A. W. Tozer

School ended for him early, as it did for many children of rural poverty at the turn of the century. Whatever theology, philosophy, history, and literature he came to know, he pursued alone: borrowed books, attic hours, a mind too hungry to stay idle. The self-education this enforced would prove more consequential than any curriculum he might have followed. Tozer worked through Meister Eckhart, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nicholas of Cusa, Madame Guyon, and Thomas à Kempis not as a student cataloguing sources but as a practitioner comparing notes with people who had genuinely tried to find God and written down what they found. He also worked through English literature, church history, and philosophy with the same patient attention to primary sources. The prose on nearly every page he eventually published reflects this: nothing is secondhand, nothing summarised from a distance. He had lived with the books.

The religious turn came in Akron, Ohio, where he worked at a tire company as a teenager. One afternoon on the way home, he caught a fragment of a street preacher’s words: “If you don’t know how to be saved, just call on God.” He didn’t pause to argue or question. He went to the house, climbed to the attic, and prayed. He rarely said more about it than that. The restraint is itself a kind of argument. Tozer was suspicious, throughout his life, of religious experience that circled back to the one having it, that demanded elaboration or applause. The attic account is as bare as a receipt. What it records is real; what it refuses to dramatise is everything else.

Five years passed. Then, in 1919, without a theology degree and without any institutional backing, Tozer stepped into a pulpit at a small storefront congregation in Nutter Fort, West Virginia. He was twenty-two years old. The church was modest. The denomination he’d joined, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, was barely a generation old, founded by A. B. Simpson on the conviction that evangelical Christianity needed depth more than it needed breadth. That conviction ran directly through the books Tozer would eventually write, so the fit was more than accidental. He wasn’t squeezed into the C&MA; he and it wanted the same thing.

Nine years after Nutter Fort, he moved to Chicago, taking the pastorate of Southside Alliance Church in 1928. He stayed for thirty years. Chicago across the Depression and the war years and into the postwar boom was not the easiest backdrop for a preacher who thought material comfort was a spiritual hazard, but Tozer didn’t adjust his message to the climate. He and his wife, Ada Cecelia Pfautz, owned no car, relying on buses and trains. After his books found readers and royalties came in, he signed much of the money to people in need. The family, which included seven children, six sons and a daughter, lived without the visible accumulation his reputation could have justified. None of this was display. It followed logically from what he believed about God and wealth, and Tozer did not often preach what he hadn’t already tried to practise.

His writing for publication began in 1931, when he started contributing pieces to the Alliance Weekly, the C&MA’s denominational magazine, now published as Alliance Life. Regular columns followed: “There’s Truth in It” from 1936 to 1937, then “A Word in Season” from 1944 to 1946. In May 1950 the Alliance appointed him editor of the Alliance Weekly, a post he held without interruption until his death. His inaugural editorial, June 3, 1950, declared his terms plainly: “It will cost something to walk slow in the parade of the ages, while excited men of time rush about confusing motion with progress. But it will pay in the long run, and the true Christian is not much interested in anything short of that.” Nobody reading those two sentences could have been uncertain about the kind of magazine they were now going to receive.

Before the editorship, David W. Fant, the C&MA’s publications secretary, had pushed him toward longer projects. The results were two institutional biographies: one of A. B. Simpson in 1943, and one of Robert A. Jaffray in 1947. Competent work, both. But they aren’t what anyone remembers.

What changed his reach entirely was The Pursuit of God, which appeared in 1948. The account that he wrote much of it on an overnight train in longhand, without reference books, may be apocryphal, but it captures something true about the book’s texture: urgent and undecorated, as though there wasn’t time for anything except the central claim. That claim is almost stark in its simplicity. God isn’t hiding. The barrier between the human soul and its source isn’t God’s distance but the human habit of stacking up what Tozer called a veil of things between the two. Strip the veil away, and the presence that was always there becomes available. The book doesn’t defend this position philosophically. It assumes the position and proceeds. Readers who have worked through more technically sophisticated theology and come away with the vague sense that something important was missing often find that The Pursuit of God names the gap without filling it with jargon. It’s been in the public domain for decades and is freely available via Project Gutenberg, which is partly why it still travels: not a commodity, but a text people give away because they can’t think of a reason not to.

Christianity Today’s survey in 2000 of the hundred books that most shaped Christian readers across the twentieth century included The Pursuit of God alongside C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. Lewis held a chair at Oxford and then Cambridge. Merton was a Trappist at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Foster attended George Fox University. Tozer was a Pennsylvania farm boy who had never taken a university course. But the list makes a kind of sense anyway, because all of them were saying, in their different idioms and from their different traditions, that the interior life of faith isn’t an advanced specialisation for unusually pious people: it’s the thing itself, and everything else is peripheral.

The Knowledge of the Holy came in 1961, thirteen years after The Pursuit of God, and it went after a different target. Tozer had become persuaded that the central failure of ordinary Christian life wasn’t doctrinal heresy but something subtler and harder to argue against: a progressive shrinkage in the conception of God, a God too small for actual worship. The book moves through the divine attributes, but not the way systematic theology does. Holiness, sovereignty, omniscience, and eternity are treated as things one might encounter rather than categories one ought to master. Tozer was no trained theologian, and he didn’t write like one. That was probably the correct choice. Christianity Today’s 2006 survey of fifty books that formed American evangelicalism placed The Knowledge of the Holy at number 49, identifying Tozer as “the Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and mystic” who “invited us behind the curtain and into God’s presence.” The word mystic isn’t decoration there. It’s the designation that explains why Tozer is difficult to file away neatly, and why he keeps getting pulled back out.

His engagement with the contemplative tradition deserves more than a footnote. Most of the medieval and early modern mystics he read came from Roman Catholic monasteries: Eckhart was a Dominican prior, Bernard was a Cistercian abbot, Thomas à Kempis was an Augustinian canon. Tozer was a Protestant preacher in an evangelical denomination with working-class congregations in West Virginia, Chicago, and Toronto. Many of his contemporaries treated those traditions as either a Catholic curiosity or an active doctrinal danger. Tozer read them as records of what happens when someone actually pursues God past the point where polite religion usually stops.

He didn’t soften them to make them easier to digest in evangelical contexts. He kept the sharp parts and let the denominational tension stand. This is one of the things he got most right. The tradition of the interior life is older than the institutions that have quarreled over it, older than the schisms that divided Western Christianity, older than the categories that still organise most Christian self-understanding. Whether you encounter it in a Cistercian abbey or a storefront church in West Virginia doesn’t change what it’s pointing toward. Tozer knew this, and his writing knows it, which is why it reaches readers who have no particular investment in the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Prayer wasn’t a practice Tozer added to his working life. It was the source from which the working life drew. James L. Snyder records, in his biography In Pursuit of God: The Life of A.W. Tozer, that his preaching and writing “were but extensions of his prayer life” and that “he had the ability to make his listeners face themselves in the light of what God was saying to them.” Long solitary hours in his study, not reading and not preparing sermons, were a regular pattern. He thought the defining illness of the church was practical atheism: doctrinally correct belief in a God who was not felt to be actually present. His writing is, at virtually every sentence, an attempt to treat that condition. Not by producing warmer feelings, but by pressing on the place where the soul has been settling for less than it knows it could have.

He was also precise about what reading over time does to a person’s mind. “The things you read will fashion you by slowly conditioning your mind,” he remarked. He meant this as challenge, not only warning: read things that make demands, because demands are what form you. His own prose does exactly this. It isn’t cruel, but it doesn’t offer soft landings. A Tozer paragraph tends to find the place where the reader has been settling and press there until the reader either advances or puts the book down.

He had no formal academic post, and he didn’t want one. But honorary doctorates came from Wheaton College and Houghton College, acknowledgments from institutions that could recognise, even without the usual credentials, what serious self-education at Tozer’s level actually produces. He accepted the recognition without, by any account, particular excitement in either direction.

The reach across generations happened mostly through people who read him directly and then went their own way. Richard Foster, whose Celebration of Discipline ranked eighth on Christianity Today’s century list, credited Tozer’s insistence on the disciplines of the inner life as formative. The spiritual formation movement that gathered momentum in the last decades of the twentieth century drew on language, images, and habits of attention that Tozer had been circulating through midcentury evangelical culture when they were considerably less fashionable. You can hear him in writers who can’t tell you they’re echoing him, because they absorbed him early enough that the voice is now indistinguishable from their own.

Tozer published twelve books during his lifetime. The Simpson and Jaffray biographies came first. The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy are the two that made the century lists. Eight others appeared in between and after. David W. Fant’s encouragement in the early 1940s established the habit of turning his ministry output into print, and that habit’s momentum continued after his death. Editors and compilers have since assembled more than forty additional volumes from his Alliance Weekly columns, his editorials, and transcribed sermon manuscripts. Vivo en el Espíritu carries his pneumatology to Spanish-speaking readers. The Tozer Mystery of the Holy Spirit, issued in large print, is evidence that readers have been returning across multiple decades, which is a different thing from initial popularity and considerably harder to manufacture.

The Holy Spirit is the aspect of Tozer’s theology most likely to catch readers off guard if they’ve come to him only through The Pursuit of God. He wasn’t Pentecostal in any technical sense, but he argued plainly that the church of his era had effectively set the third person of the Trinity aside: acknowledged in the creeds, absent from lived experience. His position on this, stated across many books and dozens of editorials, was consistent: the Spirit is a living presence, not a theological category, and the Christian who hasn’t learned to recognise that presence is living at a fraction of what faith is actually supposed to be. Vivo en el Espíritu and the Tozer Mystery of the Holy Spirit concentrate on exactly this note, which explains why those titles have found readers in places and languages well beyond the C&MA’s institutional reach.

In 1959, after three decades at Southside Alliance Church, Tozer accepted the pastorate of Avenue Road Church in Toronto. He was sixty-two and not in strong health. He preached anyway, kept editing the Alliance Weekly, and kept writing. The Knowledge of the Holy was the last book he saw through to publication before his death. He continued filing editorial copy through his final months in Toronto, the kind of short, exacting prose he’d been producing for more than a decade.

Tozer died on May 12, 1963, in Toronto, six weeks past his sixty-sixth birthday. He was buried at Ellet Cemetery in Akron, Ohio, the city where a street preacher’s offhand words had caught him on a sidewalk nearly half a century before. The headstone carries five words: “A. W. Tozer, A Man of God.”