Holiness is not performance

Tozer had a particular sensitivity to the performative version of Christian life: the cultivation of the right appearance, the right vocabulary, the right associations. He considered it one of the most effective substitutes for genuine faith because it is so easy to confuse with the real thing, especially from the inside.

His argument was that true holiness is not something you produce. It is something that results from proximity to God. A person who has actually spent time in the presence of holiness becomes, gradually and not always visibly, more holy. The change is real but it comes from the inside out, not from the outside in.

The practical problem with performance-based holiness, Tozer argued, is that it orients a person toward audience rather than toward God. The question becomes "how does this look?" rather than "is this true?" Over time, the gap between the performance and the actual interior life becomes a source of exhaustion and spiritual emptiness.

He was writing at a time when American evangelicalism was becoming increasingly public and programmatic. He watched it with some concern. The machinery of religious activity, he thought, could easily substitute for the thing it was supposed to support, the simple direct pursuit of God.

His remedy was not a different program. It was less program. Silence, attentiveness, honesty about what is actually happening inside rather than what is being projected outside. The Pursuit of God, the book he is best known for, is essentially an extended argument that the most important work of a Christian life happens in the interior, and that most of us have settled for activity at the surface.