The Knowledge of the Holy

Tozer opens The Knowledge of the Holy with a diagnosis: The Christian Church has gradually surrendered its once-exalted concept of God and replaced it with one so diminished as to constitute a spiritual crisis. External gains such as growing congregations mask internal losses: the disappearance of religious awe, the spirit of worship, and believers' direct inner experience of God's Spirit. The only remedy is to recover a right understanding of God's nature.

Chapter 1 establishes the governing thesis: What a person thinks about God is the most important thing about that person. No religion has ever risen above its idea of God, and individuals and churches tend to move toward their mental image of Him. Tozer warns that idolatry begins in the mind whenever a person entertains unworthy thoughts about God, and that, as the apostle Paul described, wrong ideas darken the heart and lead to the worship of created things. The Church's heaviest obligation is to purify its concept of God.

Chapters 2 and 3 lay the intellectual framework. Tozer acknowledges that God lies beyond all human categories and examines how the biblical prophet Ezekiel could describe heavenly visions only through the language of resemblance. Drawing on the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and the Spanish mystic Michael de Molinos, he supports a central paradox: God is unknowable to reason yet can be known through faith and love, especially through Jesus Christ. Chapter 3 defines an "attribute" as whatever God has revealed as true of Himself. God is not a sum of parts; attributes are not possessions but how God is.

Chapter 4 treats the Holy Trinity, the teaching that God exists as one Being in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Tozer traces its defense through the Nicene Creed, formulated in 325 AD during the Arian controversy over Christ's divinity, and the Athanasian Creed. He corrects the tendency to divide God's work among the Persons, citing passages that attribute creation, the incarnation (God the Son taking human nature in Jesus), the atonement (Christ's reconciling death for sin), and resurrection to all three acting in unity.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine God's self-existence (having no origin and depending on nothing) and self-sufficiency (needing nothing outside Himself). Tozer connects self-existence to sin, arguing that sin is the creature's assertion of independent selfhood. God's declaration to the biblical patriarch Moses, "I AM THAT I AM," represents the fullness of holiness, but when a creature claims that throne, it imitates the rebellion of Lucifer, the angel who defied God. The remedy is Christ's death on the Cross, which breaks sinful self-rule and plants a new principle of life. Chapter 6 challenges the image of God as needing human help while affirming that He has chosen to work through His obedient children.

Chapters 7 and 8 explore God's eternity and infinitude (absolute limitlessness). God lives in an everlasting now with no past and no future. Tozer borrows an illustration from the writer C. S. Lewis: time is a short line drawn on an infinitely extended sheet of paper. He connects eternity to the gospel, arguing that Christ has abolished death and brought immortality to light. Chapter 8 insists that the word "infinite" applies to no one but God, and that everything flowing from His nature, including mercy and love, is without limit.

Chapter 9 treats immutability, God's complete changelessness. God's perfection rules out change in any direction. Tozer contrasts this with human mutability, which in a fallen world enables repentance. From the Book of Hebrews he shows how God uses change as a servant, abolishing the old covenant and establishing the new, while remaining changeless Himself.

Chapters 10 and 11 examine omniscience (God's perfect, unlearned knowledge) and wisdom. Omniscience terrifies those with something to hide but consoles believers, who know God knew them fully before calling them. Tozer defines wisdom as the ability to devise perfect ends and achieve them by perfect means. He addresses the problem of evil by asserting that this is not the best of all possible worlds but one under the shadow of the Fall, humanity's catastrophic moral rebellion, and that Christ's triumph will bring creation into liberty.

Chapters 12 and 13 address omnipotence (God's possession of all power) and transcendence (His infinite qualitative superiority to creation). Tozer critiques replacing God with impersonal "laws of nature," arguing that what science calls laws are the paths God's power takes through creation. He illustrates effortless divine power through A. B. Simpson, a Presbyterian pastor who, broken in health, heard a hymn affirming nothing is too hard for God, an encounter that restored his faith and launched a major missionary society. Chapter 13 clarifies that transcendence is quality of being, not physical distance. Tozer surveys biblical encounters with the transcendent God, from the patriarch Abraham lying prostrate to the prophet Daniel collapsing without strength, and contrasts these with the casual irreverence he diagnoses in modern Christianity.

Chapters 14 and 15 treat omnipresence (God's being fully present everywhere) and faithfulness. Tozer distinguishes recognizing God's objective presence from mere mental projection. Faithfulness follows from immutability: If God cannot change, He cannot be unfaithful. He warns against magnifying any single attribute at the expense of others, such as pressing God's love so far as to deny His justice.

Chapters 16 and 17 examine goodness and justice. Drawing on the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, Tozer traces every divine act back to goodness, insisting that Christ is its definitive revelation. Justice is not an external principle compelling God but a name for the way God is. Through the reasoning of Anselm, the medieval philosopher and Archbishop of Canterbury, he resolves the tension between justice and mercy: God's being is unitary, so nothing in His justice forbids mercy. The fuller resolution is redemption: Through Christ's death in sinners' place, justice is satisfied and mercy becomes operative.

Chapters 18 and 19 distinguish mercy and grace. Mercy is an eternal attribute disposing God toward compassion; grace is God's goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. Tozer corrects the misconception that the Old Testament God deals only in justice while the New Testament God deals only in mercy, arguing that biblical figures such as the patriarch Abraham, King David, and the prophets were all saved by grace through faith.

Chapters 20 and 21 address love and holiness. Tozer corrects the error of treating the apostle John's statement "God is love" as a definition rather than a declaration, arguing that equating God with love destroys divine personality. Chapter 21 presents holiness as entirely other, not human purity magnified. God's wrath is His intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. Tozer distinguishes God's absolute holiness from a relative holiness imparted to believers through Christ, counseling those caught between personal impurity and the command to be holy to take refuge from God in God.

Chapter 22 examines sovereignty, the attribute by which God rules all creation. Tozer acknowledges two problems: the existence of evil and human free will. He rejects the dualist solution of Zoroastrianism, which posited two competing deities, and asserts that God has allowed evil in restricted, temporary scope. On free will, he proposes that God decreed not the content of moral choices but the freedom to make them, illustrating this with an ocean liner bound for a fixed port while passengers move freely aboard. The chapter presents the gospel as an announcement of redemption, a command to repent, and a call to surrender to grace.

The final chapter presents six conditions for recovering the knowledge of the holy: forsaking sin; committing one's life wholly to Christ; counting the old sinful self as crucified and opening to the Holy Spirit; repudiating the values of a fallen world; practicing sustained meditation on God's majesty; and translating knowledge of God into deeds of mercy. Tozer extends this counsel to the corporate Church, urging that all worship center on the holy God and faithfully represent His majesty on earth.