Elisabeth Elliot, the Valiant

When I finished Lucy Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot a few weeks ago, the book went first to my desk, not my shelf, because I knew I’d have to write something about this remarkable woman’s story. Elisabeth rose to prominence as the widow whose husband Jim died in 1956 with four of his fellow missionaries at the hands of Waorani men in the jungles of Ecuador. Her life was long, her ministry vibrant. Austen’s portrait reveals a woman of courage and conviction who developed spiritually and theologically over time.

In this telling, there’s no halo over Elisabeth’s head, no smoothing out all the rough spots. Austen’s admiration for her subject comes through, but the way she shows respect for Elisabeth is by refusing to sugarcoat the challenges that arose or ignore the doubts that hovered over her hardest years.

Strange and Compelling Love Story

Readers unfamiliar with the story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot may be surprised at its roller-coaster highs and lows, and just how long it took before they agreed to marry. From the outset, the reader senses they were both right for each other and tortured in the way they sought God’s will for their relationship.

The twentysomething Jim could sometimes be callous, often immature, clearly in the throes of a throbbing passion for God yet confused because he was confident God had called him to a life of celibacy. Torn between his devotion to God and his interest in Elisabeth, opinionated to a fault yet with a charisma and grace that charmed and influenced those around him, Jim was both honest and obstinate. Often unaware of how his vacillating affected Elisabeth, his words and actions carved channels of both love and sorrow. They were called first to the mission field and only then to each other, and once married, the couple’s life was marked by intensity: a fierce devotion to God and to each other, and to the people they hoped to reach with the gospel.

Life After Tragedy

If you’re familiar with the story, you may think the most interesting part of Elisabeth’s life is wrapped up in the mission she shared with Jim, their commitment to a dangerous and remote place in the jungle while still in their 20s, and the circumstances surrounding his death. But Austen’s biography devotes more attention to Elisabeth’s life after the tragedy on the beach.

First, we see the grieving widow with a young daughter honor the story of her husband and his fellow missionaries by giving the world an account of their dedication. Then we see her return to the area, labor for many years in language development and Bible translation, and eventually live with and observe closely the tribe responsible for Jim’s death. Along the way, she wrestles with doubt and disillusionment, ponders the miracle of conversion, and bemoans the monotony of a missionary’s life. She struggles relationally with Rachel Saint (the sister of one of the missionary men killed), always wondering how to rebuild and restore what was broken. Once she becomes a writer and speaker in the United States, Elisabeth bucks the expectations set for a missionary widow, refusing to give American audiences the gauzy and inspiring stories they most want to hear, choosing instead to be honest about her experiences and observations.

Austen’s biography contains more than a few surprises: the severe strain of her relational challenges with Rachel Saint; her marriage to Addison Leitch so quickly after his first wife’s death from cancer, after a clearly unwise yet budding friendship; the paradox of a highly independent woman accustomed to preaching and teaching who became a well-known opponent of egalitarianism; and her willingness to entertain questions on the edges of evangelical consensus—about the fate of the unevangelized, the nature of conversion, and the draw of Catholicism.

Story of Development

Austen never lets us see Elisabeth as “frozen in time,” as if we could reduce her to one event or viewpoint. Who Elisabeth was in her 20s is both consistent with and different from the woman she was in her 50s. This woman was a thinker. She applied the same curiosity she had about the world to her spiritual life, choosing to read widely even when her openness drew criticism.

The clearest change is in Elisabeth’s view of God’s will. She and Jim were influenced by the Keswick Holiness tradition, which stressed the importance of giving one’s whole heart to God to align with his will. She was given over to excessive self-examination, driven by a desire to ensure every moment of every day was devoted to obedience. Her letters betray an obsession with heeding God’s guidance, deathly afraid she might step outside of his will in some way. It’s almost as if she thought God had placed her blindfolded in a field, only then to whisper to her faintly about where she should go. This left her desperate to hear her Father’s voice, ever worried she’d miss his direction and invite his disapproval.

Over time, her view of God and his will changes. As she encounters more and more of the unknown, as she runs up against the mysterious side of suffering and the inscrutability of God’s purposes, she becomes less assured of all her decisions yet freed from a paralyzing fear of wandering off. She comes to realize the relationship between God and his people doesn’t lead to direction as obvious as she’d expected, and yet she finds solace in this not knowing because she trusts his character and believes in his presence no matter the circumstances.

No One-Dimensional Saints

Austen’s biography has been criticized by some who believe the description of Elisabeth’s third husband, Lars Gren, is unfair. Based on letters and testimony, Austen portrays Lars as controlling and manipulative; thus the marriage, though Elisabeth’s longest, was the least happy of the three, with her and Lars occupying separate interior worlds. But Lars is no villain here, because Austen also shows us how well and how long he loved and served Elisabeth in her later years of mental and physical decline. Lars, like Elisabeth, like Rachel Saint, like Jim Elliot, is complicated. No one is one-dimensional.

It’s hard to improve on Austen’s summary of Elisabeth at the end of the book:

She was by turns bold and uncertain, judgmental and understanding, rigid and flexible, ambitious and retiring, foolish and wise, kind and cruel, closed-minded and curious, changeable and faithful, misleading and truthful, sentimental and realistic, traditional and unconventional. She was complicated, which is to say, human.

Yes. And this complexity marks all of us saints and sinners. Elisabeth Elliot knew this. What she wrote in her biography of R. Kenneth Strachan applies to herself as well:

God alone can answer the question, Who was he? . . . The answer is beyond us. Here are the data we can deal with. There is much more that we do not know—some of it has been forgotten, some of it hidden, some of it lost—but we look at what we know. We grant that it is not a neat and satisfying picture—there are ironies, contradictions, inconsistencies, imponderables. . . . Will Kenneth Strachan have been welcomed home with a “Well done, good and faithful servant,” or will he simply have been welcomed home? The son who delights the father is not first commended for what he has done. He is loved, and Kenneth Strachan was sure of this one thing.

I, for one, am deeply encouraged by holy men and women whose stories are full of “ironies, contradictions, inconsistencies, imponderables.” They help us see the earthy side of holiness, what it means to have a heart for God that’s also a jumble of competing desires, what it looks like when we examine a saintlike life and find so many sins still on sad display. Elisabeth Elliot’s story reminds me of the importance of grappling with mystery and certainty, the realization that the more we know, the more we see there’s more to know. Here is a portrait of a valiant woman who knew her sins but, better yet, knew her Savior.

Trevin Wax is vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, Religion News Service, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is currently a fellow for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of multiple books, including The Thrill of Orthodoxy, The Multi-Directional Leader, Rethink Your Self, This Is Our Time, and Gospel Centered Teaching. His podcast is Reconstructing Faith. He and his wife, Corina, have three children. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook, or receive his columns via email.