Greek at Wheaton

“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

— 2 Timothy 2:15, KJV

A College on the Prairie

Wheaton College stands in the town of Wheaton, Illinois, some twenty-five miles west of Chicago, on what was once open prairie. It had been founded in 1860 under Jonathan Blanchard, an abolitionist and reformer, and by the 1940s it was perhaps the best-known evangelical liberal arts college in the United States. Its students signed a pledge of conduct, attended chapel daily, and were taught by a faculty committed to the authority of Scripture. Its president when Elisabeth Howard arrived in the autumn of 1944 was V. Raymond Edman, who had himself been a missionary in Ecuador in the 1920s, working among the Quichua of the Andean highlands until illness forced him home. No one could have known how much that country would come to mean to several of the students then passing through his chapel services.

The college Elisabeth entered was a wartime college. Many of the young men were away in the forces, and for a time women made up a large share of the student body. After the war ended in 1945 the veterans came back in numbers, older and more serious than ordinary undergraduates, many of them studying on government grants, and the campus grew crowded and lively. Through all of it the rhythms of the college went on: lectures, chapel, literary societies, prayer meetings, and the steady pressure of students who wanted to know what God was calling them to do.

Why Greek

Elisabeth chose to major in classical Greek. It was an unusual choice for a young woman in 1944, but she had a clear reason for it. She believed God was calling her to translate the Bible for a people who did not yet have it, and she wanted to be able to work from the original text of the New Testament rather than from an English version. The course was demanding. Students read Homer, the dramatists, the historians and Plato as well as the New Testament, and they learned the grammar thoroughly, by drill and repetition, in the old way.

Greek suited her. She had a precise mind, a good ear and the patience to work through difficult texts word by word. The discipline of translation, of finding exactly the right word in one language for a word in another, and of refusing to settle for a vague approximation, became part of her habit of thought. Those who later admired the clarity of her English prose were often admiring, without knowing it, the fruit of four years of Greek composition. She came to love the language for its own sake, and she kept her Greek New Testament close for the rest of her life.

She was, by the accounts of those who knew her at Wheaton, a serious and rather solitary student, more respected than popular. She was not unfriendly, but she was reserved, and she did not chase the social life of the campus. She was deeply concerned to know and do God’s will, and she prayed about it constantly. She had decided that she would rather remain single and serve God on the mission field than marry the wrong man, and she was quite prepared for that to be her lot.

Jim Elliot

In the autumn of 1945 a new student arrived from Portland, Oregon. Philip James Elliot, always called Jim, had been born there on 8 October 1927, the third of four children of Fred and Clara Elliot. His father preached in the small Plymouth Brethren assemblies to which the family belonged, and his mother was a chiropractor. Jim had grown up in a home as devout, in its own way, as the Howards’, and he had come to faith as a small boy. At high school he had already been a confident public speaker. At Wheaton he threw himself into everything. He joined the wrestling team and became one of its best members. He was active in the student missionary fellowship. And he, too, chose to study Greek.

Jim was a year younger than Elisabeth and a year behind her at college. He was handsome, athletic, outspoken and intense, with a strong sense of humour and a habit of saying exactly what he thought. He had very little time for what he regarded as frivolity, including much of the social life of the college, and he had decided views about the dangers of romantic entanglements for a young man who meant to serve God. He read the lives of missionaries and was moved above all by the diary of David Brainerd, the young American who had given his short life to preaching among the native peoples of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the 1740s, and who had died at twenty-nine. Brainerd’s single-minded devotion, and his willingness to be spent for God, became something of a pattern for Jim.

Jim’s closest friend at Wheaton was Elisabeth’s younger brother, David Howard, who wrestled alongside him and shared his missionary zeal. Elisabeth knew Jim by sight and by reputation, as one knows people at a small college. It was through Dave that she came to know him better.

Christmas in Moorestown

At Christmas 1947 Dave invited Jim home to Moorestown for the holidays. Jim stayed with the Howards, joined in the family prayers and hymn-singing, and talked late into the evenings. He seems to have felt at home in a household so like his own in its seriousness about God. It was in the weeks that followed that he began to notice Dave’s sister in a new way.

When the new term began in January 1948, Elisabeth and Jim found themselves in some of the same Greek classes, and they began to study together. They were both good at it, and both competitive. They talked about Greek, about the Bible, about missions and about the will of God. Jim had just begun to keep a journal, which would one day be published and read by hundreds of thousands, and he began, guardedly, to write about her in it. Elisabeth, for her part, kept her own counsel, and her own journal. Each was, in a sense, waiting to see what the other would do, and each was determined not to do anything that God had not plainly sanctioned.

She was a senior, and in June she would graduate. Neither of them knew what the spring would bring, or that it would begin a story that would occupy them for more than five years before it reached any resolution.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s charge to Timothy to be a workman who handles the word of truth rightly. It was the verse that might have stood over Elisabeth’s Greek grammar. She went to Wheaton to learn to handle God’s word with care, so that she might one day give it to others in their own tongue. She learned that, and she learned something else besides, which she had not gone looking for.