Friday I recommended that you read A Passion for God. I think it is important for you to read it for good reasons; even if you don't draw the same conclusions from it that I draw, it is important that you consider what is at the heart of this book.

First a few caveats.

I am not especially fond of Dorsett's writing. I think it is persistently annoying, unnecessarily repetitive and inexcusably imperceptive. I don't want to press the issue: everyone might not be as annoyed by the bits that annoyed me, and the subject justifies your time and reflection even if the observer left questions unanswered which he himself raised. I say this just so you understand that I see a value in this book, and should you be irritated with the path Dorsett chose, you should keep walking for the sake of the destination. I'll give two examples just so this doesn't turn into a hit-and-run.

He says on page 139 that Tozer admitted to being excessive in his criticism of religious movies, but Dorsett provides no context for this regret. Given Tozer's own words and deep contempt for religious entertainments, a biographer owes us more than a misleading footnote and a suggestion that his faith was recanted. I should like to have some context to draw my own conclusions. Tozer's claim has been confirmed ad nauseam: religious movies most definitely were influenced by Hollywood, and what survived to today is most certainly indebted to Hollywood. Look at religious movies. Do they look to you like they are derivative of the great Western playwrights and the early serious film-makers who regarded film as an art form?

Of course not.

Have they produced a stable, healthy church?

Please!

Dorsett also makes a big thing about Tozer's insensitivity (or inattention) with respect to his wife and family. Clearly there are two possible extremes. Tozer was just an insensitive, selfish, driven man whose marriage played second fiddle to his work. The other extreme is that his wife and family were a real hindrance to his ministry and represented a constant threat to his devotion which he resisted to a fault. As I say, these are extremes. I can be almost certain that the truth lies somewhere on the spectrum between those oversimplifications, neither of which I can accept. Dorsett should have helped us to make an informed and charitable judgment.

He might say that he found no conclusive evidence to share with us, in which case he should not have made such a big thing about Tozer's loneliness and his wife's feelings of estrangement. Every time I go to pick up milk and bananas there is this sort of writing I could pick up at the checkout.

Everything I know about the man suggests that these failings—if they were indeed failings—are significant. It is not that I would prefer a hagiography. Just the opposite. I stopped reading hagiographies a long time ago.

I grew up in a parsonage and I know first-hand the frustrations of an unsupportive, willful wife, and it takes no great imagination to see why one might guard against these interruptions, distractions and intrusions. I am not saying these reactions are justified, my presumption is that they were not justified but that they might have been understandable.

I also graduated from college where one of my classmates was abandoned by his wife on the day of his graduation. She felt she had fulfilled all her obligations when he shifted his tassel. I suspect there is more to this story than we will ever know because we will never again have Dorsett's opportunities to talk to those who had something to contribute.

I think this was unhelpful. The New Testament makes it quite clear that a determined minister might well be distracted by the things of this life and that one's enemies might come from his own household. Of course I cannot suppose that Tozer's family fell into that category so I cannot draw that conclusion. By the same token, neither can I suppose that Aiden's relationship with Ada was a flaw in him alone.

Ada survived Aiden and she remarried a widower named Leonard Odam. We read this chilling sentiment: "I have never been happier in my life. Aiden loved Jesus Christ but Leonard Odam loves me."

I must confess as one who sees in Aiden Tozer the end of a line that traces back to Isaiah and John the Baptist, that sentiment is instructive and more than a little disturbing.

A very dissatisfying book in that respect.

But the most irritating evasion in my mind is this whole notion of Tozer's loneliness. Nothing about Tozer's personality fascinates me more than this. He was sometimes irascible, abrasive and withdrawn; I should like to know, if Tozer believed a quarter of what he said, why he would not have been more irascible, abrasive and withdrawn!

I think I have read everything Tozer published. I have some sense of what he read, not just from the accounts of his acquaintances like McAfee and Chase but from the evidence that littered his writings and sermons. I also grew up observing Tozer's contemporaries. I know what they read. I know what rubbish blew across their minds and fell on their sermons. I know what they talked about when they talked to each other about their loves. I know what they thought made a good poem and what were its proper uses.

At family gatherings I have been driven to play with pets, shoe laces and dust-bunnies rather than talk with silly people. It was not until I translated the Apocalypse that I learned that the church social was not a Bowl Judgment. Do you have any sense of how excruciating it is to have Wordsworth at home on your desk and have to talk to some nutcase and watch his TV?

Again, whatever lessons one might learn from the man, I think those lessons should be drawn from a knowledge of what is in this book. If A. W. Tozer got it all wrong, we should give some thought to how it might be done right. At this stage I don't see anyone doing it right. I would rather live in a world with flawed prophets than the world of superficially well-adjusted religious functionaries and carnal drudges we have today.

And maybe our regard for Tozer is just one more nail in our coffin.