A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy (1961) opens with one of the most consequential sentences in twentieth-century devotional literature: 'What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.' The sentence encapsulates the entire argument of the book and the conviction that drove Tozer's ministry: that the root cause of Christian impoverishment - spiritual superficiality, ethical compromise, joyless religiosity - is not insufficient Bible study or inadequate church programs but a diminished conception of God.
Tozer was a self-educated man who became a minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and served the Alliance Church on South Avenue in Chicago for thirty-one years. He read deeply in the Christian mystics - Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Brother Lawrence, Fenelon, Thomas à Kempis - and brought their concern for the interior life to bear on the evangelical tradition from which he came. The Knowledge of the Holy is his systematic attempt to restore to evangelical devotional life the attributes of God as subjects of worship, awe, and transforming encounter, not merely topics for theological classification.
The book is organized around the divine attributes, each receiving a separate chapter: the self-existence of God, the self-sufficiency of God, the eternity of God, the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of God, the transcendence, immutability, faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, holiness, and sovereignty of God. Each chapter is brief - a few pages - and each opens with a prayer that embeds the reader in a posture of worship before the exposition begins. The combination of theology and doxology is deliberate: Tozer wants the reader to know these truths in the mode of adoration rather than mere information.
Isaiah 6:3 - 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory' - is the governing text, as it was for both Tozer's predecessor Sproul and his contemporary Packer. The seraphic doxology establishes the mood of the entire book: reverent, awed, overwhelmed. God's holiness is not one attribute among many but the quality that suffuses all the others - a holy omniscience, a holy love, a holy mercy - so that even God's tenderness is not comfortable familiarity but the tenderness of the absolutely Holy One.
Revelation 4:8 - 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come' - extends the Isaiah vision into the New Testament, where the four living creatures before the throne of God repeat the same thrice-holy acclamation. The continuity across the testaments establishes that the God of the New Testament is not a gentler deity but the same holy God who filled the temple with smoke and brought Isaiah to his face.
Exodus 3:14 - 'I AM THAT I AM' - is the divine name that grounds Tozer's account of the divine self-existence: God is the only being who exists entirely from within himself, whose existence depends on nothing outside himself, who simply and absolutely is. This is the foundational ontological claim that distinguishes the God of the Bible from every other object of worship: everything else is contingent, dependent, derived; God alone exists in himself.
John 4:24 - 'God is Spirit' - grounds Tozer's account of divine immateriality and the implications for worship: those who worship must worship in spirit and truth, not through external forms or sensory stimulation but through an engagement of the spiritual self with the spiritual God.
Tozer died in 1963, two years after publication, and never knew how far the book would reach. It has sold millions of copies, been translated into many languages, and remains a standard in evangelical seminary curricula more than sixty years after its publication. Its influence on the Reformed revival of the 1980s and 1990s - on Sproul, Piper, and the broader culture of theological seriousness - was acknowledged by those figures themselves. It is, along with Packer's Knowing God (1973), the most important popular work of theology of the divine attributes in the evangelical tradition.
Tozer died in 1963, two years after publication, and never knew how far the book would reach. It has sold millions of copies, been translated into many languages, and remains a standard in evangelical seminary curricula more than sixty years after its publication. Its influence on the Reformed revival of the 1980s and 1990s - on Sproul, Piper, and the broader culture of theological seriousness - was acknowledged by those figures themselves. The book demonstrated that serious engagement with the doctrine of God need not choose between academic rigor and devotional warmth, and that the attributes of God are not merely topics for systematic theology but occasions for worship.
The Knowledge of the Holy is, along with Packer's Knowing God (1973), the most important popular work of theology of the divine attributes in the evangelical tradition. The two books complement each other: Packer is more exegetically detailed, Tozer more mystically intense; Packer gives you the systematic framework, Tozer gives you the doxological posture. Together they constitute a complete introduction to what it means to know God in the mode of adoration rather than mere information - which is, Tozer argued, the only mode in which God can genuinely be known at all.