Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

Ellen Vaughn | B&H Books, 2020, 320 pp., $18.49 | Reviewed by Valerie Porter

Ellen Vaughn has written an excellent biography about Elisabeth Elliot in nearly 300 pages, but I think Elliot would have shunned the title, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot. From what Vaughn clearly reveals through innumerable quotes from Elliot’s personal correspondence, Elliot did not want to become the famous missionary widow. But she did want to serve the Lord in His place for her. Elisabeth wrote shortly after her husband, Jim Elliot, died, “Thou alone knowest, Lord Jesus. Come Thou, purge, purify, make me like unto Thy glorious self!” (Vaughn, 165). The book is written in three parts: Beginning, Becoming, and Being.

Vaughn reminds us that Elliot was quite a scholar and, more importantly, a whiz at languages. Her major in college was just the beginning of language study for this young woman. Majoring in Greek, as did her younger brother, who happened to be Jim Elliot’s roommate, provided her the opportunity to meet her future husband.

For over two years, Elisabeth, Jim, and their daughter, Valerie, shared an incredible life together serving the Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. Before Elisabeth married and had Valerie, she had added Spanish to her language library, as well as Quito, which was the native Indian language where she and Jim would live. Despite the great sorrow of her husband’s death, she continued working in the jungle trying to linguistically and logically create an alphabet and New Testament in the Waodoni language of the natives who killed her husband. The Lord was molding her to be more like Christ. While Becoming Christlike might not have been a book title that easily rolls off the tongue, it might have been more accurate.

This book also chronicles the work of mission organizations in the 1950s and ’60s. For example, I learned about the advent of the airplane being such a help to those young trailblazers. Ellen Vaughn did extensive research, visited the native peoples in Ecuador, met the man who killed Jim and later became Elisabeth’s brother in Christ, read and recorded many details from Elisabeth and Jim’s letters to each other and their families. Though a convicting and bittersweet read, the book is excellent and is only about the early part of Elliot’s life. I look forward to the next book.

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Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe

Voddie T. Baucham Jr. | Washington D.C. Salem Books, 2021, 233 pp. plus appendices, $24.99 | Reviewed by Joe Allyn

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests, I followed up on a recommendation that I listen to my African American brothers. Voddie Baucham was one of many that I turned to, first in a series of lectures he had given at a Founders Ministries Conference in 2019. What I immediately loved about him was that he was a Christian brother who had confidence in the Word of God!

In his recently released book, Fault Lines, Baucham was able to outline some of the ideological underpinnings of a worldview that he calls Critical Social Justice and two movements that flow from it: Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Though I was unfamiliar with their technical terminology, Baucham demonstrated how their ideas are not only pervasive in our culture, but are taking root in the church with alarming effect.

Baucham traces the ideological pedigree of these movements and evaluates them on the basis of their own terms, citing original sources. In a way that I found reminiscent of Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, he exposes how the underpinnings of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality are, in effect, their own religion, a religion that is definitely not compatible with the Christian worldview.

Baucham’s aim, therefore, is not to heal a divide but to expose what he is convinced are fault lines that will rupture. His hope is to call Christians to be firmly on the side of the Word of God so that they will be on solid ground when the earthquake comes.

Baucham has convinced me that this is indeed a looming catastrophe, and I urge Christians today to familiarize themselves with the arguments of this book to know the difference between the concept of biblical justice and the calls of equity by those supporting Critical Social Justice.

Furthermore, we need to love our brothers and sisters who may not be aware of the dangers of these ideas, speaking the truth to them in love and standing for the truth alongside Christian brothers.

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Glimmers of Grace: A Doctor’s Reflections on Faith, Suffering, and the Goodness of God

Kathryn Butler | Crossway, 2021, 224 pp., $17.99 | Reviewed by Dr. Izzi Elliott

In Glimmers of Grace, Dr. Kathryn Butler does a good job of conforming the suffering we endure in sickness and death to the truth of the gospel. Each chapter follows the same basic outline. First, Butler presents a patient’s story, ranging from the mundane challenges of swallowing hospital food to the desperate tragedy of traumatic death.

In the second half of each chapter, she demonstrates how to take every thought captive, as she applies biblical truth to each story. For example, Butler calls on us to see Christ’s blood shed on the cross, both as we apply a Band-Aid to a child’s boo-boo and when an emergency blood transfusion saves a life. Even apart from the obvious benefit in helping the reader think through the hard questions that arise in the face of sickness, suffering, and death, this work is an excellent exercise in training the mind to view all of life through the lens of Scripture.

As a family physician and a recently returned medical missionary, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with questions about how we as Christians ought to think through the hardships associated with medical problems. Butler offers well-outlined, biblical explanations of how the Christian can rest in the faithfulness of our good God even in the hardest of times.

The appendices alone are a useful read for anyone walking alongside a patient with a serious or chronic disease. In Finding the Right Words, she gives excellent advice about how to encourage, and how to avoid discouraging, our friends and loved ones who are suffering illness.

That said, I would offer a word of caution to those who have been deeply hurt through the medical system, either personally or professionally. Butler accurately portrays some of the darker moments of medicine, and it can bring up memories and emotions in those of us who have lived through similar events. Be prepared to cry and to set the book aside for a few days at a time when one of her stories strikes a little too close to home.

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Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

Carl R. Trueman | Crossway, 2020, 432 pp., $34.99 | Reviewed by Rosaria Butterfield

Carl R. Trueman, former seminary professor at Westminster Theological Seminary and current professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, has written a tremendous book that will be a prescient resource for Christians for decades to come. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a must-read for Christian students (high school and college) who need more than traditional worldview handbooks to make sense of gender theory. It will also be a life-saving resource for Christian parents whose adult children have fallen under the indoctrination of LGBTQ+ and who want to stay connected to them without endorsing foolishness.

This 400-page book seeks to answer a simple question: How did average Americans become comfortable with the normalization of homosexuality (including gay marriage) or the advocacy of transgender identity (including hormones and surgery for minors)? How did words become weapons?

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is divided into four parts: Architecture of the Revolution (how Self and Culture have been redefined), Foundations of the Revolution (how 18th Century philosophy informs this redefinition), Sexualization of the Revolution (why attacks on the Creation ordinance have made sexuality the most important identity-factor), and Triumphs of the Revolution (understanding the new logic). Trueman writes accessibly and clearly about complex ideas.

A traditional world—view approach understands personal values and beliefs as propositional—that is, they deal with things that are logically true or false. But traditional worldview approaches cannot account for the variety of problems created when feelings (unstable at best) replace beliefs and when feelings become the epistemological basis—the rock of truth to which others must submit. Traditional worldview studies have not considered the gestalt in what it means to be human in the late 18th Century, producing thinkers like Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Rousseau. These atheist thinkers rejected a Western Judeo-Christian definition of being human (being made male or female and made in God’s image), and this rejection set the stage for non-binary gender identity based on personal feelings.

Traditional worldview studies cannot account for this—other than dismissing the use of personal feelings in place of logical truth as an epistemological no-no. But when the person who has embraced a “non-binary” identity is your daughter or mother or sister, you can’t (and shouldn’t) just wash your hands of the illogic. Trueman explains, “This is the reason why society now often feels like a cultural battle zone: it consists of groups of people who simply think about the moral structure of the world in utterly incompatible ways” (80).

By introducing categories that may be new to the reader—such as “social imaginary,” “emotivism,” and “expressive individualism”—Trueman shows how to understand the other side. For the Christian parent who has lost (for now) a child to the LGBTQ+ movement, understanding that this is not as much of a logical debate as it is a conflict between competing sacred orders can be the first step in understanding your lost child. More than any other book, this one explains the internecine civil war that we face daily.