A Love Laid on the Altar

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”

— Romans 12:1, KJV

Spring 1948

Through the early months of 1948 Elisabeth Howard and Jim Elliot studied Greek together, talked, and watched each other. At the end of April they went together to a large Christian gathering in Chicago, which was, by the standards of the time and the place, a date, though neither of them would have used the word lightly. As the spring went on, it became clear to both of them that something more than friendship was growing. It became equally clear that neither knew what to do about it.

For Elisabeth the difficulty was partly one of temperament. She had been brought up to believe that a woman did not reveal her feelings to a man until he had declared his, and she held to that conviction firmly. She was also reserved by nature, and anxious not to want anything that God had not given. Her private journals from these months, now drawn on by her biographer, show that the outward composure was not the whole story. She was in love, and she found the uncertainty very hard to bear.

For Jim the difficulty was one of conviction. He had come to believe, from his reading of Scripture, that God might be calling him to remain single for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He had taken very seriously Paul’s words in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians about the unmarried man caring for the things of the Lord, and Christ’s words about those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom’s sake. He thought that a missionary pioneer, going into hard and dangerous places, might be better without a wife, and he feared that marriage might divide his heart. He was not sure. But he was not willing to proceed until he was sure, and he was not willing to let his feelings decide the question for him.

A Walk in June

On 9 June, shortly before Elisabeth’s graduation, the two of them went for a walk in the evening, south of the campus, and came to a cemetery. There, by their own later accounts, they spoke openly for the first time of what each felt for the other. And Jim told her also that he believed God might be leading him to remain single, at least for now, and that he could not ask her for anything or promise her anything.

They agreed, in the end, to give the matter back to God. The image they both used, then and later, was of the altar. In the twenty-second chapter of Genesis, God asks Abraham to offer his son Isaac, the son of the promise, as a burnt offering on Mount Moriah. Abraham goes, builds the altar, binds Isaac and lays him on it, and only then does God provide a ram instead. Jim and Elisabeth understood their love in that light. It was a gift from God, and it was precious, and for that very reason it must be offered back to him without conditions. If God gave it back to them, well and good. If he did not, they would trust that he had something better.

As they sat there, they became aware that the moon, risen behind them, was throwing the shadow of a large stone cross between them. Both of them remembered it, and Elisabeth told of it years later. Neither treated it as a magical sign, but both took it as a picture of what they had just agreed: that the cross stood between them, and that whatever happened to their love would happen under it.

No Promises

Soon afterwards Elisabeth graduated and left Wheaton. Jim had another year to go. There was no engagement, and no understanding of the kind that young couples of the time often had. They did not regard themselves as committed to each other. They agreed to write, but even that was a matter of some scruple, and the letters that followed were frequent at some periods and sparse at others. Jim, especially, was careful not to say anything that would bind either of them. Elisabeth, for her part, held herself to her principle that a woman should wait for the man to lead, and she waited.

It is easy, three generations later, to find all this strange, and some readers find it painful. Two young people who loved each other deeply, and who both wanted to marry, chose to live for years with no promise at all, because one of them was not yet sure that marriage was God’s will for him. They saw each other only rarely. They went for long periods without knowing whether the story would end in marriage or in a lifetime of separate service. The waiting was hard, and Elisabeth’s private writings make clear that she sometimes found it almost unbearable. But neither of them ever suggested that they had been forced into it. They chose it, freely, because they believed that the will of God was worth more than their own happiness, and that if they sought his will first, their happiness would be safe in his hands.

Passion and Purity

Elisabeth Elliot told the story of these years in Passion and Purity, published in 1984, nearly thirty years after Jim’s death. She drew on her own journals and on his letters, and she wrote it for young Christians struggling with questions of love, sex and the will of God in a culture that had largely abandoned restraint. The book was very widely read, and for many young people it was a lifeline: a picture of a love that was passionate and also chaste, and a reminder that self-control is not the enemy of love but its servant.

Not every reader was persuaded. Some felt that the book made one couple’s unusual path into a pattern for everyone, and that readers took from it rules that Scripture does not lay down. Others found its assumptions about the roles of men and women in courtship too rigid. These criticisms deserve a hearing, and they belong to the wider discussion of her teaching, which the companion volume takes up. But the story itself, as a matter of history, is not in dispute. Jim and Elisabeth did what they said they did. They loved each other and laid that love on the altar, and they left it there for a long time.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s appeal to the Romans to present their bodies as a living sacrifice. It is a hard word. It does not speak of a single dramatic offering but of a life laid down continually, day after day. That was the shape of the years that followed the walk in June 1948. The altar was not a moment. It was a place where they had to keep returning.