Evangelicals Now
<< March 1998 >>

Quest for Love - True Stories of Passion and Purity

Quest for Love:
true stories of passion and purity
By Elizabeth Elliot
OM Publishing. 276 pages. £
ISBN 1 85078 253 9

Quest for Love is a compelling read. Elizabeth Elliot has written this book to help people with questions about the right and wrong way of searching for a life partner, using letters and stories as illustrations.
All the letters were written to her in response to her earlier book Passion and purity. The issues are alive and kicking: How do you know when a person is right for you? What is the role of the single women waiting - should she initiate anything? What about apparently platonic friendships? How should we go about 'dating'? How can we set limits for the physical side of a relationship? And how can you know God's will? Although she doesn't all spell it out in detail, it is pretty clear what she thinks a healthy romance should consist of.
To understand fully what Elizabeth Elliot is recommending, I also read Passion and purity which is the story of her own romance with Jim Elliot, the famous missionary martyr. This is clearly her main model. However, this seems to me the story of a frustrating and confusing relationship, as her diary records. Early on, Jim expressed his love for her, a love which was obviously reciprocated. Then he announced that God was calling him to be single for the time being and he didn't know if or when he could ever marry. It took five years of heartache before they did marry. I am not so concerned to pick over the bones of that experience as to ask whether it can form any kind of healthy model for others. I would not want anyone to suffer the agonies of over-extended soul-searching in the way Jim and Elizabeth did before they married.
As examples of the rather dated feel, her advice to us in the 1990s includes the idea that the woman should never initiate anything; that 'words should not be necessary' when letting a man know how far he can go physically; that dating is a dangerous game. In fact, her guidelines for a date are based on what she did in 1939 when she was 14!
I applaud Elizabeth Elliot's call to purity in today's world of romance. It is clearly a biblical principle and one under attack. But I feel that many of her practical applications of this are not necessarily based on the Bible but on social norms that are no longer current. Some of her standards seem so out of touch with reality that I fear many would disregard all she has to say rather than taking her message to heart and sifting its contents carefully.

Debbie Hardyman,
Cambridge