What Are the Attributes of God? — Tozer’s Plain Theology
⏱ 14 min read
You have asked this in a Bible study, probably, and the answer came back as a list. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable, holy, just, loving, sovereign, eternal, self-existent, self-sufficient. You wrote the words down. You nodded. You went home, and within a week the list had drifted somewhere behind the grocery list and the unanswered emails, because lists do not lodge in the soul the way a single slow sentence does. The attributes were correct. They were also weightless — a piece of vocabulary that did not seem to touch the woman who was, on a Tuesday evening, trying to know what kind of God she was actually praying to.
This is the slow answer. Not the eighteen-item handout. The actual answer Tozer gave — the small, plain-speaking Chicago pastor who wrote The Knowledge of the Holy in the last decade of his life, after thirty years of insisting that the church’s gravest problem was not its programmes but its low view of God — read at the speed he wrote it, with three passages held next to each other, because for Tozer the attributes of God were not a checklist. They were the shape of the God whose absence the modern church was suffering from without knowing it. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice. For now — read slowly. The question what are the attributes of God will not be answered by a list. It will be answered, the way Tozer answered it, by sitting still with the God whose attributes the list was trying to describe.
A. W. Tozer was an American pastor with very little formal education and an unusually severe interior life. He wrote his books slowly, often at night, after the day’s pastoral work was done, on a manual typewriter in a small study. The Pursuit of God came in 1948. The Knowledge of the Holy came in 1961, two years before his death. He believed — and the books make the case at length — that the recovery of right ideas about God was the central recovery the modern church needed, and that the right ideas about God were not gathered from theology books but from slow attentive prayer and the careful reading of the saints who had gone before. The attributes were, for Tozer, the names the church had learned over centuries for the qualities of the God it had been worshipping. The names mattered. But the worship mattered more, because the worship was the place where the attributes stopped being words and became the felt reality of God.
The first passage: the holy paradox of pursuit
“Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart… Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Tozer opens with a single sentence that names, in compressed form, one of the central attributes of God: Thine own eternity is round Thee. Hold that phrase for a moment. He is not saying God has eternity, as a property He possesses. He is saying eternity is around God — the way air is around the breathing creature, the way water is around the fish. God is the only being whose own being is its own atmosphere. Theologians have a phrase for this — aseity, from the Latin a se, from oneself. Tozer is saying it without the Latin. God is the One who is sustained by nothing outside Himself. Everything else that exists is held up by something else; God is held up by Himself. That is the first attribute. Tozer names it in eight words and then moves on, because his real subject is not the attribute as a concept. His real subject is what living near the attribute does to a soul.
That is the rest of the passage. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love. The attribute of God’s infinity — the fact that He is endlessly more than what you have already known of Him — means that the soul that has truly found Him is also a soul that goes on seeking Him. Tozer is making a quiet polemical point against what he calls the too-easily-satisfied religionist — the woman who has answered the altar call, joined the church, learned the doctrines, and now lives as if God were a settled possession. Tozer is gentle but unsparing. He says: the saints who actually knew God never spoke as if God were a possession. They spoke as if He were an inexhaustible country, into which they were always travelling further. The finding and the seeking were not stages. They were simultaneous.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that reframes the chronic guilt of not feeling like she has arrived spiritually. Tozer would say: you have not arrived because God is infinite, and the infinite is not the kind of country one arrives at. The fact that He is still ahead of you, after twenty years of faith, is not evidence that you have failed. It is evidence that He is the God He claims to be — the One whose own eternity is round Him, whose riches do not run out, whose interior life is more than a creature could exhaust in a thousand lifetimes. The longing forward is the sign that you are walking with the right God. The settled-satisfaction was the wrong target the whole time.
(If you have wondered whether your slow start at all this disqualifies you — the late-beginner anxiety that quietly attaches to the question what are the attributes of God when you are forty-one and just now reading Tozer — how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin takes the late-start anxiety apart. And if the Bible itself is the part you would like to learn to read more slowly — how to Bible journal for beginners walks the smallest entry point.)
The second passage: the Triune God I want to want
“I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it twice. The second time, read it as a prayer.
This passage names another cluster of God’s attributes, but it names them in the inverted form Tozer prefers — the form of the human soul reaching toward what only God can give. Show me Thy glory is a request that depends on the attribute of God’s self-disclosure: the fact that God is the kind of God who can be shown, who makes Himself known, who is not hidden in principle but discloses Himself to the seeker. The theologians call this attribute revelation — the truth that God is communicative, that the divine life turns outward toward the creature in self-giving, that being known is part of what He has determined to be in relation to those He loves.
Begin in mercy a new work of love within me names another attribute — God’s grace — but names it by its action. Grace is not a substance God hands out. Grace is the action of God toward the undeserving creature, the new work of love He begins inside her when she has nothing of her own to bring. Tozer is praying as a man who knows the attribute. He is not abstractly affirming that God is gracious. He is asking the gracious God to do what only the gracious God does — to begin again, in mercy, the work of love that the creature could not begin in herself.
Notice the whole architecture of the prayer. I want to want Thee. That sentence is the most exact diagnosis of the modern Christian woman’s interior life that Tozer ever wrote. You do not feel the desire for God you would like to feel. You feel the absence of the desire. You feel the ought without the want. Tozer’s solution is not to manufacture the want. His solution is to pray, honestly, that the God whose attribute is to begin new works of love in the soul will begin one in you. The desire is not produced. It is received. And the only honest first step is the admission that you do not currently have it, addressed to the One whose nature is to give it.
This is what the attributes of God turn into when they are prayed instead of catalogued. Aseity — He sustains Himself. Infinity — He is endlessly more than you have known. Self-disclosure — He is the kind of God who shows His glory to the one who asks. Grace — He begins new works of love in souls that have nothing of their own. The attributes are not, in Tozer’s mind, a vocabulary for theological exams. They are the qualities of the God you are praying to, and the prayer is what makes the attributes operative in your life.
A pause — for the body
Tozer believed the body and the soul were one in worship, and the attribute of God’s holiness — the attribute the title of his last book points to — lands in the body before it lands in the mind, when it lands at all.
Sit somewhere quiet. Set the page down. Notice your chest — the area between the collarbones and the bottom of the ribcage. The modern Christian woman who has been carrying a chronic low-grade anxiety about whether she knows God well enough often carries the anxiety as a tightness across the upper chest, a kind of held breath that never quite finishes its exhale. Take one slow inhale, and on the exhale, let the chest soften — not deflate, soften. The breath finishes. The chest releases. Then take a second breath, and on the exhale, notice the jaw — the place where the I-should-have-figured-this-out tension lives. Let the jaw release. Two breaths. Chest soft. Jaw soft.
That small loosening is the body’s version of the attribute Tozer is naming when he says I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. The body that has been demanding to manufacture the desire for God is the body that holds the breath. The body that has stopped demanding — that has admitted the lack — is the body that exhales. The exhale is the somatic shape of the prayer Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. The body knows how to receive what it cannot produce. The mind can learn the same posture, slowly.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow daily receiving. One passage per session, one page for the honest sentence, no demand to feel more than you currently feel. The workbook is not where you learn to perform spirituality. It is where you slowly let the God whose attribute is grace begin His own work in a soul that has stopped trying to manufacture its own.
(If the study question itself has felt foreign — if the word study has been the part that intimidates you — inductive Bible study for beginners — a 4-step method walks one fully-worked example without making you feel late to a class you never signed up for. And if you would like a quieter starting place still — a beginner study Bible for women (and how to use it without being embarrassed) is the article that clears the doorstep.)
The third passage: lift your heart and let it rest
“Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary though it be a Pullman berth or a factory or a kitchen.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the smallest passage of the three, and also the most practical. Tozer is naming a final cluster of God’s attributes — His omnipresence, His immediate availability, His non-confinement to sacred spaces — by describing what happens when the believing soul lifts her heart toward Him in any location at all. The Pullman berth is a 1948 sleeper-train cabin. The factory is the working woman’s noisy floor. The kitchen is the domestic location that has always been, for the Christian woman, the place she suspects is too ordinary to count as prayer. Tozer says: all three locations become sanctuary the instant the heart is lifted, because the attribute of God’s omnipresence is not a doctrine but a lived availability.
Hold the verb lift. It is a small word. It is also the entire practice. You do not need to leave the kitchen. You do not need to find the quiet hour. You do not need to wait until the children are asleep or the work is finished or the house is in order. The attribute of God’s omnipresence means that the lifting of the heart, in the middle of the chopping of the onion, is sufficient to constitute a sanctuary. The sanctuary is not the room. The sanctuary is the lifted heart in proximity to the present God.
This is what the attributes of God mean for an ordinary Tuesday. The omnipresent God is the God of the kitchen. The gracious God is the God who begins the work of love in a soul that cannot begin it itself. The infinite God is the God who is endlessly more than you have known, which is why the slow daily walking with Him does not run out. The self-existent God is the God whose own eternity is around Him, who needs nothing from you, and whose love toward you therefore cannot be diminished by your performance. The attribute is not the abstract concept. The attribute is the lived availability of God to the woman who lifts her heart in the kitchen.
For the modern Christian woman whose theology has been mostly correct and mostly weightless — this is the line to keep near the page. Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary. The attributes do not require an elevated location. They require a lifted heart. The lifting is small. The sanctuary is immediate. The God you have been studying is the God who is there, in the kitchen, the instant the heart turns toward Him.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at what is the Trinity — Augustine’s slow answer and what are the names of God — Spurgeon’s treasury walk. Each takes a single classical question and walks it slowly through one father.)
What the slow answer actually leaves you with
So — what are the attributes of God. The list answer is true: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable, holy, just, loving, sovereign, eternal, self-existent. Hold the list. Tozer would. But hold the list inside the lived answer, which is the one The Pursuit of God is reaching for: the attributes are the names the church has learned, slowly, for the qualities of the God whose own eternity is round Him, who begins new works of love in souls that have nothing of their own, and who turns any kitchen into a sanctuary the instant the heart is lifted toward Him.
The attributes, read this way, stop being the part of theology you cannot quite remember. They become the description of the God you have been praying to all along. The omnipotence is the omnipotence that is at your disposal when you ask. The omnipresence is the omnipresence that is in the kitchen with you. The holiness is the holiness that has not been startled by you, that has been the steady context of your life since the day you were born. The immutability — the unchangingness — is the immutability of the love that was set on you before the foundation of the world and has not wavered through any of the years you have spent forgetting it.
What slowly answering the question what are the attributes of God does, over a year, is move the attributes from your notebook to your knees. You stop reaching for the handout. You start praying, with Tozer, O God the Triune God, I want to want Thee — and you find, on the morning you say it slowly, that the attributes have rearranged themselves from a vocabulary into a posture. You are no longer trying to remember what God is like. You are letting Him be, toward you, the God He has always been, and the remembering quietly stops being the task.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each session, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the attributes of God in proximity to a soul that has stopped trying to memorise them and started letting them describe the One she is praying to.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Tozer’s slow vocabulary — eternity round Thee, begin in mercy a new work of love, lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus — into a daily companion built for the woman whose questions about God are, at last, ready to become the prayer she has been waiting to pray.
