Through Gates of Splendor

“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.”

— Hebrews 11:4, KJV

Asked to Write

Within weeks of the deaths on the Curaray, the story of the five men had been told to millions. Life magazine’s photo essay, built around Cornell Capa’s pictures of the widows and the search and around photographs the men had taken themselves on the beach, appeared at the end of January 1956. Newspapers, magazines and radio programmes followed. Churches across the United States held memorial services. Many accounts were hurried, and some were inaccurate. It was soon clear that someone who had known the men, and who could write, should tell the story properly. The obvious person was Elisabeth.

She agreed, and she worked quickly. She had at her disposal the men’s own diaries and letters, the notes Nate Saint had kept on the gift flights, the photographs, the recollections of the other widows and of the colleagues who had flown and searched, and her own memory. The book was written in the course of 1956, and it was published in 1957 by Harper and Brothers in New York under the title Through Gates of Splendor.

The cost of that work is easy to pass over. To write the book she had to read, in the first months of her widowhood, page after page of her husband’s private journals and letters, and to reconstruct hour by hour the weeks that had ended in his death. She had to weigh what to include about four other families, each with its own grief, and to write about men she had known well without either flattering them or exposing them. She did it while still carrying the ordinary load of a mother and a missionary.

The title came from a hymn. Before the men left for the Curaray they had sung together “We Rest on Thee”, a hymn by Edith Gilling Cherry, a young Englishwoman who had died in 1897, set to the tune of Sibelius’s Finlandia. Its last verse looks forward to the day when believers, passing through the gates of pearly splendour, rest with Christ for ever. Elisabeth took her title from that line. It placed the deaths of the five men where they themselves would have placed them, in the hope of the resurrection.

The Book

Readers who come to Through Gates of Splendor today, expecting a pious tribute, are often surprised by it. It is a plain, factual, carefully restrained book. Elisabeth told the story chronologically, from the five men’s backgrounds and callings to their deaths and the search, and she let their own words, from their journals and letters, carry much of the weight. She described the gift flights and the days on the beach in detail, and she did not linger on the horror of the end. She did not preach. She did not claim to know why God had allowed it, and she did not claim that the story was finished. The book ends not with an explanation but with the conviction that God was sovereign over what had happened, and with the work still to be done.

The restraint was deliberate. She was a writer of unusual clarity, trained in Greek and in close reading, and she had a strong dislike of overstatement. That dislike would grow stronger over the years. But even in 1957, writing in grief and under pressure, she was trying to tell the truth, not to produce a legend.

The book’s effect was enormous. It sold in great numbers, was translated into many languages, and has remained in print ever since. It made the five men known throughout the evangelical world and far beyond it. Over the following decades thousands of people, many of them students, said that reading it had led them to offer themselves for missionary service. Mission agencies spoke of a wave of new volunteers. For a generation of American evangelicals, the five men on the sandbar became the very picture of costly obedience, and Elisabeth became, without seeking it, one of the best-known Christian women in the world.

Shadow of the Almighty

The following year, 1958, she published a second book, devoted to Jim alone. Shadow of the Almighty took its title from the first verse of the ninety-first psalm, which speaks of abiding under the shadow of the Almighty. It told Jim’s life from his boyhood in Portland to his death, and it drew heavily on his journals and letters. In it readers met for the first time the young man who had written, a few months after leaving Wheaton, the sentence about giving what one cannot keep. They also met a young man who was intense, idealistic, sometimes self-absorbed, often hard on himself and on others, and very much in love with God.

It was a remarkable thing for a widow of barely thirty to do. She was presenting to the world the private writings of the husband she had lost, with all their fervour and all their immaturity, and she chose not to tidy them up into something more edifying. Some of what Jim wrote as a student reads, to an older eye, as earnest and even naïve. She let it stand. She trusted readers to see the man as he was, growing in grace, not yet finished. Shadow of the Almighty became, like the first book, a classic of its kind, and Jim’s journals, which she later edited in fuller form as The Journals of Jim Elliot (1978), have continued to be read.

A Story She Kept Correcting

There is an irony in the success of these two books, and Elisabeth felt it more and more as the years went by. She had written them to tell the truth plainly. But the story they told was taken up by others and made into something simpler and more triumphant: a tale of heroes and savages, of martyrdom followed swiftly by mass conversion, of a happy ending guaranteed. She came to dislike that version intensely. She knew that the men’s planning was open to honest question, that the motives on the Waorani side were complicated and human, and that what followed among the Waorani was neither as quick nor as clear as the legend claimed. When Through Gates of Splendor was reissued in 1996 for the fortieth anniversary, she added an epilogue saying so, and declining to give the story a neater ending than God had. That later honesty, and what it cost her, belongs to a later chapter.

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of Abel, the first man in the Bible to die, of whom the writer to the Hebrews says that being dead he yet speaks. The five men spoke after their deaths largely because Elisabeth gave them a voice. She did it with care, at real personal cost, and with a reticence that the people who retold the story did not always share. Her two books are, in a sense, the first expression of a conviction that would govern her whole writing life: that the truth about suffering, told without decoration, is more useful to faith than any legend.