Elisabeth Elliot: A Life - The Gospel Coalition (2024)

“What would happen to your idea of God …if you found that your work was useless?” (p. 398). If we are honest with ourselves, we have asked this difficult question or will at some point in the future. Lucy Austen provides a tragically hopeful account of one of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most well-known evangelical Christian missionaries, writers, and speakers—Elisabeth Elliot.

Austen spent a decade closely examining the personal correspondence, journals, and writings available to the public, in addition to interviews with Elliot’s family and friends. She skillfully weaves her research into the three-part biography Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. Of the nearly nine decades Elliot lived, Austen devotes the most pages to the eleven years Elliot spent as a missionary in Ecuador. Austen admits, “This is how she is best known and most often remembered. It is neither the beginning of her story, nor the end” (p. 7).

Part 1 of the biography lays out many of the characters and events that formed the foundation of Elliot’s life. The strong Christian heritage of her family and education provided a framework for her developing intellect and relationships. The latter—interpersonal relationships—proved to be a life-long struggle for the introverted thinker. She felt called to a missionary life during this early period (1952–1963). She also began a painfully uncertain relationship with the man who would become her first husband, Jim Elliot. Elliot wrote at the close of her years at Wheaton College, “I tremble to realize the price that we must be at least willing to pay” (p. 74). Her pondering leaves readers to wonder if this was God preparing her for what would come.

In part 2, Austen chronicles Elliot’s evolving theology and missiology through her encounters with diverse cultures and the harsh realities of her years as a missionary. Austen paints Elliot’s life in Ecuador as extremely challenging. However, the nearly two years and three months married to Jim seem full of love and excitement, especially with the birth of Elliot’s only child, Valerie. However, Austen writes, “The idea that she would be required to suffer at some point in the future because of the blessings she had received crops up repeatedly in Betty’s letters” (p. 163). And suffer she did, for decades to come.

In Elliot’s own words, in January of 1956, “What had been quiet work in an undistinguished corner of the world was now the focus of widespread attention” (p. 226). Her husband and four other missionaries were murdered by a famously fierce tribe among whom Elliot and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter would later live for three years. Elliot told the martyrs’ story in Through Gates of Splendor. Austen discloses that while writing this book, Elliot “realized she was a writer” (p. 238).

Austen begins part three with Elliot’s return to the United States and an official start to her life as a full-time writer. During the fifty-two years covered in this portion of the book (1963–2015), Elliot marries twice more and experiences more joys and sorrows. Through her immersion in Elliot’s journals, letters, writings, and relationships, Austen reprises the seemingly ever-present theme of suffering. Austen’s description of Elliot’s inner struggles evokes sympathy and kinship with her subject. She lays bare the “roller coaster of hope and fear” Elliot experiences, especially in the last years of her life (p. 451).

Through her narration of Elliot’s complex experiences and convictions, Austen guides the readers through Elliot’s personal development in faith, relationships, and discernment. The raw, yet kind, approach demonstrates Austen’s clear admiration for Elliot but does not lift her unduly to a saintly pedestal. A significant strength of the book lies in its use of Elliot’s own words describing her thoughts, her decision process, and her theology. Austen chooses to devote nearly half this book’s content to only eleven years of Elliot’s life, which may leave some readers longing for a more thorough treatment of both the early and late years of her life.

Anyone wishing to witness a beautiful and often paradoxical life of loneliness and love, doubt and confidence, confusion and clarity, suffering and joy, cast beneath the Shadow of the Almighty will find satisfaction in this biography. Anyone confused when the promises of God, the clarity of his call, and the visible results of your sacrificial offerings do not seem to merge (or, more realistically, seem to clash) will find kinship and encouragement in Austen’s telling of Elliot’s story. Finally, this book provides students of evangelical theology insight into one who shaped popular theology over the past three-quarters of a century, by a woman who mused that she had “opportunities I never sought, platforms I never asked for, and influence I hardly know about” (p. 499).