A.W. Tozer — Overview
The prophetic pastor of Chicago — The Pursuit of God, The Knowledge of the Holy, his critique of entertainment Christianity, and his debt to the mystics.
Life and Prophetic Voice
Formation of a Self-Taught Prophet
Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) was born into rural poverty in western Pennsylvania and received no formal theological education beyond a brief period of night-school study. His conversion at seventeen, through the overheard words of a street preacher, set him on a path of ferocious self-directed reading that over the following decades took him through Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, the English Puritans, the medieval mystics, and the great Reformers. He was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1920 and served as pastor of Southside Alliance Church in Chicago for thirty-one years, from 1928 to 1959, before moving to Toronto for the final years of his life. He died at his desk in 1963, leaving behind a body of written work that has shaped evangelical spirituality more deeply than most academic theologians of the same period.
His spiritual disciplines were rigorous and countercultural even by the standards of his own tradition. He rose before dawn to pray, spent long hours alone with God, and often prayed face-down on the floor of his study. He refused to own a television. He was suspicious of the growing entertainment culture within evangelical Christianity and said so publicly, repeatedly, and with the kind of bluntness that made him enemies among the comfortable and heroes among the earnest. The prophetic posture he maintained — addressing the church as one who loved it too much to flatter it — was grounded in what he believed Scripture required: not the knowledge of God as a theological category but the experience of God as a present reality (Jer 9:23–24; Phil 3:10).
The Prophetic Critique
As editor of The Alliance Weekly from 1950 to 1963, Tozer reached approximately 140,000 readers with a weekly editorial that was often more sermon than magazine column. The consistent theme across decades of writing and preaching was the loss of the sense of the divine Majesty within evangelical Christianity. He observed that the church had grown adept at organizing, programming, and entertaining while losing its capacity for awe. The name of God was used constantly, but the presence of God was rarely sought or expected. Services were designed to attract rather than to encounter.
Tozer stood in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets in the specific sense that he was calling the people of God back to what they had professed to believe rather than inventing something new. His critique was not that evangelical theology was wrong but that evangelical practice had become a hollow shell around a living doctrine — the doctrine still formally held, the reality no longer genuinely pursued. He insisted that the gap between stated belief in the Holy Spirit and actual dependence on the Holy Spirit was the central wound of the twentieth-century church.
The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy
The Pursuit of God (1948)
The Pursuit of God was written in a single night on a train journey and reads with the intensity that origin suggests. Its governing image is the soul's gaze fixed on God — not the accumulation of correct information about God but the living orientation of the whole person toward the divine Presence. Tozer began with Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen 22:1–14) as the paradigm of what he called the blessedness of possessing nothing. God's gift of Isaac had become, over the years, something Abraham possessed — something that, Tozer argued, stood between Abraham's soul and God himself. The command to offer Isaac was the command to release the last and greatest of the lesser goods in order to possess the Giver himself. The pattern is the deepest logic of Christian spirituality: Matt 6:33 — seek first the kingdom — is not a scheduling instruction but a description of the soul's proper ordering.
Tozer further argued that the voice of God in Scripture is not a past record only but a living, present address to the reading soul. The words of the Bible are not merely reports about God's speech; they are God's speech, and the person who reads them with a listening heart will find them addressed to him or her directly. This experiential immediacy of Scripture stood at the heart of his spirituality and distinguished his approach from both dead orthodoxy and subjective mysticism: the experience he described was always the experience of meeting the living God through the written Word.
The Knowledge of the Holy (1961)
The Knowledge of the Holy is a meditation on the attributes of God, structured as a series of short chapters each devoted to a single divine perfection: self-existence, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, transcendence, immanence, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, holiness, sovereignty. The governing premise — one of the most quoted sentences in twentieth-century evangelical writing — is that what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. Low thoughts of God produce disordered lives, churches, and cultures. The recovery of authentic Christianity must begin with the recovery of the sense of divine Majesty.
The attribute chapters are not systematic theology in the academic sense but devotional theology in the tradition of Stephen Charnock's treatises on the attributes — aimed at moving the reader not merely to correct assent but to worship. The opening meditations on God's self-existence and eternity press against the habit of imagining God as a larger version of a human being. Tozer drew heavily on Isaiah's vision of the transcendent God (Isa 40:18) and on the magnificent self-disclosure of the divine Name in Exod 34:6–7 — the God who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, while not leaving the guilty unpunished. His treatment of the love of God is notably unsentimentalized: the love of God is a holy love, inseparable from the justice and the wrath of God, and to reduce it to mere benevolence is to shrink God to human scale.
Theology and Legacy
Christology and the Mystical Tradition
Tozer's Christology was entirely orthodox and thoroughly evangelical. He held that Christ is the eternal Son, the pre-existent Wisdom and Word through whom all things were made and in whom the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell. The Incarnation was for Tozer an act of divine condescension that involved no diminishment of essential deity — the Son did not cease to be what he had always been in order to become what he had not been. He was particularly insistent on the present reign and lordship of Christ over the church and deeply resistant to any practice or theology that treated Christ as a Saviour to be accepted for personal benefit without a corresponding submission to him as Lord over all of life.
Tozer's relationship to the Christian mystical tradition was unusual among evangelical pastors of his era. He read and recommended writers such as Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica. He was careful to distinguish the scriptural core of their testimony — the soul's union with God through grace, the necessity of self-abandonment, the reality of contemplative prayer — from any element inconsistent with Protestant soteriology. He insisted that genuine mystical experience must be grounded in the atoning work of Christ and normed by Scripture. What he valued in the mystics was their refusal to be satisfied with anything less than God himself — a refusal that he found depressingly rare in the activist, program-driven evangelical world he inhabited.
Legacy and Key Scripture
Tozer's legacy is felt most strongly in those strands of evangelical Christianity that take worship seriously as theology and that resist the reduction of the Christian life to intellectual assent or moral effort. His writing has proved remarkably durable across generations and across denominational lines, read with equal appreciation by Reformed evangelicals, charismatics, and Catholics. He is, along with Amy Carmichael, one of the figures most often recommended to young believers who want to know what it looks like to actually pursue God rather than merely talk about him.
The scriptural threads that run most visibly through his entire body of work tell the story of a soul oriented entirely toward the knowledge and presence of God. The psalmist's single desire to dwell in the house of the Lord and gaze upon his beauty (Ps 27:4) is the aspiration Tozer regarded as normative for every believer, not the peculiarity of the spiritually gifted. The thirsting of the deer for the water brook (Ps 42:1) is the condition he hoped to awaken in his readers. The definition of eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son (John 17:3) grounded his insistence that eternal life is not merely a future destination but a present quality of relationship. And Paul's prayer for the Ephesians — that they might receive the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him (Eph 1:17) — captured the hunger that Tozer believed the Holy Spirit is always willing to satisfy in anyone willing to seek it.