The Knowledge of the Holy

What The Knowledge of the Holy is

The Knowledge of the Holy is a short devotional theology of God — twenty-three brief chapters, each devoted to a single divine attribute. Tozer opens with a prefatory chapter on why thinking rightly about God matters, then walks through self-existence, self-sufficiency, eternity, infinitude, immutability, omniscience, wisdom, omnipotence, transcendence, omnipresence, faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, holiness, and sovereignty, closing with the open invitation that the holy God has not made himself hard to find.

Each chapter runs roughly four to six pages and ends with a short prayer. The book is meant to be read slowly — one chapter at a sitting, with the prayer treated as the point of the chapter rather than a tag at the end. Tozer is not building an argument across chapters; he is taking the reader on a circuit of the divine attributes, returning again and again to the same conviction: that the modern church’s problems begin with a God who has been quietly shrunk to manageable size in the popular imagination.

Why everyday readers prefer The Knowledge of the Holy

Most books on the doctrine of God are either academic systematics — Grudem, Bavinck, Berkhof — or popular Christian-living books that gesture at God’s attributes in a chapter or two before getting back to the reader’s life. Tozer sits in a category almost by himself. He writes about God with the seriousness of a theologian and the urgency of a revivalist, and he refuses to let the reader stay neutral. By page ten the question is not whether you agree with him but whether the God you have actually been worshiping is the God he is describing.

That tone is why the book has crossed traditions that rarely agree on anything else. Reformed pastors quote Tozer. Catholic spiritual directors quote Tozer. Pentecostals, Wesleyans, Anglicans, and Baptists all find their own emphases in him. He is drawing on the broad classical-Christian inheritance — the God of Augustine and Anselm and the Puritan divines — and presenting it in a prophetic voice that pre-dates the worship-wars and culture-wars vocabulary that has divided so many of his readers from each other.

The thesis: what comes into our minds when we think about God

The opening chapter contains the line that has outlived almost every other sentence Tozer wrote: "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." It is the load-bearing claim of the entire book. Tozer’s argument is not that doctrine matters in the abstract; it is that a person’s actual, working, in-the-moment picture of God determines almost everything else about them — how they pray, how they work, how they handle suffering, how they treat the people who are inconvenient to them.

The brilliance of putting this thesis on page one is that the rest of the book becomes a diagnostic. As Tozer walks through self-sufficiency, immutability, holiness, and the rest, the reader is not just learning what classical Christian theism has said about God; the reader is being given language to notice where their own working picture of God has gone small. That is why pastors keep coming back to this book for sermon series, and why so many readers describe their first encounter with it as unsettling in a way that a normal devotional is not.

The twenty-three attributes: a structure that doubles as a curriculum

After the opening chapter, the book is organized as a circuit of the divine attributes — twenty-three short essays, each on a single quality. The sequence is roughly the classical one: the incommunicable attributes first (self-existence, self-sufficiency, eternity, infinitude, immutability) and then the moral attributes (goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, holiness, sovereignty). Tozer is not inventing this taxonomy; he is taking the inherited Christian map of God’s being and walking it slowly enough that a non-specialist can follow.

The practical effect is that the book functions almost perfectly as a curriculum. A small group can take one chapter a week and have a 23-week devotional theology study without writing any additional material. An individual reader can use it as a daily devotional for just over three weeks. A preacher can take the table of contents as a sermon series outline. The structure is the second reason — after the thesis — that the book has stayed in print for sixty years: it gives the reader an architecture for thinking about God that is easy to remember and hard to leave behind.

Tozer’s prose voice: prophetic and accessible at once

Tozer was a self-educated preacher who read the Puritans and the Christian mystics on his own time and wrote for a magazine readership rather than an academic one. The voice that comes out of that combination is unusual: he uses the high vocabulary of classical theology — aseity, immanence, transcendence, impassibility — but pitches every sentence at the level of an attentive lay reader. The closing prayer at the end of each chapter is in the older second-person voice ("Thee," "Thou"), which some modern readers find archaic and others find precisely right for the subject.

The cumulative effect is that the book reads more like a sermon than a textbook. Tozer is willing to indict, to plead, to call the reader to repentance, and to break into prayer mid-paragraph. That is also why this is not the book to hand someone looking for a neutral, scholarly survey of the doctrine of God. It is the book to hand someone who suspects their picture of God has gone small and is willing to be told so by a preacher who has clearly been over the same ground himself.

Pricing

Where The Knowledge of the Holy falls behind

No footnotes or Scripture index. Tozer leans heavily on the Christian tradition — Augustine, Anselm, the Puritans, the medieval mystics — but he almost never names a source. A reader who wants to trace where a particular argument comes from has to do the detective work themselves, which is a real loss for a book of this stature.

No engagement with the questions a skeptic would actually ask. This is in-house devotional theology, written for readers who already believe and want their picture of God enlarged. Anyone hoping for an apologetic treatment of the attributes — the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, the coherence of omniscience and human freedom — will need a different book (Keller, Lewis, Plantinga, Craig).

Limited explicit interaction with debates inside contemporary theology. Tozer’s framing of immutability, impassibility, and sovereignty sits comfortably within classical Christian theism, which is the broad shared inheritance of Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Lutheran, and much of Wesleyan thought. Readers coming from open-theist or process frames, or from some strands of contemporary Wesleyan theology that read divine relationality differently, will find points where they want to argue back — and Tozer does not anticipate or address those arguments.

Short to a fault on some of the most pastorally weighted attributes. The chapter on love, the chapter on mercy, the chapter on grace — each is doing a lot of work in four or five pages, and a reader hoping for the slow-walk treatment those topics get in a longer book like Knowing God will sometimes feel that Tozer has moved on before he has fully arrived.

No built-in study aids. For a book that functions so naturally as a 23-week curriculum, the absence of discussion questions, leader’s notes, or even a one-page summary per chapter is a missed opportunity. Most groups end up generating their own, or pulling from one of the third-party study guides that have sprung up online.

The Knowledge of the Holy vs. The Pursuit of God vs. Knowing God

These three books — Tozer’s two and J.I. Packer’s Knowing God (1973) — form something like the standard starter shelf on the doctrine of God for general readers. They overlap on the central conviction that a small view of God is the church’s deepest problem, but they take different paths to the same end.

Different strengths. The Pursuit of God is the most devotional of the three — Tozer writing about the soul’s longing for God, the posture of seeking, the inward life. The Knowledge of the Holy is more doctrinal — the same author, ten years later, walking the attributes one by one. Knowing God is the longest and most teacherly of the three — Packer at full extension, with chapter-length treatments of topics Tozer covers in four pages, and a more deliberately British-Reformed accent throughout.

A common pattern: read Pursuit first to get into Tozer’s voice and posture, then Knowledge of the Holy as the doctrinal companion, then Knowing God when the appetite has been built for a longer, slower treatment. None of the three replaces the others, and most readers who care about this category end up with all three on the same shelf.

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