“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” — A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
That sentence — the opening of Chapter 1 — is arguably the most quoted line Tozer ever wrote, and it serves as the thesis for everything that follows. The Knowledge of the Holy is not a systematic theology. It is a doxology in prose: a sustained attempt to restore weight, wonder, and worship to the evangelical imagination by recovering what the church has always confessed about who God is.
Tozer was sixty-four when he wrote it. He had spent decades as a pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination shaped by Keswick spirituality and a deep hunger for the interior life. His earlier book The Pursuit of God (1948) had established him as one of the most distinctive devotional voices in American evangelicalism. The Knowledge of the Holy is its theological companion — shorter, sharper, and more concentrated. Harper & Row published it, making it Tozer’s only lifetime book to appear with a major secular publisher. It became his most enduring work.
What This Book Argues
The book’s argument is deceptively simple: the greatest problem facing the church is a low view of God. Not heresy, not secularism, not bad technique — but a diminished conception of the divine that produces, in Tozer’s words, “a hundred lesser evils.” When the church ceases to be astonished by God, it inevitably becomes consumed with itself.
Tozer structures the book as a tour through the divine attributes — twenty-three chapters, each devoted to a single attribute: God’s infinitude, immutability, omniscience, wisdom, omnipotence, transcendence, omnipresence, faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, holiness, and sovereignty, among others. But these are not academic entries in a theological dictionary. Each chapter opens with a prayer. Each treats the attribute not as a concept to be mastered but as a reality to be encountered — something before which the proper response is silence, then worship, then changed living.
The method is doxological rather than analytical. Tozer does not argue for the existence of God; he assumes it and invites the reader to contemplate what kind of God exists. His prose is compressed, aphoristic, and urgent — the voice of a man who believes the church is dying of thirst while standing next to a well it has forgotten how to drink from.
Major Themes
1. The Attributes as Invitations to Worship
Tozer’s most distinctive move is to treat the attributes of God not as theological abstractions but as doorways into worship. He defines an attribute as “whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself” — an act of divine self-disclosure intended to draw the creature toward the Creator, not merely to inform the intellect.
Each chapter follows the same logic: here is what Scripture reveals about God’s nature; here is what this means for how you should think, feel, and live in response. His chapter on divine omniscience, for example, does not end with a philosophical defense of foreknowledge. It ends with the observation that God knows everything about you and still loves you — and that this should produce both holy fear and astonished gratitude.
This doxological approach sets The Knowledge of the Holy apart from most systematic theologies. It is not a book for seminarians learning to categorize. It is a book for believers who have lost the capacity to be moved by what they profess to believe.
“The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men.” — A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
2. The Tragedy of the Lost Idea of God
Tozer opens the book with a lament disguised as a diagnosis. He argues that modern Christianity — and here he means evangelical Christianity, his own tribe — has lost the capacity to think great thoughts about God. The result is not doctrinal error (though that follows) but spiritual smallness: worship that entertains rather than awes, prayer that asks for things rather than adores the Giver, lives that are shaped by culture rather than by the weight of glory.
The root cause, Tozer argues, is that the church has stopped contemplating God. It is busy, productive, strategic — and spiritually shallow. It knows how to organize, but it has forgotten how to adore. The remedy is not a new program but an old discipline: sustained, unhurried, reverent attention to who God actually is, as revealed in Scripture.
This diagnosis has not aged. If anything, the pace and distraction of contemporary life have only intensified the condition Tozer described. His call to recover the “lost jewel of adoration” is more relevant now than when he wrote it.
3. The Incomprehensibility of God as a Positive Doctrine
One of the book’s most counterintuitive arguments is that God’s incomprehensibility is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be treasured. God can be truly known — Tozer is no agnostic — but He cannot be fully known. The finite cannot contain the infinite. To think you have God figured out is to worship an idol, not the living God.
This is a deeply necessary corrective in any theological culture that prizes certainty and closure. Tozer insists that mystery is not the absence of knowledge but the presence of something too large for knowledge to contain. We know God truly because God has revealed Himself. We do not know God exhaustively because God is God. Both truths must be held together, and losing either distorts faith.
“Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure command.” — A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
4. Holiness as the Central Attribute
Tozer gives the longest and most intense chapter in the book to the holiness of God. He does not treat holiness as one attribute among many. He treats it as the attribute that gives meaning to all the others. God’s love is holy love. God’s justice is holy justice. God’s sovereignty is holy sovereignty. Without holiness, every other perfection becomes something less than divine.
The holiness of God is not merely God’s moral purity — though it includes that. It is His absolute otherness: the infinite qualitative distinction between Creator and creature that cannot be bridged from the human side. Tozer’s treatment of this theme owes a clear debt to Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, but he translates Otto’s philosophical categories into the language of urgent pastoral appeal. The holiness of God is not a concept to be studied; it is a fire to be approached — and the proper approach is fear, then faith, then adoration.
This chapter is the theological center of the book. Everything else — the call to worship, the critique of modern shallowness, the emphasis on reverence — radiates from here.
5. The Open Secret
The book’s final chapter, “The Open Secret,” is its pastoral payoff. After twenty-two chapters spent contemplating the majesty, mystery, and holiness of God, Tozer arrives at a disarmingly simple conclusion: what the church most needs is not a hidden technique or a special revelation. It needs to put God back at the center.
“The secret is an open one which the wayfaring man may read. It is simply this: Acquaint thyself with God. To regain her lost power the Church must see heaven opened and have a transforming vision of God.”
The open secret is that there is no secret. The knowledge of the holy is available. It requires no special training, no esoteric method, no elite spiritual status. It requires attention — sustained, worshipful, obedient attention to the God who has made Himself known.
This is Tozer at his most generous and accessible. He has spent the entire book telling you how vast and overwhelming God is, and then he tells you that this God wants to be known — by ordinary people, in ordinary churches, through ordinary means of grace. The door is open. The question is whether we will stop long enough to walk through it.
Practical Applications
- Read one attribute per day, slowly, as a devotional practice. The book’s structure is designed for this. Each chapter is short, self-contained, and ends not with a summary but with an implied call to worship. Do not rush. Let a single attribute sit with you for a day.
- Begin your prayer with adoration of a specific attribute. Tozer’s method is to start with who God is before moving to what you need. Let one attribute — God’s faithfulness, His wisdom, His love — shape the opening of your prayer before you ask for anything.
- Notice where your functional view of God is smaller than your stated theology. Tozer’s diagnostic question — “What comes into our minds when we think about God?” — rewards honest self-examination. What you actually think about God, revealed by what you fear and what you trust, may be very different from what you profess.
Lineage and Legacy
A. W. Tozer was formed by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination that grew out of the Keswick holiness movement under the leadership of A. B. Simpson. Keswick spirituality emphasized the deeper life, the crisis of surrender, and the Spirit-filled life as the normative Christian experience. Tozer absorbed this framework deeply but also pushed beyond it — reading medieval mystics, Catholic contemplatives, and Puritan divines with an appetite that made some of his Alliance colleagues uncomfortable.
His recommended reading list included Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, John of the Cross, Thomas à Kempis, Brother Lawrence, Jeanne Guyon, François Fénelon, Miguel de Molinos, and the anonymous author of Theologia Germanica. Tozer was an evangelical who refused to let the Reformation divide determine what he could learn from the broader Christian spiritual tradition. This is one of the reasons his work continues to appeal across denominational lines — he models a generous orthodoxy rooted in Scripture but nourished by the whole history of the church.
Brother Watchman Nee and Brother Witness Lee did not, so far as the record shows, directly reference Tozer or The Knowledge of the Holy. Their shared spiritual lineage runs through Keswick and the deeper life tradition, and many of Tozer’s concerns — reverence, the inner life, the danger of spiritual superficiality, the centrality of Christ — would have resonated deeply. Tozer’s insistence on the experiential knowledge of God as the goal of theology finds a clear parallel in the recovery’s emphasis on the subjective, experiential dimension of faith — though the recovery articulates this through the language of the mingled spirit, the inner anointing, and the organic building up of the Body, categories Tozer does not employ.
The Knowledge of the Holy remains in print more than sixty years after its publication. It is read by evangelicals, charismatics, Reformed Christians, and seekers from every tradition. It anticipated the later evangelical spiritual formation movement associated with Dallas Willard and Richard Foster, and it continues to be one of the most widely recommended introductions to the doctrine of God for ordinary believers.
Honest Assessment
What this book does well: Tozer achieves something genuinely rare: he writes theology that produces worship rather than merely describing it. The book’s structure — prayer, meditation on an attribute, application — models a way of knowing that is contemplative rather than merely intellectual. His prose is consistently arresting. Sentences that could be clichés in less disciplined hands — “God is love,” “God is holy” — are restored to their full weight through Tozer’s ability to make the familiar strange again. The book is short enough to read in a week and dense enough to live with for a year. It rewards slow, repeated reading more than most theological books do.
The book’s limitations: Tozer’s strengths are also his limitations. The book is a devotional meditation, not a work of biblical exegesis. Readers who want careful engagement with specific texts will need to supplement Tozer with commentaries and theological reference works. His treatment of difficult questions — the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom, the problem of evil — is suggestive rather than thorough. He sketches a position without fully defending it.
Tozer also writes within the assumptions of mid-twentieth-century evangelicalism and does not always signal when he is doing so. His language of “the Church” can blur the distinction between the invisible universal church and the visible American evangelical subculture he knew best. Readers from other traditions will need to do some translation.
The book’s sustained focus on God’s transcendence and majesty can, if read in isolation, lead to a one-sided picture. Tozer is clear that God is both transcendent and immanent, both holy and loving, but the book’s rhetorical energy is concentrated on restoring the weight of divine majesty that he believed had been lost. Readers who need to recover a sense of God’s nearness and tenderness may want to pair this book with something that emphasizes divine intimacy — perhaps Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, a work Tozer himself recommended.
Read This If…
Read this book if your theology has become a list of correct propositions that no longer produces wonder — and you need someone to show you that knowing God is not the same as knowing about God.
Not suited for readers looking for a systematic theology textbook or a detailed scriptural commentary. The Knowledge of the Holy assumes the reader already holds orthodox Christian beliefs. Its work is not to establish them but to restore the weight and warmth they have lost. If you come to this book without any prior theological framework, you will find it suggestive but insufficient — it was written for believers who know the words but have forgotten the music.