"To most people God is an inference, not a reality"

The Pursuit of God (A Christian Classic)

The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

“Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea.  We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over Evangelicalism, but the church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the wonder that is God. . . . to most people God is an inference, not a reality.  He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but he remains personally unknown to the individual.” A.W. Tozer, the Pursuit of God

In the very introduction to A.W. Tozer’s THE PURSUIT OF GOD, I read “it is a theology not of the head but of the heart” and later “our habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshiper.  We are more likely to explain than to adore.” Again, at a later point, he writes: “Some things belong to the deep and mysterious profound of God’s omniscience.  Prying into them makes theologians, but it will never make saints.” I confess that upon reading these sentiments, I had the reflexive thought, “Here we go again”. “Why is it,” I ask myself “that I am always asked to check that aspect of intellect in to get into the Holy of Holies?” I can get in there being a Red sox fan. I can get in there overweight. I can get in there with a goiter. I can get in there with leprosy. I can get in there sobbing over Bambi movies. But if I THINK too much, I don’t make the line. It’s like those rides at the fair where the sign says “If you are not this tall, you can’t ride this roller coaster” and my SAT score turns out to be three points too high so no ride on the Holy of Holies coaster for me.

But clearly A.W. Tozer is allowed to be smart. He communicates effectively. He can quote Augustine and Spinoza and other intelligent people.  But I can’t argue with him about the fundamental reality of life on the human plane of emotions. It is emotions that cause us pain and pleasure and though thoughts can help, they are not substitutes for emotional realities. I can no more feel satiated with the THOUGHT of a turkey dinner than I can feel connected with the THOUGHT of a romantic partner or a divine lover of my soul. Tozer is correct when he states “it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.” P. 9 These who do experience God, he refers to as “the children of the burning heart”.

“They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are not yet able to reconcile themselves to the continued absence of fire. . . . there is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the Faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives.” P. 8

Tozer notes that the Biblical text is full of stories about how human beings experienced God. One might say that Hindu texts are as well. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna encounters the divine THROUGH Krishna on his chariot. In the Koran Muhammad encounters God through the medium of the angel Gabriel in a cave. Joseph Smith says that he encountered God THROUGH the medium of the angel Moroni and golden plates Fed Exed to him from heaven. Up the road from me is the Eddy farm where the theosophy  movement is said to have gotten its beginnings. There people came from all over the world to experience some contact with another world through séances and mediums. Every religion in a sense is saying something similar. “They have words. We have direct experience”.

For Tozer, the experience of God is open to all, everywhere, anytime, anyplace. “God wills that we should push on into his presence and live our whole life there,” he writes. 

“This is to be known to us in conscious experience.  It is more than a doctrine to be held, it is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day. . . . The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us” p. 39

Though I may be tempted to respond with a skepticism born of years of human loneliness, Tozer insists that God is pre-eminently capable of supplying all that the human soul needs to be happy and nourished.

“God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that he can, without anything other than himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.” P. 42

Now, I will grant you that the people who say that to me are GENERALLY those who have also constructed for themselves lives in which they are surrounded with manifestations or facsimilies of that love in their human communities. I am not sure that I know anyone who has constructed a life for themselves in such a way that they are LESS distracted from the source of all bliss by living in a cave on a mountain in Nepal with no email, no address, no family, and nothing but their Bible for soul contact. One finds oneself tempted, as Satan appears to have been in the Biblical book of Job, to say “Just take away their human relationships and THEN see how satisfied they are with God” but … one has no wish to do so because … well … because life without those healthy human relationships just sucks and we all know it. But this critique may not be fair. It may perhaps be and probably is more the case that it is the intimate connection with God that makes the building of better human relationships possible. I am sure that would be the counter-argument to the charge anyway. I am sure that they would say that “the sacramental quality of the everyday living” they experience is rich in nutrients BECAUSE the more fundamental spiritual relationships of each of the people in it is rich in nutrients.

But Tozer is not making a case for monasticism here. Though I would argue that if you follow the logic out to its ultimate conclusion that is where you wind up. On a windswept baren ledge of a Sinai cliff with Elijah trying to conjure up in one’s prayers the sense that they have more love in this solitude with the invisible divine than they would ever have in a concert hall of devoted admirers, friends, and family. Here is the crux of it. Tozer does not suggest for a moment that we must learn to PRETEND that God is communicating on an intimate level with us. He asserts that God DOES.

“God is a person, and in the deep of his mighty nature he thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may. . . . he communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.” P. 13

And thus Tozer cannot understand why there are those who fail to take advantage of what is so clearly, obviously, undeniably, THEIRS to have. “Why do we consent to abide all our days just outside the holy of Hollies and never enter at all to look upon God?” He asks. He quotes the great great grandfather of the devotional life, Augustine of Hippo who wrote in his autobiography, Confessions, “Thou hast formed us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee”

For Tozer, the “The great in the kingdom of God are those who love God more than others did.” Which means that the great in the kingdom of God are those who have the capacity for experiencing and not those who have the capacity for merely understanding. It is at this juncture that I am inclined to say “Ahhh … so this is why intelligent people need not apply!” For it is only those who can SUSPEND critical thought that can imagine what cannot be proven. Tozer explains:

“I think the average person in the progression will be something like this: First a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden. Then a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear.  And the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend.  Then will come light and light, and best of all, ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and all.” P. 81

What could be wrong with this? How does the process get interrupted? And does the habit of critical thought make it impossible?

Tozer insists that what he is speaking of is NOT imagination or self hypnosis or “wishful thinking.” “Another word that must be cleared up,” he writes,

“is the word reckon.  This does not mean to visualize or imagine.  Imagination is not faith.  The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other.  Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them.  Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.  God and the spiritual world are real.  We can reckon upon them with as much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.” P. 56

So when Tozer makes an assertion about God, he claims not to be imagining but to be reckoning. And this is where the heart of the debate is. How do we know that he has reckoned and not imagined? A case in point. Tozer insists that God is immutable. I quote him at length.

“He [God] is immutable, which means that He has never changed and can never change in any smallest measure.  To change you would need to go from better to worse or from worse to better.  He cannot do either, for being perfect he cannot become more perfect, and if He were to become less perfect He would be less than God.”

Now, what if I, when I “recon” God, perceive a personality who is constantly learning and changing. What if I cannot imagine a god who does learn from mistakes or ever make mistakes or who always knows the right thing to do from the almost right thing. What if I read a Biblical passage like this one in Genesis “And God regretted that He had made man on the earth” and conclude that THIS is the passage that captures the essence of God and not the passages that say that He “is the same yesterday, today and forever”? Which of these perceptions of God is being reckoned? Which is being imagined? What if neither are either?

Tozer promises that these experiences will make all the difference in life. That indeed, the ability to believe that one’s imagination is actually reckoning the unseen is the central skill required of the spiritual person. “If we cooperate with him in loving obedience,” Tozer insists, “God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between nominal Christian life and the life radiant with the light of his face.” P. 64

… and I just find myself saying “Damn!” I am stuck … because I can so easily reckon 9or imagine) God being a number of different possibilities in just about any situation. Tozer insists that “the voice of God is a friendly voice” but some of my experiences, both real, intellectual, and esoteric have given me impressions of other possibilities. And it would seem that the Bible even would confirm that. God is, apparently, sometimes terrifying and other times tricky. Having had multiple experiences and having read widely of multiple experiences, my mind is full of possibilities even when I experience something directly. Things are not always what I think they are when I think the first thing to enter my mind. I have trained myself to think in potentials and to suspend conviction until after analysis.

This is the kiss of death to my faith life it seems (at least according to Tozer).

Tozer, I suspect would argue that among the many possibilities a mind might consider, the truth will be on fire. It will be the difference between lighting and a lightning bug as Mark Twain might say.

But it rarely is for me. It’s like I can smell well enough to know that things have smells but not well enough to distinguish a rose from a donkey stall. Like I can see well enough to know what an eye can do but not well enough to see which wall the eye exam chart is on.  Like I was born with ears that work well enough to tell that two songs are playing at the same time but unable to tell which is being played with pots and pans and which is an orchestra.

But maybe this is only because when I really feel that something has been “manifested” and that I have actually “reckoned” I find myself disagreeing with so many people that say they know what they are talking about. I slink off and say “Oh well. I thought I had reckoned that correctly.”

All in all a good read.