A. W. Tozer and the Renewal of the Mystical Dimension in Evangelical Spirituality

Introduction

American Fundamentalist mystic A. W. Tozer—full name, Aiden Wilson Tozer—was born in 1897 and died at the age of sixty-six in 1963. As a prolific and influential writer in his day, he was an important precursor to what has become known as the spiritual formation movement within conservative Protestant circles today. This essay aims to locate Tozer’s life contribution within the larger scope of spiritual currents within North American Christianity in the decades prior to our own, and to conclude with some reflections on his legacy.

If we take a bird’s eye view of things, we will recognize the persistence of interest in spiritual matters across the centuries, up to and including American history to the present. It is also important to understand that developments within the evangelical camp have always been part of, and reflected, broader religious and cultural impulses. The boundaries between the evangelical community and the larger culture of the West have been surprisingly porous. For example, to understand the renewed Christian spiritual quest in our own time, one that spans not only Protestantism, but encompasses Roman Catholicism as well, we would be wise to begin with developments in France in the mid-twentieth century. There, recognizing the seriously dehumanizing effects of advanced modernity, a number of gifted Christian “first responders” began to reclaim the classic Christian understanding of human persons as spiritual beings with a capacity to touch the transcendent realm and consciously apprehend the presence of God, an apprehension that brings with it considerable transforming and healing effects. ¹ The outpouring of both popular and serious intellectual works on Christian spirituality since that time has been one manifestation among others of this movement of renewal and restoration on both sides of the Atlantic. The modern Protestant spiritual formation movement is part of this broader phenomenon, and we want to consider one contributing influence and precursor to it.

The title of this essay is “A. W. Tozer and the Renewal of the Mystical Dimension in Evangelical Spirituality.” It is about the renewal of the mystical dimension, rather than an introduction of it, because it is far from foreign to the tradition. It has always been present in Protestantism generally, ² and in evangelical Protestant spirituality specifically, although of course there has been an ebb and flow to its intensity across time.

Here are just two examples. Early on in the Reformation, Martin Luther discovered a fourteenth-century devotional work that highlighted numerous contemplative and mystical themes, many derived from the Rhineland mystic Johannes Tauler. Luther found that book of medieval origins to be personally soul-nourishing, and he gave it its somewhat nationalistic but enduring name—the Theologia Germanica. ³ “I have not seen,” he wrote, “a more wholesome theology, one more in accordance with the Gospel . . .” ⁴

Well over a century later, toward the end of the 1600s, Henry Scougal, a young theologian in Aberdeen, Scotland wrote The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677). Scougal’s tenure as a professor was just four years. He died a few days before his twenty-eighth birthday. His library was discovered to contain the Theologia Germanica, the sermons of Tauler, and other mystical works. Scougal’s little treatise was cited repeatedly by writers embedded within the subsequent evangelical movement within English-speaking Protestantism. It became a favorite of John Newton. ⁵ It was commended by Susanna Wesley to her sons, and passed along to George Whitefield, who said of it: “I never knew what true religion was till God sent me that excellent treatise by the hands of my never to be forgotten friend.” ⁶ In this little book, Scougal wrote:

The love of God is a delightful and affectionate sense of the divine perfections which make the soul resign and sacrifice itself wholly unto him, desiring above all things to please him, and delighting in nothing so much as in fellowship and communion with him, and being ready to do or suffer any thing for his sake or at his pleasure. ⁷

I have quoted this in full, because these are words that Tozer might just as easily have written.

A Biographical Sketch of Tozer

Tozer was a self-educated farm boy from western Pennsylvania who quit school at age fifteen to help his financially struggling family. His family eventually abandoned the farm, and moved west to Ohio. There, alongside other family members, he began his working life in an Akron rubber factory. He was converted as a teenager and found his first church home among the Methodists, and later the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a newer Holiness denomination with a similar ethos. He did his share of street preaching in those early days, and began to sense a call to pastoral ministry. In 1919, after a brief stint in the U.S. Army, and without any formal theological training, he accepted his first pastoral appointment: a poor little congregation in Stonewood, West Virginia. Other brief pastorates followed—in Morgantown, West Virginia, and then in Indianapolis. These led him eventually to Chicago’s South Side, where he settled for thirty years (1928–1959), and finally to Toronto, Canada (1959–1963).

He was gifted intellectually, and notwithstanding his limited formal education, he developed his gift of the mind through a lifetime of diligent reading and self-directed study. In addition to decades of pastoral ministry, he became both a magazine editor with The Alliance Witness and a prolific writer who exercised a broad influence on American Fundamentalism and evangelicalism from the 1940s to the early 1960s. He rejected both dispensationalism and what he regarded as Pentecostalism’s emotional excess. For him the goal of life was the quiet, adoring contemplation of God’s glory. This was an experience that evoked reverence and stimulated the transformation of the gazing soul. Like other Christian mystical writers, he liked to speak of the “sweetness,” even the “piercing sweetness,” of such experiences. ⁸

Tozer combined the temperament of the prophet Jeremiah with the homespun, pungent writing style of Mark Twain. Among his numerous publications, The Pursuit of God (1948), The Divine Conquest (1950), and The Knowledge of the Holy (1961) have become classics in conservative evangelical circles—over a million copies of the first have been published, and all three continue to be read. Back in the year 2000, Tozer’s The Pursuit of God made Christianity Today’s list of the top one hundred books of the previous century. By the time of his death, his writings had already been translated into at least fifteen languages. Further details of Tozer’s life are readily available in three biographies of him, the most recent of these being Lyle Dorsett’s in 2008. ⁹

Tozer’s Spiritual Vision

The Pursuit of God is a natural gateway to the rest of Tozer’s writings, and reveals his vision of the Christian life. It breathes a holy discontent with the merely formal and superficial aspects of organized Christianity. In their place, it offers hope of actually beholding and delighting in God in his glory. It tantalizes readers with the possibility of replacing external religiosity with direct encounter and sustained conscious communion with God.

As we have already noted, Tozer’s goal in life, and the one he commended to others, was a quiet, adoring contemplation of God’s splendor. It remains a great mystery how in such moments God, the object of reverent beholding, comes to believers in clear and self-authenticating ways. At best, the Christian’s adoring gaze constitutes a hospitable invitation. It prepares a place of meeting, a place where the possibility of real encounter can occur. Tozer believed that we were made for this, and that the pursuit of God is therefore our highest purpose, and the secret to human fulfillment.

Did this make Tozer a mystic? Well, this depends, of course, on how the term mystic is defined. If a mystic means someone who disdains humans’ God-given powers of reason, or who exalts private subjective experience over the truths revealed in Holy Scripture, Tozer was not one. We know that he loved the Bible and immersed himself in its pages. Words, phrases, and stories from the Scriptures flooded his mind, filled his sermons, and, most importantly for him, defined the contours of genuine Christian experience.

If, however, a mystic is understood in the classic Christian sense as someone who seeks, and enjoys above all else, a conscious apprehension of the presence of God in their lives, then Tozer definitely was a mystic. This was a label he owned (while fully aware of some of its negative connotations), and nowhere more clearly and unabashedly than in the last book he published: The Christian Book of Mystical Verse (1963). Therein he employs the term “evangelical mystic” to describe a doctrinally-orthodox person who differs from other ordinary and similarly-orthodox Christians “only because he experiences his faith down in the depths of his sentient being while [others do] not.” Such a person is “quietly, deeply, and sometimes ecstatically aware of the Presence of God in his own nature and in the world around him.” For him, evangelical mysticism is about immediate acquaintance with God through union with the Eternal Son. Such mystics come across as self-forgetful because they are fundamentally God-oriented instead. And they are not only God-oriented; they are, he said, “God-enamored persons.” ¹⁰

The Resources Upon Which Tozer Drew

A distinctive feature of Tozer’s contribution was the ecumenical breadth of the spiritual writers and works upon which he drew and which he commended to others. His lists, and we have a number of these, ¹¹ including the standard giants of mysticism like Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, John of the Cross, and Richard Rolle. He was known to hand out copies of Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God. ¹² But his lists also include less predictable names, like the Pietist Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) and Frederick Faber, a Victorian-era English hymnwriter. There were other medieval mystics too, like Henry Suso and Nicholas of Cusa. And he was particularly fond of three seventeenth-century Quietists: Madame Guyon, François Fénelon, and Miguel Molinos. This is just a sampling of those whom Tozer found to be soulmates and inspiring mentors.

His spiritual reading choices seem from our vantage point now to have been quite eclectic. The conventional explanation is that he discovered these varied authors randomly while browsing public libraries and used bookstores in Chicago and elsewhere. There may be some truth to this, but it cannot be the whole story. The Wesleyan-Holiness tradition in which Tozer was formed had been amenable to the mystics from the beginning. The hymnody of the Methodists, largely a creation of John Wesley’s brother Charles, was awash in rapturous mystical sentiment. And John Wesley himself published numerous abridged versions of mystical writings for the edification of his followers. His extensive Christian Library series eventually included numerous works of Christian mysticism.

Meantime, Madame Guyon and other Quietist writers, with their relentless negations of the self, had come to exercise a remarkable influence upon popular American Protestant spirituality. Their persistent and pervasive influence has been traced in a fine historical study by Patricia Ward, entitled Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and Their Readers (2009). (Here, experimental means experiential.) Guyon’s appeal to Protestants was due partly to their perception that she too had suffered from the hostility of the Roman Catholic Church, which made her in their eyes a kind of “honorary Protestant.” And as it turns out, it was mainly the Quakers who mediated Quietist influence to North American Protestantism. In 1813, for example, a couple of Pendle Hill Quakers published a small volume entitled A Guide to True Peace, comprised chiefly of Quietist writings. The introduction stated that “the highest form of prayer is not a mental act nor an upsurge of feelings, but the direct perception of the divine Presence.” ¹³ This Guide to True Peace circulated widely and went through numerous reprintings. It was particularly influential throughout the nineteenth century Holiness Movement and the early years of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Tozer was personally acquainted with it, appreciated it, and commended it to others. ¹⁴

Our point is: there was more going on Christian mysticism-wise in nineteenth and twentieth century conservative American Protestant circles, especially amongst Pietist, Quaker, Wesleyan, Holiness, Keswickian, and Pentecostal groups, than has always been fully appreciated. Still, the breadth of Tozer’s mystical reading may have been unmatched amongst mid-twentieth century conservative Protestants. I say may have been because we should also acknowledge kindred spirits like the South African Dutch Reformed mystic Andrew Murray (1828–1917). ¹⁵ Tozer was certainly among the first conservative evangelicals in America to step outside the silo of separation and suspicion within which most Fundamentalists at the time lived and did most of their thinking. As he explained in some private correspondence, “We modern Christians are in great need of some new thinking on spiritual things . . . we need a breath of fresh air [and] the books I recommend will provide it.” ¹⁶ By adopting this stance, he was ahead of his time. In his own way, he anticipated the ecumenical vision of Richard Foster and other leaders of the Protestant spiritual formation movement that came later.

The Scope of Tozer’s Influence

The acrimonious years of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy had coarsened the ethos of conservative Protestants, and left their churches somewhat hardened in disposition and depleted spiritually. ¹⁷ But Tozer began The Pursuit of God on a hopeful note: “In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of orthodox Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God himself.” ¹⁸ This was his perception of what was going on. The number of such people kept him busy meeting requests for books, essays, sermons and lectures from his home base on the South Side of Chicago.

We catch glimpses of the scope of his activities. He spoke frequently at Wheaton College, and had a regular radio program at WMBI, the flagship radio voice of Moody Bible Institute. On Sunday evenings, students from both schools, including a youthful Billy Graham, would sometimes find their way down to Chicago’s South Side to hear him preach. Wilbur Smith, one of the founding faculty members of Fuller Seminary, perceptively remarked to Tozer: “Your writings have a tremendous influence today, especially with college young people who are sincere followers of the Lord.” ¹⁹ Indeed, Tozer was a sought-after speaker at large-scale Keswick Conventions, and in Christian college chapels across the country, and welcomed by organizations like Youth for Christ and Intervarsity campus ministries. A younger generation appeared drawn not only to his message, but also by his fresh delivery, witty aphorisms, and iconoclastic temperament. ²⁰

On more than one occasion, he ventured up to Minneapolis and St. Paul, where he was welcomed by Carl Lundquist (1916–1991), the president of Bethel College, and spoke at Bethel’s Deeper Life Conferences there. Employing a term Tozer had used informally for many years, ²¹ Lundquist later founded The Evangelical Order of the Burning Heart, an active ecumenical and international fellowship of faculty members, seminarians, pastors and laypersons committed to the spiritual life. Under its auspices, Lundquist promoted regular retreats at which the disciplines of fasting, silence and solitude were encouraged and refined. And over the years he concurrently amassed a large library (still extant at Bethel University) of mystical and devotional works. ²² Lundquist, standing in as he did within the Pietistic Scandinavian tradition, regarded Tozer as both a kindred spirit and a personal mentor. ²³

Many of the things Tozer wrote were first published in The Alliance Witness, but these were often picked up and reprinted free of charge in other conservative Protestant magazines, including influential ones at the time like Christian Life, Eternity, InterVarsity’s His Magazine, Moody Monthly, the British Keswick’s Life of Faith, and latterly, Christianity Today. But ultimately it was Tozer’s books that had the greatest impact.

The outpouring of tributes at Tozer’s memorial services in Toronto and Chicago, and those printed in a special memorial issue of The Alliance Witness in 1963, reflect the scope of his influence. His personal network encompassed evangelical leaders like British pulpiteer David Martin Lloyd-Jones and V. Raymond Edman, president of Wheaton College, as well as Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield and even the bumptious American revivalist Leonard Ravenhill. His death was mourned by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Independent Fundamental Churches of America alike. ²⁴ Tributes came from as far afield as New Zealand and Australia, and from a grieving international missionary diaspora. These admirers rarely labeled him a mystic—that was a category with which they were largely unfamiliar or perhaps uneasy. More often, they simply described him as a prophet and a man of God.

It is a bit challenging to assess Tozer’s enduring influence on the contemporary Protestant spiritual formation movement. Both Dallas Willard and Richard Foster were familiar with Tozer’s work, and occasionally they have cited it appreciatively. But they have also treated his writings somewhat tangentially, and when there was need in their respective writings to reference an exemplar of evangelical mysticism, they gravitated more often toward Frank Laubach, the missionary author of Letters by a Modern Mystic (1937).

Among contemporary spiritual writers, none has been more appreciative of Tozer than Kenneth Boa, author of Conformed to His Image (2001), and Bruce Demarest, a former missionary and longtime professor at Denver Seminary. Demarest references Tozer’s legacy repeatedly in his book Satisfying Your Soul (1999). In it he wrote: “Tozer was well ahead of his time in communicating the riches of a contemplative and mystical spirituality to evangelical Christians.” Demarest goes on to claim that “we need an evangelical mysticism.” ²⁵

Some years ago, while speaking at a Renovaré conference in California, Demarest expressed his desire that a new generation of “ten thousand Tozers” might rise up in the American church. The phrase captured the imagination of Hank Voss, one of the participants, who made it the motto of an ambitious program out of Taylor University to publish twenty spiritual classics in accessible contemporary language for non-theologically trained Christian leaders around the world. The Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics project, now well on its way to completion, aspires “toward ten thousand Tozers.” And Tozer’s The Pursuit of God has taken its place in this series alongside other venerable spiritual classics.

Limited Help on Practical Disciplines

I have spoken to people over the years about the impact of Tozer’s writing on their spiritual lives. They commonly acknowledge that he has inspired them to seek a deeper walk with God. But they also admit that they have felt at a loss about exactly how to progress in that direction. So much of Tozer’s writing on the mystical life focused on the cultivation of deeper, delighting desire for God, and on radical relinquishment of the self-interest and willfulness that keep getting in the way of such a Godward pivot of the soul. Addressing a conference of his own denomination in 1958, he declared his conviction that “most matters will adjust themselves if our hearts keep right. This is our philosophy of the Christian life . . .” ²⁶

When it came to specific disciplines that might be practiced, beyond calling for investing more time in prayer and meditation, Tozer offered relatively little, and was perhaps behind such reticence was his lingering suspicion of the very idea of implementing strategies and steps. Where by conviction or simply by temperament, Tozer was averse to technique. That seemed too anthropocentric, too take-charge for his liking. ²⁷

On one occasion, Catherine Marshall, widow of United States Senate chaplain Peter Marshall, and author of his bestselling biography A Man Called Peter (1951), wrote to Tozer from New York City in hope of obtaining his counsel on matters related to experience of the Holy Spirit. If Tozer was agreeable, she offered, she would fly up to Canada with her second husband Leonard LeSourd, editor of Guideposts magazine, to meet with him. But Tozer put her off, suggesting that anything he could offer her was already in print. And then he added: “The soul’s relation to the Holy Spirit is so highly personal that no third party can understand. The best one can do is point an inquirer to the Lamb of God and then fade out of the picture. The leap of faith must be made by the seeker, and having made it he can scarcely tell another how he did it.” ²⁸ So, if we can say on the one hand that the contemporary Protestant spiritual formation movement still needs Tozer’s witness, which I believe we can, we must also acknowledge that Tozer’s mysticism may need more of the disciplinary and formational focus of this more recent movement to round it out and fulfill it.

Prioritizing the Personal and the Relational

Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago is author of The Presence of God, a magisterial nine-volume history of Christian mysticism. If anyone understands the mystical element in Christianity, he does, and this is how he defines it: “The mystical element in Christianity is that part of its beliefs and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God.” ²⁹ Note its essence here—consciousness of the immediate or direct presence of God. It is remarkable how closely Tozer’s definition of Christian mysticism anticipated and aligns with McGinn’s. He too described a mystic as a believer who practices the presence of God. ³⁰ And Tozer also appears to have understood that such practice will be undertaken by Christians with varying degrees of intensity. He seemed to acknowledge a sliding scale among those who can be described as Christian mystics. For him, the semantic range of mystic encompassed everyone from the classic mystics—those he called true mystics—to those who display at least “unmistakable traces of pure mysticism, and are the better for it.” ³¹ And, as he also pointed out, any Christian who claims a personal relationship with Jesus Christ must already be at least a bit of a mystic. ³² The only real question, then, is how much a Christian will choose to lean into this possibility and privilege. ³³

Taking a bird’s eye view of Christian spiritual theology through the centuries, three interwoven dynamics can be discerned to have always been in play in the believer’s life experience. The first is relational. It is about connecting, communing, about being in relationship, preeminently with God, but also with other humans, and with the more-than-human world. The second is transformational. It is about formation, about becoming, change, renewal, healing, and increased likeness to Christ. The third is vocational. It pertains to our calling in life, to mission, to our doing and our actions. A healthy Christian spiritual life requires that all three of these interconnected elements be operational in concert.

This tripartite dynamic of the Christian spiritual life is fully appreciated within the contemporary Protestant spiritual formation movement. You can see it on display when the titles of three of Dallas Willard’s most influential books are lined up together: Hearing God (1999), Renovation of the Heart (2002), and The Divine Conspiracy (1998). It is also obvious in Richard Foster’s bestselling book on Prayer, wherein prayers are organized under three headings: those that move us upward, seeking intimacy; those that move us inward, seeking transformation, and those that move us outward, seeking ministry. And just this past year or so, John Mark Comer’s book Practicing the Way was published and gained a wide readership. Its subtitle? Be With Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did. ³⁴ There it is again. And such a tripartite understanding of the Christian spiritual life is not restricted to evangelical writers. It’s all over the place among the Roman Catholics too, from Henri Nouwen to Michael Downey and beyond. ³⁵

But you can see where I am going with this. Tozer’s foremost passion was to nurture the first of these three dynamics—the relational. This was not everyone’s priority in his day. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, a central desire of the Holiness movement was gaining supernatural power for holy living. Power for holy living. That was their motto, their goal. As the nineteenth century moved on to the twentieth, that desire morphed for some into a quest for power for effective service. ³⁶ These two objectives became the rallying cries of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements respectively. Meantime, that first dynamic, the relational one, sometimes got lost in the shuffle. Often there was a fixation in both camps on power as an impersonal energy, a desirable acquisition, even while acknowledging that this “commodity” flowed from a divine source.

Tozer was a relatively lonely voice reminding his fraternal evangelicals that cultivating the conscious presence of God was more than an instrumental means to these other goals. It was a legitimate end in itself, the fulfillment of humanity’s highest purpose. And it was a relationship, a deep communing in loving adoration and delight, not a mere transactional recharging station for power. As Tozer once wrote, “The men of the Bible everywhere communed with [God] in language as personal as speech affords, and with Him prophet and saint walked in a rapture of devotion, warm, intimate, and deeply satisfying.” ³⁷

Elsewhere he wrote that at the bottom of religious experience is a sense of something there, “but better far is the sense of Someone there.” And then he adds: A person “cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text.” ³⁸ It should be obvious that this is a world apart from the religiously untethered “mystical” experience of absorption into an impersonal, undifferentiated All that was espoused by ancient Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and echoed in the speculations of Pseudo-Dionysius. ³⁹

Persistent Evangelical Suspicion of Mysticism

Generally speaking, Roman Catholics feel pretty comfortable with the term mysticism. Contemporary evangelicals? Not so much. Perhaps, no single piece of writing has turned conservative evangelicals against mysticism more than B. B. Warfield’s essay “Christianity and Mysticism,” originally published in The Biblical Review in 1917. ⁴⁰ In it he stood opposed to absolutely anything hinting of mysticism or labeling itself as such. His conclusion was clear and unequivocal. “We may be mystics, or we may be Christians. We cannot be both.” ⁴¹ Mysticism, to put things in the bluntest terms, was anti-Christian.

But of course everything rode on how Warfield was defining mysticism. As it turned out, he claimed that mysticism appealed to subjective feelings as more authoritative than objective scriptural revelation. In rejecting so-called mysticism, he was protesting against any tendency to attribute normative authority to subjective experience over the higher authority of divinely revealed scriptural truth. But this was, obviously, an unfair indictment of the evangelical mysticism that Tozer, and countless others, espoused. Theirs has been an authentic Christian mysticism in which scriptural truth provides the normative framework within which authentic experience can flourish, and further confirm these truths of the faith to believers’ souls.

Naturally it raised eyebrows in some quarters whenever Tozer repeated John Wesley’s dictum that “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion.” ⁴² Similar responses were no doubt evoked when Tozer reflected, near the beginning of The Knowledge of the Holy, “That God can be known by the soul in tender personal experience while remaining infinitely aloof from the curious eyes of reason constitutes a paradox best described as [quoting one of Tozer’s favorite poets, Frederick Faber] ‘darkness to the intellect, but sunshine to the soul.’” ⁴³ It was easy for some to react negatively to such measured pushbacks against religious rationalism, even though Tozer himself was clear:

It is not enough to say that we may have a mystical or numinous experience of God without any doctrinal knowledge and that is sufficient. No, it is not sufficient. We must worship God in truth as well as spirit . . . To believe on Christ savingly means to believe the right things about Christ. There is no escaping this. ⁴⁴

But denunciations like that of Warfield for anything labeled Christian mysticism took their toll in the years that followed. Suspicion of anything labeled mystical persisted in evangelical quarters and has probably tempered acceptance of Tozer’s vision for the renewal of evangelical spirituality. As recently as 1988, for example, Arthur L. Johnson wrote a scathing rejection of it entitled Faith Misguided: Exposing the Dangers of Mysticism. It reiterated Warfield’s earlier take, and called Tozer out specifically. Interestingly, the book was published by Moody Press, even though Tozer had been a regular speaker at Moody Bible Institute, and on its radio station WMBI, and the preface to Tozer’s The Divine Conquest (1950) had been penned by William Cuthbertson, president of Moody Bible Institute at the time.

The book prompted Win Corduan at Taylor University to publish a few years later a nuanced rejoinder entitled Mysticism: An Evangelical Option? (1991). His answer to the question he posed in the title was a qualified yes. That same year James Houston of Regent College got involved, and turned the tables a bit, penning an essay entitled “Reflections on Mysticism: How Valid is Evangelical Anti-Mysticism?” His answer? Not valid when Christian mysticism is properly understood. ⁴⁵

But almost two decades later, suspicion still lingered. The prolific evangelical Calvinist theologian Donald Bloesch, in his Spirituality Old and New: Recovering Authentic Spiritual Life (2007), again took aim at his construal of mysticism as a sense of unity with an impersonal All, and something entirely untethered from the biblical witness. In light of all this cumulative pushback, some contemporary evangelical spiritual writers seem to have concluded that the terms “mysticism” and “mystical” come with too much baggage to remain useful. More palatable terms like “meditation” or “contemplation” are substituted, despite these being instrumental techniques rather than the mystical experience itself. The danger inherent in these sorts of linguistic switch-outs is, so to speak, that the baby can end up getting thrown out with the bathwater.

Christian Mysticism Essential to the Future

Possibly the most frequently cited quotation in conversations about Christian mysticism is one by the esteemed twentieth century Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. Some years ago, in an essay entitled “Christian Living Formerly and Today,” he peered into the future and declared: “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has ‘experienced’ something, or he will cease to be anything at all.” ⁴⁶ Notice the meaning Rahner attached to the term mystic—someone who has experienced something. It is clear from the full article that Rahner was not proposing experience as an alternative basis for knowing, or something to be substituted for revealed truth. He was predicting that going forward Christian faith will be sustained if, and only if, Christians who have convictions receive a confirming seal from corroborating experience.

We have seen how Tozer spoke reprovingly to a conservative Protestant community that had become, in his judgment, largely disconnected from the presence of God. At one point in the late 1940s, he cried: “Fundamentalism is decadent!” ⁴⁷ Fundamentalists, he fulminated, “have allowed themselves to be ‘dispensationalized’ into a state of spiritual vacuity.” ⁴⁸ In private correspondence, he wrote: “The evangelical church is going to pot all over the world and of course the evangelicals do not want to hear about it.” ⁴⁹

It is striking that a decade or so later, Louis Dupré, a Belgian-born Catholic scholar, gave a series of lectures at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, an abbey made famous by Thomas Merton’s residence there. In those lectures, later published as The Deeper Life: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism (1981), Dupré declared: “The need out of which I speak is not merely personal; it is the need of an entire age that has lost the direct presence of the sacred.” And sensing this spiritual bankruptcy even within the church, he added, still-hungry people, “have turned to the mystics, rather than to the moralists or the theologians, for enlightenment.” ⁵⁰ The resonance in perspective between this Catholic writer and A. W. Tozer is quite remarkable and illustrates the ecumenical consensus that was already emerging amid the crisis of secularity in the West.

Summing Up

Tozer’s legacy—and what we may hope will be an enduring legacy—was to reconnect conservative evangelicals with larger, ecumenical streams of Christian spirituality, and to prod Biblicists to behold the God who dwells beyond the sacred page. He did not try to take us to some esoteric new place, but rather simply to help us find our way back home. During the post-World War II years, he was a proverbial canary in the coal mine, alerting the conservative evangelical community to its ominous spiritual deficiencies. This was his “prophetic” role, one that he embraced and that his peers respected.

Tozer’s mystical vision was not notably original. He broke no discernable new ground. For this reason, perhaps, he has never been widely acknowledged outside of conservative evangelical circles. ⁵¹ He has been more like the figure Evangelist in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), whose task was to faithfully point travelers in the right direction. ⁵² He would have concurred with conservative theologian Carl F. H. Henry’s observation that “the eternal realms, not one’s own resources, constitute the real supply-line for genuine spirituality.” ⁵³

To the end, Tozer remained a Fundamentalist, albeit an ambivalent one. He was suspicious of institutional Roman Catholicism, hostile to liberal Protestantism (so-called Modernism), and opposed to any association with the National Council of Churches. He had a pessimistic view of the trajectory of human history, and his separatist worldview precluded significant societal or cultural engagement. But there was an upside to this, and it actually turned out to be Tozer’s super-power. Notwithstanding his limitations and his prejudices, his quirks, his contradictions, and his reproachful tonality, he was able to speak to conservative Protestants as one of them. And because of this, they perceived him as someone credible, as someone who could be trusted.

Tozer’s spirituality had obvious limitations. It was a spirituality upon which it would be difficult to build a university, or to fuel robust engagement in social service. It offered little to inspire Christian social agency. Admittedly, Tozer did not offer very much in the way of guidance on spiritual disciplines and practices either. Instead, as we have pointed out, his contribution was to press for purified habits of the heart, for a corrected trajectory for desire, and for the clarification of our deepest loves—always advocating for a spiritual disposition that would then define our highest priorities and stimulate our most relentless pursuits. The evangelical tradition still needs to heed his call, but in the context of a more integrated, more holistic Christian spirituality. In his defense, Tozer’s intent was always less to explain everything, and more to light a fire of desire for what he had experienced, and what might therefore be possible (and necessary) for others as well. His God-centered vision and experience continues to evoke “holy envy,” and this may be his greatest legacy of all.