“Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its faith not in the living God, but in dying men.”

A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy walks the reader through an examination of the attributes of God. “An attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed to be true of Himself.” Throughout the book, the author makes a case that a proper understanding of the Christian God enhances an individual’s spiritual life and rightly aligns a church’s teaching. He does a great job of differentiating the divine attributes, warning of the tendency to allow one to dominate the others,¹ while also trying to hack his way through the difficult idea of divine simplicity. At times, Tozer can build up some steam and get a little bit too verbose, which sometimes obscures the points he is trying to make; but this is a minor issue. He begins each chapter with a prayer and closes each with an excerpt from a hymn; nice touches that, along with consistently short chapters, make the book suitable for a daily devotional.

The difficulty with such an effort is that, as the author confesses several times, much of what he is writing about is inscrutable. The attributes of God are infinite and essentially impossible to fathom in their entirety. That we routinely paste analogous human traits onto Him is often a disservice to our own ever-developing understanding and hinders a proper stance toward God. In fact, he warns that false conceptions of God can become idols that prevent us from worshipping Him correctly. According to Tozer, this failure to properly conceive of God is the great failure of the modern church and has led to distorted doctrine and self-centered theology. When a preacher with a false image of God uses that to understand and formulate their personal doctrines,² they are not actually speaking of the creator of the universe and savior of all nations, but a constrained version of God created by their own fallen mind.

The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God, that is precisely what we see. Twentieth-century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God.

There is an obvious challenge in trying to impart knowledge of the unfathomable attributes of God into a finite intellect. For instance, sometimes for a split second I can convince myself that I understand what it means for God to have existed before time; but I very quickly come tumbling back down to the ground where I’m at a loss to even scratch the surface of the concept. Understandably then, Tozer spends much more time ensuring that we aren’t falling into incorrect understandings rather than trying to conclusively nail down exactly what God is. Even though he admits that it is futile, he tries to lead the reader into a correct, but inherently limited understanding of the known attributes of God—self-existence, self-sufficiency, eternity, infinitude, omniscience, wisdom, omnipotence, goodness, justice, love, mercy, etc. (that’s not an exhaustive list, by the way)—that can be drawn out from scripture and arrived at logically.

Several times, when comparing or describing attributes, the writing caused me to consider things that I already knew in a different way which improved my conception of God and strengthened my faith. For instance, the chapter on God’s transcendence contains a particularly good explanation of why God should not be granted pre-eminence (which would put him at the top of the hierarchy of beings). “He is as high above an archangel as above a caterpillar.” Instead of being at the top of the created order, God is outside of it entirely. This proper conception of God as transcending creation orients us to heed Him, while a flawed understanding—for example, that the Christian God is “one god among many”—can lead to sin because we do not have a proper fear of God (which is another whole topic itself). “When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation. The fear of consequences is no deterrent when the fear of God is gone.”

I also really appreciated Tozer’s explanation of free will and God’s sovereignty. I won’t detail it here, but it allows both for God to have ultimate sovereignty and people to have choice. He uses an analogy of people aboard a ship crossing an ocean. We are all traveling toward a predetermined destination together, but while we are on board, we are free to do as we choose. It’s more nuanced than that, but that’s the gist.

I don’t know if I agree with Tozer’s accusation that the modern church is failing because it lacks a robust understanding of the unknowable (in their fullness) attributes of God. I think the opposite is the case: the church’s failing has led to a less reverent, more self-centered, and theologically weak understanding of the God that we purport to worship. We aren’t called to have a perfect understanding of something that the author admits we aren’t capable of fully understanding. We as Christians are called to witness to others, live righteously, and love one another. In doing those things we will come to know more about the nature of God. We should not rely on such a lofty understanding of God to inform us how to live, else a large swath of the human race would have no hope. But the author doesn’t press this issue to the degree that my reaction would indicate; it is buried within the rest of the work.

The author casually tangles with the idea of divine simplicity; that though we conceive of these distinct attributes of God, they are not parts of a whole. God is unified, i.e. His love is His justice is His mercy, and they cannot act contradictory to each other. For instance, a just punishment for our sins does not indicate that God does not love us even as we are punished. Further, these attributes are identical to God’s being, not qualities of God’s being. The concept can be quite difficult to think about, and is handled better and more extensively elsewhere (such as in the work of Thomas Aquinas or those in the philosophical school of Thomism), though it is not accepted by all strands Christianity.

Life is a short and fevered rehearsal for a concert we cannot stay to give. Just when we appear to have attained some proficiency we are forced to lay our instruments down. There is simply not time enough to think, to become, to perform what the constitution of our natures indicates we are capable of.

The book is a great introduction to the divine attributes of God, especially for someone who has a conception of God as some kind of elevated human-like deity. It does a good job of setting God apart from His creation and ensuring that the reader doesn’t conflate the things we know about God or cling to one at the expense of the others. Its devotional quality, including its prayers and hymns, move it out of the realm of purely academic study (Tozer has a bit of an anti-intellectual disposition anyway), but it contains plenty of intelligent writing that it is worth reading through and contemplating if you have been struggling with some of these ideas.

1. Specifically, “God is love” is often clung to so completely that there is no room in a person’s theology for God’s justice.

2. That many modern churches intentionally distance themselves from the historical roots of Christianity and twist the bible to meet their own agenda is another problem altogether, and one that I would like to investigate more myself.