52 pages • 1 hour read
Elisabeth ElliotThrough Gates of Splendor
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: 20th-Century Evangelical Christianity
Through Gates of Splendor is written from the context of 20th-century evangelical Christianity, and the book’s cultural and philosophical assumptions stem from that worldview. Mid-century American evangelicalism was a broad movement that included many different Protestant Christian denominations, all united through an overarching commitment to the primacy of the Bible and the necessity of a faith-commitment to Jesus Christ in order to experience God’s salvation and the promise of eternal life. A prominent example of this movement was the ministry of Billy Graham, who preached to crowds of many thousands around the world, encouraging them to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior. The foundational premise of the evangelical movement is that the biblical gospel message is universally true: that Jesus was the Son of God, that he came into the world to die for humanity’s sins and rise to life again, and that through faith in his sacrifice, one could experience salvation from one’s sins and everlasting life in heaven. Since the result of accepting the gospel message was believed to be the greatest possible good—eternal life—the dissemination of the gospel was the paramount goal for evangelical Christians. The logic of evangelical theology dictates that the supreme act of love for another person is to seek their salvation, if they are willing, and, conversely, choosing not to share the gospel message is an act of cruelty that precludes the other person from the possibility of receiving everlasting life.
This ideological context explains many of the features of Through Gates of Splendor. Whereas readers who do not share the author’s evangelical convictions might question the ethics of contacting an Indigenous tribe and thus introducing potential disruptions into their culture, evangelicals view the missionaries’ actions in the book as being motivated by love and aiming for the Indigenous people’s greatest possible good. From the missionaries’ perspective, leaving the Huaorani people unreached by the gospel would mean condemning them to an existence in which they would have no hope of attaining the eternal life promised in the Bible. To them, the Huaorani people’s greatest need was thus for knowledge of the gospel, by which they could choose for themselves whether they wanted to follow the Christian faith or not. In addition to disseminating the gospel message, the missionaries also sought to exemplify the Christian ethic of love by bringing a host of other benefits—medical treatments for the preventable illnesses from which the Huaorani suffered, the ability to read and write and gain an education, protection from the depredations of unscrupulous outsiders like poachers and loggers, and so on. Motivated by these principles and by a concern for the Huaorani people’s spiritual and physical welfare, the missionaries undertook grave risks to reach them, and thus the men’s deaths were interpreted by evangelicals not as a tragedy, but as an inspiring story of faith and sacrifice.
Critical Context: Christian Missionary Literature
Through Gates of Splendor is considered a foundational work in Christian missionary literature, likely surpassing the impact of any other 20th-century missionary biography. It offers a firsthand account of one of the pivotal moments of the evangelical mission movement, falling in the middle of an era in which Christianity was expanding more rapidly around the world than ever before in history. Further, it helped to spur a renewed wave of missionary activity in the second half of the 20th century by inspiring many young people to consider for themselves the story of the five missionaries. As such, the book provides a useful window into the worldview of evangelical missionaries and a glimpse of the procedures and methods they used to attain their goals during a period in which their actions stood at the center of an ongoing worldwide transformation in culture, religion, and globalization.
The book’s construction, being an account of the events of “Operation Auca” woven together through several different primary sources—diaries, journals, letters, and Elisabeth Elliot’s narration—adds to its sense of authenticity and immediacy, offering students of the missionary movement a valuable insight into the thoughts and motivations of the participants. The book was well-received at the time of its release and remains widely appreciated today, but ongoing reflection on the book’s contents in later decades was not always uncritical. In addition to some of the theological and practical difficulties of missionary work that did not receive full treatment within the published text (but were later highlighted in Elliot’s second epilogue), a few evangelical critics felt that the book glorified an enterprise that had been undertaken too quickly, too rashly, and without the proper preparations. Nonetheless, Through Gates of Splendor retains an influential place in the evangelical movement and in the history of Christian missions, with the missionaries’ sincerity, love for others, and zeal for the gospel still held up as a model worthy of admiration and emulation.
