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.
Chapter 19-Epilogue IIChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “Yet We Have Not Forgotten Thee”
The book’s final chapter attempts to reconstruct what must have happened at that fatal meeting on Palm Beach. The five missionaries carried guns as a last resort against hostile action, intending first to fire them into the air to frighten any Huaorani warriors if necessary, but with ammunition available should the situation require it. The men’s wives surmised that their husbands had likely been surprised in an ambush—perhaps distracted by a welcoming party while a larger group of warriors snuck up from the other side. At least one gun had been discharged, with a bullet-hole left in the plane’s windscreen, but the fact that all five bodies were discovered in the water likely indicated that they had retreated until the last moment, hoping to show their peaceful intent by drawing back in the face of violence. After the missionaries’ deaths, the Huaorani had stripped the plane of its outer metal fabric and returned to their settlements.
In the remainder of the chapter, Elisabeth Elliot explains the diverging views that the outside world took of the five men’s deaths, but also the effects that their story were beginning to have: “To the world at large this was a sad waste of five young lives. But God has His plan and purpose in all things. There were those whose lives were changed by what happened on Palm Beach” (253). The five missionaries were seen as martyrs for the cause of spreading the Christian gospel around the world, and many people began to consider strengthening their commitments to that cause. In the months after the attack, the mission work in the area continued: Barbara Youderian serving among the Jivaros, Elisabeth Elliot working with the Quichua people in Shandi, Marj Saint and Marilou McCully going to radio ministries in Quito, Rachel Saint (Nate’s sister) and Dayuma pressing on with the Huaorani language project, and Johnny Keenan recommencing gift-drops into Huaorani territory. Far from a renouncement of the mission to the Huaorani, the deaths of the five young missionaries on Palm Beach inspired a redoubling of efforts.
Epilogue Summary
The first epilogue was written in November of 1958, more than two years after the events described in the final chapters of Through Gates of Splendor. Elisabeth Elliot opens the epilogue with a striking update on the course of the Huaorani mission: “Today I sit in a tiny leaf-thatched hut on the Tiwanu River, not many miles southwest of ‘Palm Beach.’ In another leaf house, just about ten feet away, sit two of the seven men who killed my husband” (257). Elliot relates that missionary pilots continued doing gift-drops to show their good intentions to the Huaorani even after the deaths, and Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister, continued in her study of the Huaorani language with Dayuma.
Then, late in 1957, two Huaorani women suddenly emerged from the forest and came to a Quichua village—one of them was the woman who had accompanied George and Delilah to Palm Beach the year before—and Elisabeth took the opportunity to learn the language from them. Shortly thereafter, these two, along with Dayuma, returned to Huaorani territory with messages of the missionaries’ goodwill. This paved the way for Elisabeth and Rachel to go and live among the Huaorani, where they were peacefully received. They learned that the five missionary men had been killed because of a rumor that they were cannibals. Elliot writes of this in her final paragraphs: “Basically it was fear that led them to what they now regard as a mistake. But we know that it was no accident. God performs all things according to the counsel of His will” (259).
Epilogue II Summary
The second epilogue was written in January of 1996, appended to the 40th anniversary edition of Through Gates of Splendor, after Elliot had moved back to the US and earned her reputation as a widely-loved devotional speaker and writer. Elliot writes of the difficulties inherent in considering the story of the five missionaries’ deaths—in particular, the temptation to grasp after glimmers of triumph while ignoring the suffering and the lingering questions about that episode. Though the missionaries’ deaths certainly did result in many people becoming inspired to take up the cause of the Christian gospel and ultimately led to the Huaorani people receiving that very gospel, Elliot notes that questions still remain: “For us widows the question as to why the men who had trusted God to be both shield and defender should be allowed to be speared to death was not one that could be smoothly or finally answered in 1956, nor yet silenced in 1996” (268). She does not regard these questions, however, as a rebuke of God’s plan, but rather as an experience akin to the suffering of Job in the Bible, who in answer to his many questions had only the response of God’s sovereignty, not the revelation of his specific purposes in Job’s life:
In short, in the Waorani story as in other stories, we are consoled as long as we do not examine too closely the unpalatable data. […] The healthier faith seeks a reference point outside all human experience, the Polestar which marks the course of all human events (270).
In the end, Elliot comes back to her faith in God’s will, even if it plays out in directions and events that she still does not understand. Like Job, it is in bowing to the mystery of God’s sovereignty, especially in the experience of suffering, that marks out the truest and deepest consolations of faith.
Chapter 19-Epilogue II Analysis
Chapter 19 and the two epilogues each serve to narrate a conclusion to the events of the men’s death in 1956, but each does so in slightly different ways. Chapter 19, written in the immediate aftermath of those events, focuses on trying to make sense of the events that had occurred on Palm Beach and on seeking out the glimmers of hope that emerged from the men’s deaths. It is the most positive of the three conclusions, giving its attention to the way in which the story of the deaths transformed the lives of many people who encountered it, encouraging them to consider a deeper engagement with the mission to bear the gospel around the world. The next conclusion—the first epilogue—is written two years after the events, from the perspective of having met the Huaorani and learning the story from their side. This conclusion, too, is fairly positive, showing the continuing effects of the Huaorani mission that the five men had begun, and the surprising turn of events that led to Elisabeth Elliot living among the Huaorani. The third conclusion, in Epilogue II, is written with the benefit of four decades of retrospection and is the most emotionally and theologically nuanced of the three. By 1996, when that piece was written, there would have been time not only to gauge the positive impact of the story told in Through Gates of Splendor, but also to absorb some of the critical reception that questioned the assumptions and the rapidity of pressing forward in the five men’s undertaking of “Operation Auca.” Epilogue II admits, like the other two conclusions, of the many positive effects that emerged from the story of the five men’s deaths. However, it also wrestles with difficult questions that remain from that episode, especially as they relate to the theological question of understanding the will of God.
The predominant theme in these sections is that of Faith and Sacrifice. As the actions and motivations of the five missionary men are weighed, the verdict always comes back with an emphasis on their sincerity, their faith, and their willingness to press forward even with a full knowledge of the possible dangers. The five men are regularly hailed as “martyrs” in many other accounts—a word that Through Gates of Splendor does not make its main descriptor of the men—but the undercurrent of noble self-sacrifice for the ideals of one’s faith nonetheless fills the text at every point.
The other theme that receives a notable treatment here is that of Discerning the Will of God, but it is dealt with differently in this section than in any of the book’s previous chapters. Earlier, the idea of discerning the will of God was always focused on the question of what God’s will was—to go to the Huaorani or to wait. In these sections, however, the question becomes twofold: First, was the presumed answer on which the men acted actually the will of God? Second, if it was the will of God, why did God send them to their deaths? The first of these questions appears to be answered in the affirmative in each of the book’s concluding sections. Elliot, together with the other widows, remains secure in the conviction that they were acting within the will of God: “God has His plan and purpose in all things” (253).
In regard to the second question, which Epilogue II wrestles with, Elliot admits that she has no easy answers. While she can point to some of the positive results that came out of the story of her husband’s death on that beach by the Curaray River, she also acknowledges the difficulty those events raise regarding her understanding of God’s will. It was a question that “was not one that could be smoothly or finally answered” (268). In the end, she comes back around to her faith in God—a faith held even when she cannot discern the reasons behind God’s purposes nor the way that human weaknesses play into the story of the divine will:
It is God [that we depend on] and nothing less than God, for the work is God’s and the call is God’s and everything is summoned by Him and to His purposes, the whole scene, the whole mess, the whole package—our bravery and our cowardice, our love and our selfishness, our strengths and our weaknesses (271).
At the end of the book, then, the theme of discerning the will of God remains something of a mystery—not that Elliot or the other widows felt they had not accurately discerned God’s will, but in the sense that the infinite purpose and plan of God—the why behind that will—was beyond their finite ability to fully understand.
