elliot at Wheaton College.
One of the Brethren’s founders was John Nelson Darby, a key early exponent of the prophetic timetables of dispensational premillennialism. The church manifested a special combination of holiness, lay initiative, missionary zeal, and apocalypticism. The Brethren, a primitivist Protestant movement dating to the 1820s in Ireland and England, left a deep imprint on the piety of both Elisabeth Howard and Jim Elliot. The Howards were dyed-in-the-wool members of the Plymouth Brethren church. Where else shall we go?Įlisabeth (Howard) Elliot was born in 1926 to an American missionary family serving in Belgium. He has not promised to answer our questions.” And yet, Elliot would remind us, God has the words of eternal life. To the contrary, Elliot concluded that God “has never promised to solve our problems. Seen in this light, Elliot’s life refutes common Christian assurances that if we obey, all will go well.
We cling to God for his character and for what he accomplished in Christ’s death and resurrection, not for worldly peace or prosperity. Much of the book recounts how Elliot, through repeated and largely inexplicable instances of suffering, grew in wisdom about what it means to truly follow the Lord. The core of their problem, to Austen, was the way that postwar evangelical culture gave young people a naïve view of discerning God’s will. Austen is especially unsparing with Jim Elliot, who comes off both as a courageous missionary and a vacillating (at best) suitor in his ludicrously protracted courtship of Elisabeth. At times she clearly finds her subject frustrating. In recent years, growing numbers of iconoclastic authors-especially academics-have gone to the other extreme, reviling once-revered evangelical figures and judging them irredeemable due to their complicity in various sins.Īusten happily inhabits the judicious middle in this spectrum. Some Christian authors choose a hagiographical approach, presenting their subjects in a holy, inspirational light. By that time, Elliot was a bestselling author whose now-classic books Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (1958) were fast becoming standard reading among evangelicals.īiographers of figures like Elliot always grapple with finding the right tone. About three-quarters of the book covers Elliot’s story up to 1963, when she returned to the US from South America. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life is a biography worthy of its subject, diving deep into Elliot’s vast body of correspondence and other writings to present an exceptionally detailed and sometimes conflicted portrait. Before returning to the US, Elliot had become one of the best-known evangelicals in America, with coverage of Jim Elliot’s death and of her endurance on the mission field appearing in major national outlets like Life magazine. Perhaps even more remarkably, Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (whose brother Nate also died in the attack) went to live among the Waorani in 1958. Anyone even marginally affiliated with the American missionary community knows the stirring and tragic story of Elisabeth and her first husband, Jim Elliot, who was killed in Ecuador by Waorani tribesmen in 1956. Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most extraordinary and controversial evangelicals of the post–World War II era.
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