Aiden Wilson Tozer was born in 1897 in a farmhouse in Newburg, Pennsylvania, the third of six children. He received no formal theological education, converting to Christianity as a teenager after overhearing a street preacher in Akron, Ohio. He was largely self-taught, reading deeply and widely in the Christian mystical tradition — Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, Meister Eckhart, and the medieval English mystics among them. He was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance and served as a pastor for forty-four years, most of them at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago, before finishing his ministry at Avenue Road Church in Toronto, where he died in 1963.
Tozer's life as a pastor unfolded during a period of rapid cultural and ecclesiastical change in America. He observed the mid-twentieth-century evangelical world with mounting unease, convinced that the church was substituting activity, entertainment, and shallow theological content for genuine encounter with God. He wrote and preached against what he saw as a creeping worldliness, not primarily in moralistic terms, but as a failure of worship — a loss of the sense of divine majesty.
His two most enduring books, *The Pursuit of God* (1948) and *The Knowledge of the Holy* (1961), press the reader not toward more religious effort but toward an honest reckoning with who God is. *The Knowledge of the Holy* in particular opens with a claim Tozer makes his own: that a low view of God is the root of a hundred lesser evils in the church. His prose is spare and serious, shaped by the King James Bible and by a preacher's instinct for the well-placed sentence. He had no patience for religious pretense and little interest in institutional recognition.
Tozer's influence has extended well beyond his own tradition, finding readers across denominational lines who share his conviction that theology, at its best, is never merely academic but always a movement of the soul toward the living God.