Part Six, Discussing Elisabeth Elliot: A Life

For the past few months I’ve been hosting conversations about my most recent project, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, which is the first full-length single-volume biography of that remarkable and complex woman. We started at the end of September with a one-time conversation covering the whole book, since not everyone has time for an ongoing discussion. Since then, for those who had time and interest for more detail, I’ve been posting once a month with a reading schedule, information about the current section, and questions to start a conversation. This is the final installment.

Welcome

We’ve had a glorious stretch of sunny days recently, and I’ve been writing perched on the mossy concrete cover of our well while my co-workers bring me fir cones or dig in the sandbox nearby. Even though it’s raining now, the forget-me-nots are beginning to bloom and the birdsong is riotous.

I would not have believed back in September that it would feel like such a blink of an eye before we were here talking about the final chapters of Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. This post was finished on the day before Palm Sunday, but neither Holy Week nor Easter Sunday seemed like quite the right time for it to show up in your inboxes, so I’m sending it a week late. Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here.

If you’re just joining the discussion, last month we covered Chapter 8 and Chapter 9.

The Schedule

For the month of April, we’ll read and discuss:

• Chapter 10

• Chapter 11

• the Epilogue

Below I’ll share a few thoughts on this section. If you’ve already read this portion of the book or if you don’t mind possible spoilers, dive right in! If you want to stick a virtual bookmark here and go read this section of the book and come back, that’s great too. Either way I hope you’ll join the conversation in the comments section.

Forget-me-nots between rain showers.

The Section

For many periods of Elliot’s life, my writing process involved sifting through mounds of detail to identify key themes, then choosing only the strongest examples to include. Starting in Chapter Ten and continuing through the end of the book, changes in the available sources increasingly required a different approach.

The journals available for scholarship come to an end in late 1974, not long after the death of Addison Leitch. And the family letters that are a mainstay of information for so many years become increasingly less personal as the circle of readers grows over the years. (What started as letters to Elliot’s own parents and siblings eventually grew to include her siblings’ spouses, their children, children’s spouses, three sets of in-laws, and so on. It’s no surprise that she didn’t maintain the same level of intimate communication). Eventually, the surviving letters¹ cease to be “family” letters in any sense indistinguishable from the letters people traditionally send out with Christmas cards, and it appears that they were written about as frequently.

So instead of Elliot recording in an orderly fashion the events in her life that seem worth reporting to her (and often what she’s reading and thinking about), researchers have to wade through a wide range of documents from a period of decades and draw our own conclusions. This doesn’t mean that her letters and journals don’t require a critical approach—even a subject with religious convictions about truth-telling can’t be assumed to always correctly interpret events or her own heart. But even so the subject’s own reporting gives us important help.

For these final chapters the information needed to tell Elliot’s story is there, but it took some different kinds of digging to find it. Oral sources, including the interviews I was able to conduct with those who knew Elliot, became increasingly important. They filled in gaps in the written record, and they gave clues to what I should be looking for elsewhere. Often I was able to gradually substantiate such hints from a combination of other sources—a letter tucked away in the wrong file, a terse note in the margin of a book, and so on.

The density of available details visibly changes in the course of Chapter Ten.

Chapter Ten

One section of Chapter Ten that took this kind of careful work was the early days of Elliot’s marriage to Addison Leitch and the timing and circumstances of their courtship and engagement. I compared multiple letters by various writers, travel schedules, (fragmented) journal entries, published essays, and oral interviews to piece together the information presented in the book, while noting that there was room for more information to come to light over time.

Unfortunately, the additional information that appeared with the subsequent publication of volume two Ellen Vaughn’s Eliot biography confirmed that Leitch pursued Elliot in ways and at times that, I would argue, violated his marriage vows to his first wife. It’s hard to understand how Elliot could still have seen him as a potential partner, unless it is because his behavior seemed mild in comparison to other propositions she had received over the course of her life, and because she believed that aggressive pursuit was a key part of masculinity.

One of the puzzles of Elliot’s life is an apparent tension between some of her work as a missionary, writer, and speaker, and some of her teaching on the roles of men and women. Elliot does not seem to have seen any such tension, as evidenced by the Urbana speech quoted at the end of Chapter Ten.² The events of this section seems to offer a potential explanation: Elliot taught men in church settings, pursued a paid career, left her child in the care of others for long stretches of time, etc., as a single woman because she believed the work needed to be done and there was no man to do it. She prioritized homemaking and supporting Leitch’s career when she had the opportunity to be married again, publishing very little during their marriage. (And as we see in Chapter Eleven, her career seems to have followed a track that was more in keeping with Lars Gren’s preferences than her own in some ways, suggesting that she was acting on her understanding of what submission in marriage meant.) Perhaps she saw herself as following her own teaching in regard to marriage during the times that she was married, and saw the things that seemed to many to be inconsistent with her teaching as being necessitated by circumstances outside her control. Of course, this doesn’t explain why she does not seem to have recognized the many times circumstances forced her hand as an indication that her framework needed revision.

Thick stacks of notes: one cataloguing notes in the margins of Elliot's books, the other cataloguing books on her shelves.

Chapter Eleven

This final chapter covers almost half of Elliot’s life, just over forty years from 1974 to her death in 2015. In part this is related to the change in source materials, and in part due to fewer major changes in her life. Once she married Gren and they moved back to Massachusetts, there was less variety to report. But these decades saw not only her longest marriage but also the publication of some of her most widely read books, so there’s still plenty to think about.

Elliot’s third marriage was another portion of the book that took a lot of detective work. It was not a topic that people wanted to talk about, and because it was so sensitive, it was even more important that anything I reported needed to be well substantiated. Again, I relied on a wide range of sources to gradually build up a reliable picture. Sadly that picture was much darker than it appeared in the public interviews the couple gave together about their relationship. I’m grieved for both Elliot and Gren—and for everyone their lives touched—that his patterns of destructive behavior were normalized both to them and by them to the extent that they were. I’m grieved that, at least during Elliot’s lifetime, Gren didn’t find healing and change for his harmful ways of responding to life. I’m grieved by what was lost, what might have been. And I think it’s important to grapple with how Elliot’s and Gren’s theology and cultural influences affected their views of each other and their relationship, and how their relationship in turn affected Elliot’s teaching on the sexes.

Even though the beginnings of Elliot’s public speaking and writing on the roles of men and women took place in Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven covers some of her best known work on the topic, Let Me Be A Woman and Passion and Purity. Throughout the biography, I approached writing about Elliot’s books with the assumption that readers would likely not have time to sit down and read Elliot’s entire oeuvre to get the big picture of her teaching over time. At the same time, it has seemed to me that much of our awareness of Elliot’s teaching at this point in time comes from quotations on social media and brief excerpts to bolster a point in a sermon or opinion piece. Because of this I tried to not only to report on the circumstances in which each book was written, but to give an overview of the ideas contained in each book, and using the authorial voice to highlight things I thought might not be noticed due to familiarity. I hope to see other writers interacting with her work more in the future.

A pictorial chronological bibliography of books by Elisabeth Elliot. I date-labeled all of these and made these dividers so I could see at a glance when something was written. Then I spent a laaaaaaaaaht of time staring at this shelf and thinking.

Epilogue

The Epilogue is probably my favorite part of the book now, although for a long time after finishing Chapter Eleven I agonized about how to conclude things. I could point to a few concrete things that happened in the aftermath of her death, but there was so much that seemed impossible to pin down. At first I didn’t see how I could make the kind of assessment or judgement or summary that seemed appropriate. But in one of her family letters, after writing out a long list of all the suffering and grief she sees around her, Elliot says, “In the face of that what can one say but Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”³ Through all her ups and downs and rights and wrongs that was the bedrock of her life, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that perhaps that was all there was to say.

At my Massachusetts b-n-b with one of Elisabeth Elliot’s Bibles in November, 2014.

In Conclusion

Flannery O’Connor says that “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.” That’s very much how I feel about the life of Elisabeth Elliot. It took me 600 pages to sum up her life, and every month as I’ve worked on this discussion series I’ve wondered whether anything I could say here could get into enough detail to be worth reading.⁴ But it has been great to talk about the book in depth with you all, and I appreciate you sticking with me, both through the series and through this extra-long post. I hope you have also found it worthwhile.

For our final discussion, here are some things I’m curious about:

• Elliot experienced a lot of happiness in her marriage to Addison Leitch, and there is sharp poignancy in her dream-self’s assessment that, faced with a choice between Jim and Add, she would stay with Add because Jim wanted other things more than her. It reminds me of the words of Ada Pfautz Tozer Odam after the death of A. W. Tozer, who was her husband for 45 years, and her subsequent remarriage: “Aiden loved Jesus Christ, but Leonard Odam loves me.” There seems to me to be a real tension here. On one hand, Christians have Jesus’ words in Luke 14, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple,” and on the other hand, John’s words in 1 John 4, “whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” How do we reconcile or balance the two?

• What do you make of Thomas Howard’s and Elisabeth Elliot’s Neoplatonism? If you are inclined to agree with it, how do you resolve the dilemma of how we know which aspects of a symbol are to be imitated and which laid aside? If you are inclined to disagree, I’d love to hear your point of view.

• I’ve been surprised not to hear more discussion around Elliot’s long membership in the Episcopal Church.⁵ Her decision to formally join the denomination makes sense for many reasons—her changing understanding of the purpose of a church service, her affinity with her brother, her growing emphasis on tradition and symbolism, her love of language and beauty. It’s also an interesting contrast with the ways that her beliefs on marital submission and the ways her thinking changed under Leitch’s influence, since he did not change denominational affiliations. What did you make of this?

• Regardless of where one lands on complementarian/egalitarian debates, it seems to me that Elliot’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:9 (“Woman was made for man”) to mean “yes she is supposed to ‘make all the sacrifices’ [in marriage]”⁶ directly flies in the face of Ephesians 5:25 (“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”) Do you have thoughts about either my argument or hers (or both)?

• Elliot crying in the grocery store after Leitch’s death sounds quite different from the days after Jim’s death when she could count on one hand the times she had shed tears. How does her response to grief—both personally and expressed in her pamphlet about dealing with the death of a loved one—strike you in this section?

• In Chapter Eleven we see Elliot repeatedly struggling to know what to do because she feels over-busy and over-tired and yet she still feels that she is turning away many people who want her help. Our own busyness and the needs around us may not rise to the same level as Elliot’s numerically, but it’s a problem I suspect we all struggle with. Do you have any thoughts on how to balance similar tensions in our own lives?

• Do you see tension between Elliot’s career and her teaching on the roles of the sexes? Why or why not? If so, what do you make of my possible explanation above?

• What are your questions or comments about this section?

As usual, no need to feel like you have to respond to everything (or anything!) here, but I hope you’ll chime in in the comments about whatever catches your interest, even if it doesn’t appear in these questions.

I am planning to look into whether any portions of my manuscript that didn’t make it into the finished book would make good “director’s cut” posts here, but otherwise I’m thinking of letting this space lie fallow for awhile aside from notifications if I have an article or a podcast appearing somewhere. But if you have ideas about other kinds of posts you’d like to see in your inbox, please let me know. And thank you again for joining me for these past several months!

1. Elliot herself made donations to the Billy Graham Center Archives—Jim Elliot’s journals, an oral history interview that she gave to Robert Shuster, and manuscripts for some of her books—in the 1980s. However, the first major donation of her personal papers was made by Lars Gren in 2012. With the second volume of Ellen Vaughn’s Elliot biography (2023) reporting that Gren destroyed Elliot’s journals from the period of their marriage, it’s an open question whether the documents he donated represent a complete record or whether there were other papers from those decades of Elliot’s life that he also destroyed prior to making his donations.

2. Pages 456-457 in the hardbound book.

3. Quoted on page 477 in the hardbound book.

4. If anyone is interested in really getting down further into the weeds, the footnotes and bibliography are full of good books and articles you might like to check out.

5. For that matter, I’ve also been surprised not to hear more discussion of her sympathy with her brother Tom’s conversion to Catholicism, given, eg., how strongly evangelical institutions have often reacted to faculty conversion.

6. Page 438 in the hardbound book.