Significance without a pedestal

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: exploring the life of missionary and theologian Elisabeth Elliot.

Here’s book reviewer Bekah McCallum.

AUSTEN: On the last night in Arajuno, she wrote to the Howards and Elliotts: “My flesh, and my heart may fail. But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

BEKAH MCCALLUM: That’s Lucy Austen reading from her new biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. Elliot may be best known for her work as a missionary in Ecuador who tried to bring the gospel to the Waorani tribe. Austen begins her prologue there, in 1956. Elliot’s husband Jim and four other missionaries were first reported missing, then killed. Radio announcements brought news of their deaths.

MEMORIAL SERVICE: Greetings, radio friends round the round world! The back home hour tonight will be a memorial service to the five missionary martyrs who gave their lives for Christ and his Gospel just one week ago.

It wasn’t her only deep loss. During the eighty-eight years of her life, Elliot became a widow twice. She also watched many loved ones pass away before her own long and deadly bout with Alzheimer’s. Throughout her biography, Austen shows Elliot’s faith through great tragedies.

AUSTEN: “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee…” Isaiah 42 came unbidden to Betty’s mind. She began praying silently, “Lord, let not the waters overflow.”

Early chapters deal with Elisabeth’s childhood and teenage years, while a second section covers her life in Ecuador. Two years after Jim died, Elisabeth tried to live with the Waorani again. Austen describes what it was like for Elliot to live among her husband’s murderers.

AUSTEN: Again and again as the days went by, Elliot marveled to find herself in this community, marveled that these extremely ordinary people were fabled killers. “After all these months of living on tenter-hooks, wondering, wondering - here I am. Here they are. And we live in peace.”

A third section deals with Elliot’s final decades. When she returned to the United States in the 1960s, Elliot hosted a radio program called Gateway to Joy and wrote at least twenty books. To improve her writing, she read from a wide variety of authors including Amy Carmichael, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor.

AUSTEN: Elliot felt that most of “those we call ‘Christian’ authors…do no not fall into the category of artists,” neither addressing the great themes nor communicating effectively. She was not interested in preaching comfortably to the choir.

Readers likely won’t approve of every one of Elliot’s convictions, especially her later views on gender roles. Some of her books were used as proof-texts for the purity culture movement, but that’s why Lucy Austen says reading about Elliot’s life is so vital.

AUSTEN: It helps to contextualize where she was coming from, and, and what the influences were that shaped her and shaped then the teaching that she gave.

David Steele is pastor of Christ Fellowship Church in Everson, Washington, and author of six books. He attended a Ligonier conference back in the 90s where Elliot was a speaker. According to Steele, Austen’s description of the determined Elliot seems spot-on:

STEELE: I remember thinking she was very feisty, might be the word. I think that's the word my wife would use. She's feisty, and, and a little bit opinionated. And I liked that. I thought that was that was really endearing.

Elliot had flaws and frustrations. She didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment when she left Ecuador, even though she became famous for her missionary work. By making this disappointment part of the book’s climax, Austen encourages the reader to wrestle with this question: what really makes a Christian’s life successful?

STEELE: I think every pastor ought to read this book. It was deeply not only challenging to me, but encouraging to me. I think I'll tell you what, every outgoing missionary should be required to read this book.

At over 600 pages, it’s a hefty read. It flows well, though, and is full of interesting details to contrast Elliot’s adventures in the jungle with her life in the U.S.

AUSTEN: Elliot wrote with humor of the difficulties of rural life for city-bread transplants: the time spent hauling water; the struggle to sterilize the water, which came from a river that doubled as an outhouse, and to cook food over an open fire that kept going out.

Elliot’s life spanned from the time of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic to the fall of the Twin Towers and beyond. So, Austen had a lot of material to sift through. It took Austen eleven years to complete the biography, and her hard work shows.

AUSTEN: So she really turned out to be to be kind of irreducible, and and I think that that has really shaped my thinking about, shaping my thinking about what it means to be human.

Readers won’t get the impression that Lucy Austen tried to put Elisabeth Elliot on a pedestal. Elliot would have been the last to ask for that. The biography may encourage readers to admire Elisabeth Elliot’s faith and most of all, to praise the object of her faith. And that’s fitting, considering she always opened her radio program this way:

ELISABETH ELLIOT (GATEWAY TO JOY): “You are loved with an everlasting love.” That’s what the bible says. “And underneath are the everlasting arms.”

I’m Bekah McCallum.

EICHER: To find more ideas for books you can give family and friends this Christmas, check out the link in today’s show notes.

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