Last night in our Advisory Team meeting, we spent time discussing Tozer’s statement in The Knowledge of the Holy, “So, were every man on earth to become atheist, it would not affect God in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.”

What a statement. The implications of it are profound, expansive and nuanced. I don’t think we could ever fully understand such an idea so I wonder how many of us truly believe it?

I know I can affirm it mentally and yet live in a very different way. I sometimes get trapped into thinking I must persuade my students of a particular idea about God in order to legitimize God (or more likely, me). As if he becomes weaker or I become less of a teacher if a group of 16 year-olds don’t think something about him. All this attitude does is lead to frustration on my part, resentment on the students’ part, and likely a wonderment on God’s part, as in “What was Troy thinking?”

If we were to fully commit to the idea that what we or our student believe about him adds nothing and takes nothing away from him because he is completely sufficient and independent of us, we would revolutionize our classrooms. The teachers and students would have a level of freedom that would change the dynamic in our school. We would be free to explore those dark and hidden, yet very real, questions and issues that we so often fear students have (as if we’ve never had them ourselves). We would no longer view ourselves as teachers who must get our students to agree with us, but as teachers who allows students to freely explore and think about big questions, given them biblical guidance along the way, but recognizing that God will work in the student’s heart however he wishes, regardless of what we do. That is the kind of environment in which I believe the deepest learning in all disciplines would take place.

By the way, if you have never read Knowledge of the Holy, you are missing out. My pastor in college wrote to about 50 of the top Christian leaders (Stott, Sproul, people like that) for a book he was writing and asked them to list the books that have had the most influence on them. Knowledge of the Holy was by far the most frequently mentioned. It’s a life-changing book.