Elisabeth Elliot

Life

Elisabeth Elliot was born Elisabeth Howard on December 21, 1926, in Brussels, Belgium, the daughter of missionary parents, and moved with her family to the United States when she was a few months old. While studying classical Greek at Wheaton College, she sensed a calling to translate the Bible into the languages of tribes that did not yet have Scripture in their own tongue. A calling, in this sense, is God's summons to a task He entrusts to a person. During her college years she met Jim Elliot; the two later served separately as missionaries in Ecuador and married in 1953.

In 1956, when their daughter Valerie was ten months old, Jim was killed along with four fellow missionaries. They had been attempting to make first contact with the Waorani, a people of eastern Ecuador who had no contact with the outside world. At the time the Waorani were also known as the "Auca." In 1969 Elliot married the theologian Addison Leitch, but he died of cancer in 1973. In 1977 she married Lars Gren. She suffered from dementia in her later years and died on June 15, 2015, in Magnolia, Massachusetts, at the age of 88.

Ministry and Achievements

Elliot remained in Ecuador after her husband's death. She learned the Waorani language from Dayuma, a Waorani woman who had been living apart from her people; Dayuma later returned to her tribe and served as a bridge to them. In October 1958, Elliot went to live in a Waorani village with her three-year-old daughter Valerie and Rachel Saint, the sister of Nate Saint, one of the missionaries who had been killed. Elliot learned the language and shared the gospel while living among the very people who had killed her husband, and this work made her widely known. She left the Waorani village in 1961.

Elliot wrote Through Gates of Splendor (1957), the story of the five missionaries, and Shadow of the Almighty (1958), a biography of Jim Elliot. In 1978 she edited and published Jim Elliot's journals. She went on to write steadily on suffering, loneliness, singleness, the roles of men and women, and the home, and she also wrote a biography of Amy Carmichael. After returning to the United States, she taught as an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary beginning in 1974. From 1988 to 2001 she hosted the Christian radio program Gateway to Joy.

Influence on the Korean Church

Many of Elliot's books have been translated into Korean. The publisher Bokinneun Saram issued Korean editions of Through Gates of Splendor (2003, translated by Yoon Jong-seok), Shadow of the Almighty, and her biography of Amy Carmichael. Passion and Purity, which addresses Christian courtship and marriage, was translated by Yang Eun-soon and first published in Korean in 2001; it was later reissued by another publisher. Other works have also been translated, including books published in Korean under titles meaning "Suffering Is Not in Vain" and "Building a Christian Home." When she died in 2015, Korean Christian media outlets such as the Kukmin Ilbo reported her death.

Assessment

In evangelical circles, Elliot is highly regarded as an example of someone who kept the faith in the midst of suffering. Christianity Today, a leading American evangelical magazine, named her one of the most influential Christian women of the twentieth century.

She has also received mixed assessments and criticism.

• Her only novel, No Graven Image (1966), is regarded as a work that questioned the tendency to lionize missionaries as heroes, as well as the evangelical expectation that every missionary story must end in triumph. Reactions at the time of publication were mixed, and some reviewers questioned the author's faith.
• Because of her teachings on gender roles and premarital chastity, critics, including Christian feminists, regard her as something of a symbol of "purity culture," a term for an American evangelical culture that strongly emphasized premarital chastity and restraint in relationships between the sexes. Supporters, by contrast, regard her teaching as consistent and faithful to Scripture.
• Recent biographies have moved away from portraying her solely as a hero, instead reexamining her as a person who wrestled with doubts and inner conflict.