![]() ![]() The church manifested a special combination of holiness, lay initiative, missionary zeal, and apocalypticism. The Brethren, a primitivist Protestant movement dating to the 1820s in Ireland and England, left a deep imprint on the piety of both Elisabeth Howard and Jim Elliot. The Howards were dyed-in-the-wool members of the Plymouth Brethren church. Where else shall we go?Įlisabeth (Howard) Elliot was born in 1926 to an American missionary family serving in Belgium. ![]() He has not promised to answer our questions.” And yet, Elliot would remind us, God has the words of eternal life. To the contrary, Elliot concluded that God “has never promised to solve our problems. Seen in this light, Elliot’s life refutes common Christian assurances that if we obey, all will go well. We cling to God for his character and for what he accomplished in Christ’s death and resurrection, not for worldly peace or prosperity. Much of the book recounts how Elliot, through repeated and largely inexplicable instances of suffering, grew in wisdom about what it means to truly follow the Lord. The core of their problem, to Austen, was the way that postwar evangelical culture gave young people a naïve view of discerning God’s will. Austen is especially unsparing with Jim Elliot, who comes off both as a courageous missionary and a vacillating (at best) suitor in his ludicrously protracted courtship of Elisabeth. At times she clearly finds her subject frustrating. In recent years, growing numbers of iconoclastic authors-especially academics-have gone to the other extreme, reviling once-revered evangelical figures and judging them irredeemable due to their complicity in various sins.Īusten happily inhabits the judicious middle in this spectrum. Some Christian authors choose a hagiographical approach, presenting their subjects in a holy, inspirational light. By that time, Elliot was a bestselling author whose now-classic books Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (1958) were fast becoming standard reading among evangelicals.īiographers of figures like Elliot always grapple with finding the right tone. About three-quarters of the book covers Elliot’s story up to 1963, when she returned to the US from South America. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life is a biography worthy of its subject, diving deep into Elliot’s vast body of correspondence and other writings to present an exceptionally detailed and sometimes conflicted portrait. Before returning to the US, Elliot had become one of the best-known evangelicals in America, with coverage of Jim Elliot’s death and of her endurance on the mission field appearing in major national outlets like Life magazine. Perhaps even more remarkably, Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (whose brother Nate also died in the attack) went to live among the Waorani in 1958. Anyone even marginally affiliated with the American missionary community knows the stirring and tragic story of Elisabeth and her first husband, Jim Elliot, who was killed in Ecuador by Waorani tribesmen in 1956. ![]() But he is unequivocal in stating that the majority of Americans at the time were Christian believers of some kind or other, and that the evangelical component of them (Patrick Henry, for example) played a formative role in creating the new republic.Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most extraordinary and controversial evangelicals of the post–World War II era. ![]() Kidd is careful not to adopt an explicitly ∜hristian nation' view of the role of religious faith, especially evangelical Christian faith, in the nation's founding. The lesson of American history is that although church and state are institutionally separate, morality and freedom are seldom at odds and that, in fact, they are mutually reinforcing.” He points outcorrectlythe errors of both present-day secularists on the left, who insist that the founders barred religious voices from political discourse, and the church-state separation deniers on the right. One of the many virtues of this book is that Kidd is a careful and judicious historian. ∿ull of information about the religion situation of the colonial, revolutionary and early periods of America. ∻alanced without being bland, lucid in the telling, Thomas Kidd's chronicle corrects the excesses both of those who overstate the degree to which America was founded as a ∜hristian nation' and of those who seek to minimize the formative role of religion in the new nation's character.” demonstrates effectively the variety of faiths among Americans of the revolutionary era.” all the more valuable because that story clearly is in danger of being expunged from the historical record.” a salutary reminder of the role religious belief played in the founding of our country. Thought-provoking, meticulously researched. ![]()
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