A. W. Tozer's Man: The Dwelling Place of God has a promising title, but unfortunately the content is less compelling. It's just all right, nothing outstanding. In some places Tozer comes across as a grumpy codger, railing against the degeneracy of the modern age. The fact that I agree with most of his rants did surprisingly little to remove the slightly sour taste he left. Maybe it's also that this collection, comprised of unrelated articles written at different times and without any flow or connection, gives the effect of a collection of soapbox speeches.

Tozer is highly articulate, with nice phrasing and a sense of the unyielding in his ideas and constructions. I can see why he continues to be quoted today. Though I haven't read much of his work, he is occasionally mentioned by other authors I respect and so I was a little surprised to see the pervasive false dichotomy of matter and spirit here. Tozer writes, "[man] is a spirit having a body. That which makes him a human being is not his body but his spirit" (10). But I think this is untrue. We don't have to denigrate our physicality to make the case for our spiritual nature. What makes us human beings is that we are both physical and spiritual.

C. S. Lewis talks about this and asks why we rate the physical world as lesser than that of the spirit. "God likes matter; he made it," Lewis argues. And I would agree. The whole "matter = bad, spirit = good" idea sounds ultra-spiritual, but is actually rather sneakily Gnostic. But perhaps Tozer was just reacting against a highly materialistic age that seeks to reduce everything to just the physical.

Random note: I loved used books and find it highly amusing how the underlinings and highlightings, so insistent at the beginning, taper off to nothing after the first several chapters. I'm not sure I have ever read a marked-up book that was marked up the whole way through.

I believe I once read Tozer described as a "leathery old saint" and I'm finding the description apt. If your time for reading theological works is limited, there are probably more profitable choices than this. Uncompelling. ( )