Society of the Fiery Heart and Passion for God – The Spiritual Journey of AW Tozer

“I’ve had a lonely life.” This is a statement made by Dr. Aiden W. Tozer shortly before he died in 1963 at age 66. The truth is that he “kept almost everyone he knew at a personal distance” throughout his life.[1] Only by tracing his heritage do we get any insight as to why he was so distant.

He grew up in the harsh mountain country of Pennsylvania, in the foothills of the Alleghenies. His father Jacob was a hard-working man, uncompromising and completely alien to sentimentality. Although he was always very grateful for his inheritance, Aiden carried a heavy burden for the family from the age of ten, after a fire tragically swept through the family home. From an educational point of view, McGuffey’s readers played a very important role in the education of the Tozer children, providing a strong moral direction based on Christianity. The fire, which significantly disrupted much of the family dynamic the Tozers had, was later seen as a good thing, but only after a major pain of adjustment. The fire marked the end of an era, and Aiden was never a child again.[2]

Some books are refreshingly lively in their portrayal of the truth, and Lyle Dorsett’s portrayal of 20th-century prophet Aiden Wilson Tozer, aka AW Tozer, is abundant in its accuracy and thoroughly researched.[3] This article is based on and summarizes Dorsett’s book.

The “Fiery Heart Society” and “meeting God in worshipful silence” were always what captivated Dr. Tozer. He loved his Lord Jesus Christ par excellence, above all in his life. Wrapping up God mysticism with the inerrancy of the Biblical Word regarding Deity theology, Tozer was a spiritually fervent and well-rounded minister anyone could find. Drawn to Christianity when he heard the preaching of Matthew 11:28-30, he was burdened and weary for Christ and found early encouragement to spiritually invest in his future mother-in-law, a fanatic of Spirit-filled worship. .[4] This unleashed within him a call from God that would faithfully endure for the next forty-five years.

Though he was called up and responded very quickly, he and his new wife Ada fell short in World War I, and Aiden was recruited under bizarre circumstances that would have proved a major test of his calling. This part of the story is truly baffling, an inspiration to fidelity.[5]

His ordination on August 18, 1920, was marked by the reason that he did not celebrate with others afterwards; he sought “his Savior in a secret place” preferring to be alone to pray and seek the face of God.[6] Their Prayer of a minor prophet[7] it reflects his burning desire to follow his ‘terrible, wonderful and fascinating’ God. He prays for protection against the “curse of compromise, of imitation, of professionalism.” He said in it: “I am a prophet, not a promoter, not a religious administrator.” He asked God instead to “lead [him] to the place of prayer.” [8]

Despite the claim that he was one of the most respected pastors of the 20th century, it is ironic that Tozer “was not an example of how to do pastoral work.”[9] However, he was a tower to all the ministers, youth, and college-age people he mentored. His teaching and preaching ministry was said to be of the highest class. Young people saw him as an authority figure because he lacked ambition and never pushed his own wheelbarrow; he was worth up to an inch.

One of the harshest critics of his own ‘profession’, he made his share of enemies both in the ministry and beyond. He seriously lamented the decline he saw in the modern church at the time and his commitment to biblical principles. Dr. Tozer chalked up the ‘personality guys’ penchant for spiritual commitment as ‘nervous’ and too attached to the world.

Tozer’s strengths were many. First, he was an anointed lover of the Deity. He loved Jesus Christ more than anything or anyone. He truly adored him and spent up to five or six hours a day (his entire morning six days a week) praying and reading the Bible. He was also fiercely ecumenical as long as other denominations and leaders supported Biblical inerrancy and did not compromise Biblical ideals for worldly ones.

He was a voracious reader, reading more books and authors in a week than some people in a lifetime. He also read widely on the sciences, history, poetry, philosophy, arts, and ethics, as well as on the early Church Fathers, influences on Church history, and theologians. Second-hand bookstores and libraries were frequent haunts. He literally took the wonder of Psalm 8 and was a firm believer in learning all he could about creation. The cliché “All truth is God’s truth” was not a cliché to AW Tozer, and “he was just as motivated” as secular men, but his motives were “to know God and to make him known,” not to make money.[10] Above all, he “became magnificently obsessed with forming the soul into the likeness of Christ.”[11]

Tozer loved children and habitually joined them for Sunday school after services instead of responding to the plastic platitudes of well-meaning parishioners after his weekly sermons. Many mothers were delighted that their famous pastor sowed in the lives of their sons and daughters in this way.

Tozer’s prayer life was amazing in any language. He prayed kneeling or prostrate on the ground often moaning or crying as he bathed in the Presence each day. Unerringly unerring in his view of the Scriptures, he would use the Bible alone for much of his daily reflections and meditations. His prayer life was the main food for his preaching, as he sought to know God’s will through personal experience rather than writing a ‘self-made’ sermon. He strongly desired to “experience [truth] before the proclamation [of it].”[12]

Tozer’s not-so-good points were probably surprisingly numerous, which is a huge encouragement to the rest of us—in short, the ill-equipped ones, which is all of us. He had the gift of discernment, but using this gift often left Tozer depressed as he lamented the destructive influences that affected the Church and people. He often warned his associate pastor Raymond McAfee: “If you want to be happy, don’t ask for the gift of discernment.”[13]

Although Tozer was capable at home, he was anything but a loving husband and father. None of his children, with the possible exception of his last, Rebecca, could say that she enjoyed any real sense of intimacy with her father; Tozer kept his affection for his Lord. Upon remarrying after Tozer’s eventual death in 1963, Ada Tozer said, contrasting her husbands, “Aiden loved Jesus Christ, but Leonard Odam loves me.”[14] A recap of Aiden and Ada’s relationship revealed that they both lived emotionally separate and lonely lives. Aiden used to travel and preach, leaving Ada behind. Dr. Tozer also never encouraged and even actively discouraged fraternization with his or Ada’s family; family vacations weren’t her thing either.[15]

Dr. Tozer, it has already been mentioned, was not a pastoral caretaker. He was a stubborn prophet, and could even be called a separatist at times.[16] He felt a “sharp spiritual contradiction” between the majority of pastors and the minds and hearts of believers; that in fact they were not ‘seekers yet’. “They search and find and search no more,” he said. This was a horrible dichotomy for Dr. Tozer, and it irritated him greatly. He simultaneously held biblical inerrancy and spiritual experience like no other. He had nothing but “disdain [for ministers] by materialism, consumerism and worldliness.” He freely criticized ministers and churches for any evidence he saw of this.

Far above all else, Dr. AW Tozer stands out as the prophetic light of the mid-20th century; His legacy has been felt very personally and indelibly in Chicago, Illinois, and surrounding states within the US. Dorsett’s offer is very well researched and written. It is a hard book to put down. The book is also a resource; I have returned to it in various stages.

Copyright © 2008, SJ Wickham. All rights reserved throughout the world.

GRADES:

[1] Lyle W Dorsett, Passion for God: AW Tozer’s Spiritual Journey, (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Publishers, 2008), p. 17

[2] Ibid., pp. 33-38. Again, Aiden was 10 years old when the fire occurred.

[3] This book is highly cited.

[4] Ibid., p. 51.

[5] ibid., p. 57.

[6] the full Prayer of a minor prophet it is widely available and is printed verbatim on pages 65-68 of Dorsett’s book.

[7] This work was eventually published in the Weekly Alliance in 1950.

[8] Ibid., pp. 65-68.

[9] Ibid., p. 135. This quote is from Rev. Ed J. Maxey, who assisted Tozer for two years in the mid-1950s.

[10] Ibid., p. 94.

[11] Ibid., p. twenty-one

[12] Ibid., p. 136.

[13] Ibid., p. 134.

[14] Ibid., p. 160.

[15] Ibid., p. 143-4. This reference applies to the previous two sentences.

[16] Ibid., p. 138-9.