{"id":2513,"date":"2024-03-05T08:59:10","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T13:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/fleshofmyflesh\/?p=2513"},"modified":"2024-07-09T21:52:19","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T01:52:19","slug":"elisabeth-elliot-victim-of-biblical-womanhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/fleshofmyflesh\/2024\/03\/elisabeth-elliot-victim-of-biblical-womanhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Elisabeth Elliot: Victim of \u201cBiblical Womanhood\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The prison of \u201cbiblical womanhood\u201d \/ Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Back in the late 1990s, I burned my copy of Elisabeth Elliot\u2019s Let Me Be a Woman<\/em> \u2013 a story I tell here<\/a> \u2013 along with a copy of Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/em>. While I have nothing against Dracula<\/em> as a novel, I burned it symbolically as a bad influence on my thinking. I\u2019d read it too young, when I was seven.<\/p>\n

My grievances with Elliot\u2019s book were more personal. In Let Me Be a Woman<\/em>, she grossly misapplied Holy Scripture to make idols of men \u2013 and to make of women something less than fully human, counseling us to rejoice in a glorified patriarchal prison.<\/p>\n

These books, despite their differences, exude dark energy. Dracula feeds on Lucy multiple times, literally sucking the life out of her. As Lucy\u2019s friend, Mina, observes: \u201cAll the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is now coming to light that the abuse Elliot suffered from her third husband had a similar effect on her. A friend of Elliot\u2019s, reflecting on this destructive marriage and its convergence with \u201cbiblical womanhood<\/a>,\u201d recently wrote that over the years, she \u201cmade herself smaller and smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBiblical\u201d Womanhood?<\/h2>\n Elliot was married to her third husband, Lars Gren, for thirty-eight years. Liz Charlotte Grant<\/a>, drawing from books by prominent Elliot biographers Lucy R.S. Austen and Ellen Vaughn, describes the marriage as one defined by Gren\u2019s pervasive abuse:<\/p>\n " \u201cGren decided when [Elliot] drank a cup of tea, took a bath, and when she slept. He frequently checked her car\u2019s odometer, double-checking that she hadn\u2019t made any unplanned stops. He controlled the house thermostat. He listened in on her phone conversations and had the final say on whether she visited her friends, often declining invitations for her at the last minute. When he grew angry with his wife, he would refuse to speak to her for days. And most painful for Elliot, Gren [would randomly deny Elliot access to her family].\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She goes on to quote Vaughn in stating that Gren \u201ccontrolled [Elliot] for the rest of her long life.\u201d<\/p>\n Gren\u2019s humiliation of Elliot indeed continued until the very end of her life, when he burned her journals, robbing her of her voice as she was losing her mind to Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n A Cautionary Tale<\/h2>\n*** ** Elliot isn\u2019t someone for women to emulate in marriage. Rather, she\u2019s a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n ** Grant writes that Elliot \u201cdid not understand her own worth; she saw herself as a slave of men and God alike, subservient to their whims and feelings even as she suppressed her own.\u201d<\/p>\n ** It is this precise depravity \u2013 the gut-wrenching idolatry of making men into gods \u2013 that oozes<\/em> from Let Me Be a Woman.<\/em><\/p>\n ** But far worse for me than reading the book was reading the story of a woman who de-converted from Christianity based on Elliot\u2019s false words.<\/p>\n ** ***What do you call evangelism in reverse?<\/p>\n Rethinking Elisabeth Elliot<\/h2>\n*** ** When I threw Let Me Be a Woman <\/em>into the charcoal burner with Dracula,<\/em> as a young teen, I could not have imagined that Elliot, like Lucy, was getting the life sucked out of her.<\/p>\n ** As I\u2019ve come to see that Elliot was ultimately a victim of the complementarian ideology she espoused, I pity her more and despise her less. She was a flawed human being and in her life the hero, the villain, and the victim. Her investment in \u201cbiblical womanhood\u201d would essentially become an investment into her own dysfunctional and abusive marriage. One of the fiercest and most influential advocates of male headship, she submitted to abuse because her husband<\/em> was the abuser.<\/p>\n ** ***Of course, Let Me Be a Woman<\/em> was written just prior to Elliot\u2019s marriage to Gren. But given the decades of emotional abuse that soon followed, it is difficult not to interpret her dogged defense of \u201cbiblical womanhood\u201d as her way of trying to rationalize her own abuse, as her way of trying to sanctify<\/em> her submission to it, as her way of justifying staying with her abuser.<\/p>\n This post has been dark, so I want to end with an encouraging word from Elliot\u2019s book Through the Gates of Splendor<\/a>. <\/em>The book was first published in 1957, before her \u201cbiblical womanhood\u201d days, and this passage reminds us that our own limitations can\u2019t hinder God\u2019s purposes for us:<\/p>\n " \u201cGod is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Elliot may have passed away, but as her complicated story continues to unfold, maybe God is still at work to accomplish his purposes in her, in spite of her.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the late 1990s, I burned my copy of Elisabeth Elliot\u2019s Let Me Be a Woman \u2013 a story I tell here \u2013 along with a copy of Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula. While I have nothing against Dracula as a novel, I burned it symbolically as a bad influence on my thinking. I\u2019d read it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4750,"featured_media":2519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[257,105,49,82],"tags":[70,263,269,260,266],"class_list":["post-2513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bliblical-womanhood","category-complementarianism","category-female-submission","category-patriarchy","tag-elisabeth-elliot","tag-ellen-vaughn","tag-lars-gren","tag-liz-charlotte-grant","tag-lucy-r-s-austen"],"yoast_head":"\nElisabeth Elliot: Victim of \u201cBiblical Womanhood\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Elliot isn\u2019t someone for women to emulate in marriage, at least not in her later years. 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