The Knowledge of the Holy

This classic of Christian testimony and devotion explores the attributes of God in words that fly straight to the heart. A superb aid to strengthening and deepening the spiritual life, each chapter begins with a prayer, lucidly discusses a divine aspect – from God's infinity to God's love – and relates that aspect to today's world, while pointing always to God's wonder and inscrutability." A. W. Tozer asserts that the cause of many of our modern spiritual woes is the loss in today's church of a lofty concept of God. He argues persuasively that the cure lies in our rediscovery of God's majesty. «True religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time,» says the author in his preface, «The messenger of Christ, though he speaks from God, must also, as the Quakers used to say 'speak to the condition' of his hearers; otherwise he will speak a language known only to himself. His message must be not only timeless but timely. He must speak to his own generation.» The message of this book is indeed both timeless and timely. Tozer is primarily concerned with the loss of the concept of 'majesty' from the popular mind and more importantly in the thinking of the church. He sees the church as having surrendered her once lofty concept of God – not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge. With this comes a further loss of religious awe and a sense of the divine presence, of an appropriate spirit of worship and of our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Tozer attempts to address this problem, to go back to the causes of the decline and to understand and correct the errors that have given rise to our loss of a sense of the holy. «It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate,» he tells us.