James Edwin Loder, Jr

Influences, Education, and Teaching

The life and labor of James Edwin Loder, Jr. can perhaps best be understood as the passionate unfolding of his own answers to the programmatic questions he posed to the readers of his fifth book The Logic of the Spirit?—“What is a lifetime?” and “Why do I live it?” In this unfolding of his life and through his sophisticated articulation of the “What?” and “Why?” of human existence corem Deo we discern his relentless longing to know and articulate the ultimate intelligibility underlying the surface chaos of creation and especially of human existence, the awakening to which calls all human beings to flourish according to the nature of Jesus Christ. In and through the surprising transformations that shaped his life and generated his fiduciary and imaginative insights into, and responses to, Christ’s Presence, Loder embodied and advocated a convictional style of life that bore eloquent testimony “upward” to the One who convicts, “inward” to his own spirit, and “outward” to the ones he taught, counseled, and those with whom he lived. Not everyone responded to him or his writings and teachings in positive ways, and by some accounts he was a difficult man to know. But Loder, by all accounts a religious genius (homo religiosus), suffered divine things at the hands of One who transformed him into homo testans, the witness, one whose life and work testified to the One with whom finally all of us have to do (Heb. 2:15). In Loder the genius and the witness became one flesh in testimony to the Word made flesh!

Perhaps it is fair to say that the “What?” and “Why?” of Loder’s life and vocation took shape, providentially, at the intersection of three interpenetrating “curriculums” through which he came to know the human condition within a framework of faith. These “curriculums” might be described symbolically as: (1) the curriculum of Athens (Loder’s search for the scientific and philosophical knowledge of the “What?” of the human condition, represented by the university), (2) the curriculum of Jerusalem (Loder’s efforts to mine the depth of the theological tradition of Reformed and ecumenical Christianity to know the “Why?” of the human condition, represented by the seminary), and (3) the curriculum of Golgotha (the existentially-revealed intelligibility through which the Living Presence of Jesus Christ comes to us from the “other side” of death and non-being to transform and integrate the “What?” and the “Why?” of human life according to His own nature through convictional experience). Loder’s life signifies one whose confrontations at Golgotha revealed a Reality so life-affirming in the face of Nothingness that he was compelled to search out a kind of “unified field theory” powerful enough to integrate the wisdom of Athens and the vision of Jerusalem in the service of giving testimony to the God-man structure of reality in a scientific context. He held out for the prospect of discerning a Christian way of being human in the world that really mattered—what he called “life in the Spirit—because it participates through the Holy Spirit in the nature, structure and dynamic power of provident-contingent relationality revealed definitively in the God-man, the power that finally redeems all things. Loder was one of the “not many” to whom Paul referred in his Corinthian correspondence who, like Paul himself, had embraced Jesus Christ in spite of being learned (“not many of you were wise…”) and lived and died to tell about it.

Loder sought to witness to the Reality of Jesus Christ to the intellectual centers of our scientific culture—symbolized by his own professional proximity to representatives of “Jerusalem” (Princeton Theological Seminary) and “Athens” (Princeton University). Loder developed the basics of a critical confessional practical theological science that he thought possessed the generative power to redefine the meaning of the Actuality of Christ in relation to a scientific culture, so that the true significance of the sciences of “Athens” and “Jerusalem” found their “Amen” in their discovery of Jesus Christ at the boundary conditions where human experience becomes intelligible in the Spirit to those who become spirit through Christ’s Presence. By describing how the Spirit of Christ works redemptively in bodily, psychic, social and cultural dimensions of human action, and especially in the spirit of the mind of the knower herself, negating the negation riven into ego and the social construction of reality, Loder sought to release “life in the Spirit” in all of these dimensions in both congregation and culture. The story of James E. Loder Jr. is perhaps best understood as a unique articulation of the integration of the “curriculums” of Athens and Jerusalem through the Cross, an articulation that bears considerable promise for those living simultaneously under the call of the Gospel and under the growing conditions of despair that mark so much of contemporary life. Perhaps Loder’s life may be understood as his attempt to answer Tertullian’s famous question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem” with an interpolation: “What has Athens and Jerusalem to do with Jesus Christ?” What follows is an attempt to narrate the unfolding of the “What?” and the “Why?” of Loder’s life and witness as a clue to the significance of his contribution to practical theology and Christian education—and perhaps beyond.

Early Life and Influences (1931-1957)

James Edwin Loder, Jr. was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on December 5th, 1931, the only son of the two children born to Edwin and Frances Loder. The Loder home was steeped in the wisdom and praxis of Athens. Edwin Loder, well educated and by all accounts a respected and likeable man, was himself an educator, the principal of his son’s elementary school, and one who took an active, hands-on interest in the life and success of his children. Frances Loder, who as a collegian won the prestigious Pi Kappa Delta National Oratory Award, possessed great dramatic and artistic talent and flair. She recited poetry to her children as they came home from school and immersed the Loder family life in the musical classics to lift their spirits. After her son left home she became a prominent professor of speech and drama at the University of Texas in Austin. Loder’s parents enjoyed a remarkable marriage (Frances never remarried after her husband’s death) and they succeeded raising their children to appreciate life and learning and to excel in all their endeavors. They did not, however, express a strong commitment to a faith tradition (Frances, according to Dr. Loder, found a living faith later in her life) and the Loder’s seldom attended church services as a family. Loder’s sibling, a sister Katherine, known as Francey Kay, six and a half years younger than her brother, was emotionally troubled as a child in spite of her wholesome upbringing. But a remarkable vision of Christ at the age of 14 (in her brother’s presence) changed her into a creative and talented young women, who, blessed with her mother’s dramatic propensities, aspired to be an actress and playwright. She even played Carnegie Hall at one point in her career! Tragically, however, she died at the age of thirty-nine from complications to diabetes.

Loder himself was a fun-loving, athletic, but also studious and artistic youngster, who seemed destined from the start to succeed in the world of the intellect. His intellectual precocity emerged very early indeed. At his memorial service his daughter Tami told the story of “little Jimmy,” whose kindergarten teacher recognized a special quality of mind that set him apart. “Every day we read a story, and after the story is over, Jimmy gets up and wants to tell us what the story means.” Loder continued to thrive throughout his school years as a top student and as a gifted athlete (track and basketball). He also got elected president of his high school’s student council. He hunted and fished and indulged in his own share of revelry with his father and uncles, the rather notorious “Loder boys.” Yet the young Loder may have also sensed very early in life the ultimate futility of constructing human answers to life’s meaning. Even though largely unchurched through his own family, he started attending the local Methodist church by himself at the age of eight or nine. This childhood quest for religious understanding persisted, and early on Loder may have had a religious encounter of some significance. But while he apparently sought a religious dimension to life’s meaning, no doubt his education in the wisdom of Athens remained dominant. He graduated from high school with a promising future in academic work.

At the suggestion of an uncle, Loder attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1949, entering as a physics major. Soon his professors realized what his kindergarten teacher knew so well, that Loder’s insatiable curiosity about the “Why?” of things made him more suited for a career in metaphysics. Loder took their advice and graduated with a B.A. in philosophy in 1953. But the vision of Jerusalem continued to beckon him, and after graduating from Carleton he matriculated at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1954, oriented to becoming a professional minister with a special competence in philosophy. While at Princeton, the dynamic interrelation between Athens and Jerusalem took hold of his mind as he pursued ways to integrate faith and knowledge. One of his roommates, Charles Graves, recalled years later the intensity and devotion of Loder to learning. “I was Jim’s roommate in Alexander Hall for part of 1954-1955…I cannot forget [that he]…was often awake half the night reading philosophy and psychology while I slept. I was astounded what trouble he took to advance his knowledge—a trait that stayed with him, apparently, all his life.” At Princeton he also began, almost by accident, his lifelong engagement with Christian education as the unlikely locus of his intellectual acumen. The circumstances of this initial involvement with the field are important, for they reveal “the trouble he took to advance his knowledge.”

In his senior year he and several other students who had signed up to take D. Campbell Wyckoff’s required course in Christian education became frustrated with it, apparently because it lacked the foundational depth and breadth Loder and the others craved. They asked professor Wyckoff if they could redesign his course to address the deeper structures of the discipline itself. So Wyckoff in his wisdom gave them permission to redesign the course under his supervision in a way that satisfied both themselves and the course requirements. Meeting the challenge to redesign this course in Christian education by seeking out what might be called its inner logic in effect launched Loder (and apparently others ) on his future course to reconstruct the conceptual dimensions of what was considered at that time to be a theoretically underdeveloped discipline. Wyckoff was so impressed by Loder’s extraordinary conceptual abilities that this episode stayed with him and informed his decision some years later to support hiring Loder to be his colleague in the Christian education department at Princeton Seminary.

Confrontation with Death and Awakening to the Presence of Christ (1954).

However, during this same time Loder was confronted by a reality more frightening, and a hidden intelligibility more compelling and generative than any he had encountered before. In 1954 his beloved father became deathly ill with brain cancer and died tragically during Loder’s first year at Princeton. Loder had left school to be with his father in Austin, Texas, where the family had relocated. This confrontation with the death of one so beloved assaulted the budding philosopher with the full force of what he would later call “the Void” (i.e. the irrevocable drift of existence toward nothingness), awakening his spirit to that existential despair that comes from the shocking awareness of how empty and meaningless the social construction of reality really is when its true destiny is exposed. This awakening to the loss of intelligibility in his life left Loder depressed and reeling with a glandular infection (perhaps mononucleosis). Neither the resources of Athens nor Jerusalem had prepared him for the awful realism of Golgotha. Yet the depth of his despair only served to magnify the profound graciousness that would accompany Loder through this confrontation with the Void, and that proved to him to be stronger than death or despair. As he later recalled, while writing out a prayer to interpret his own state of mind, like any good philosophy major would do under such circumstances, his anxiety and sorrow turned to rage. Striking his pillow as a blow against the seeming finality of it all, Loder the philosopher called out from his sick-bed for God to “Do something!” Immediately he began to feel a warming sensation, like “liquid heat” enveloping his body, beginning with his feet and rising to his head. He rose from his bed and, searching for an adequate interpretation of his experience, picked up Emil Brunner’s The Scandal of Christianity and did not so much read the book as “recognize” its relevance to the depth of despair now vanquished.

Loder had recognized at some profound level that both the wisdom of Athens and the vision of Jerusalem found their ultimate meaning in the power of the One who comes to us at Golgotha and calls us to life again in Galilee (Matt. 26:18). He now knew what Luther meant: “theologians are not made by reading and studying books but by living and dying and being damned.” Loder recognized in the midst of his despair that despair itself, when pushed to the limit, gets “scandalized” by the Scandal of Jesus Christ. Soon after this experience, he and his sister both encountered Christ “transformingly” a second time, in which together they, like the disciples of old, had a vision of Christ from across a lake. These experiences of Christ reached to the core of Loder’s spirit, and having been “wised up” to Christ, he never “wised down.” He returned to Princeton with a vivid sense that his passion for learning had entered a new degree of intensity. Only later, after 1970, when the power of death and life erupted even more forcefully and personally in his life would Loder realize the full significance of these earlier experiences of the Cross, and give intellectual testimony to what he came to know for a scientific culture.

“Maybe You Can Do Something for that Field”: The Sojourn at Harvard and the “Accidental” Call to Christian Education (1957-1962)

Knowing that what he had experienced in Austin could not be explained fully in psychological terms (i.e. by the wisdom of Athens), he returned to Princeton and confessed his experience of Christ to the Swiss theologian Hans Hofmann, Professor of Theology and Psychology, who had studied with Brunner at Basel, and also with Karl Jung. Significantly, it was Hofmann who introduced the young prodigy to the importance of Kierkegaard, who became Loder’s life-long interlocutor. Kierkegaard’s own saving experience of Christ in the midst of familial chaos, and his extraordinary articulation of the significance of Christ offered Loder a way to make sense of his Golgothan experience theologically, philosophically, and psychologically. Loder immersed himself in the works of Kierkegaard, under Hofmann’s tutelage, through what became the beginning of his life-long love affair with the Danish iconoclast. Kierkegaard, Loder confessed, provided “language for my head.” Loder showed such promise that, after his graduation in 1957 with a B.D., Hofmann, who had received an appointment as Director of Harvard University’s Project on Religion and Mental Health under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, took Loder and three other gifted students with him as his research assistants. From 1958-1962 Loder earned two more advanced academic degrees as a Harvard Fellow—a Th.M. from Harvard Divinity School (1958, with distinction) and a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Religion from Harvard University Graduate School in Arts and Sciences (1962). In these formative years between 1957 and 1962 he also met, courted and married Arlene Carr, the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor and a student at Ratcliffe. Shortly thereafter the Loders started a family with the birth daughter Kimberly. Loder also completed clinical training at the Massachusetts Mental Health Clinic, and, though not ordained, he served pulpit supply at Hope Chapel in Lakewood, New Jersey (1957) and the North Christian Church, Fall River, Massachusetts (1959). Significantly, he did not pursue ordination at this time, apparently believing ordination was unnecessary for an academic vocation that now loomed on the horizon.

Loder wrote his dissertation, “The Nature of Religious Consciousness in the Writings of Sigmund Freud and Soren Kierkegaard: A Theoretical Study in the Correlation of Religious and Psychiatric Concepts,” as a Danforth Fellow at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, with a grant in Theology and Psychiatric Theory (1961-1962). In this study he sought “to work toward a sounder integration between theoretical points of view in the fields of religion and psychiatry” (p. 1), and so to develop the rudiments of an interdisciplinary practical theological method to correlate theories of psychiatric healing and religious transformation. He was concerned that (a) heretofore important cooperative efforts that had emerged between psychiatry and religious ministry at the level of practice would nevertheless ultimately fail unless the theoretical frameworks that guided such cooperation were given “persistent critical examination,” and (b) that attempts to correlate these disciplines often resulted in one discipline reducing the other to its own terms or, in the manner of a tertium quid, reducing both disciplines by conforming them to an alien framework (pp. 7ff). He therefore wanted to develop “an intrinsically consistent, unbiased and self-critical method for making comparisons and correlations between the disciplines of religion and psychiatry” in order to fulfill the following conditions: (a) “avoidance of the reductionistic approaches”; ( b) “maintenance of the integrity of concepts as they are employed in both disciplines”; (c) “establishment of a continuity of meaning across the boundaries of the respective disciplines”; (d) and “mutual deepening of insight in both disciplines as a result of the new continuities of meaning” (p. 2).

To carry out this intention, Loder sought to correlate two epistemologies of consciousness, that of Soren Kierkegaard representing religion (Jerusalem) and Sigmund Freud representing psychiatry (Athens). In doing so he sought to differentiate healthy (“criterional”) consciousness (characterized by “limited freedom”) from pathological consciousness in religious experience (characterized by necessity). Loder called the dynamic structure that governs the move from pathological to criterional consciousness in religious experience “the hypnagogic paradigm,” a paradigm of creativity which bore affinity to both Kierkegaard’s account of conversion and to Freud’s account of the therapeutic power of dreams. One of Loder’s first students, C. Daniel Batson, commenting in a footnote on Loder’s “strange” correlation of Freud and Kierkegaard in this dissertation, illuminates the general importance of Loder’s academic project in those years for developing a linkage to reality for interdisciplinary work in practical theology. The “reconstructive phantasies” upon which Loder bases much of his analysis are those of “Little Hans” (cf. Freud’s “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” 1909). The reader may think it strange to attempt a constructive analysis of religious growth through analysis of Freud’s treatment of the change process. Loder’s concern here and in subsequent writings is not to ignore the import of Freud’s critique of religion but to see this critique as applied to religious pathology and to ask if this need be the only form religion can take. Thus, for example, in The Future of an Illusion (1927) Freud juxtaposes socializing religious training to “education to reality” (p. 81). Loder challenges the necessity of this juxtaposition, attempting to explore creative religious thought which is also “education to reality” in a more profound but no less pragmatic sense than Freud’s realist assumption can recognize.

Loder challenged Freud’s reductionism of religion to neurosis through Kierkegaard’s elaboration of reality revealed in the God-man, and paved the way to conceive a “religious education to [not from] reality.” Loder hoped to “move the theoretical dialogue between the Christian religion and psychiatry away from the familiar relationship between God and the projection of the father image to the more crucially Christian question, namely, that of the ‘new birth’” (p. 34). Characteristically, he received highest honors for his work. But more importantly, during these challenging years as a Harvard Fellow, a research assistant in the Harvard University Project on Religion and Mental Health, and a Danforth Scholar at the Menninger Foundation, Loder engaged first-hand some of the greatest minds in theology and the human sciences of that day—Talcott Parsons, David McClelland, Paul Tillich, Paul Lehmann, James Luther Adams, Arthur Darby Nock, and Harvey Cox at Harvard, and Seward Hiltner and Paul Pruyser at the Menninger Foundation. The concern that dominated his academic efforts during these years was the inner integrity among the disciplines that inform a practical theology of reality-restoring religious experience. He would later recall that this kind of interdisciplinary practical theology was “in my soul.” Through it all he continued to hear Kierkegaardian echoes that would stay with him and intensify throughout his career to become the foremost Ursource out of which he would eventually construct his own theoretical framework of critical, confessional practical theological science in the years ahead.

Having studied with the many of the nation’s greatest representatives of Athens and Jerusalem, as well as with many of the brightest stars of the rising generation of scholars, theologians and theorists—like Harvey Cox, Robert Bellah, James Fowler and Donald Miller to name just four—the question of what he could do with an interdisciplinary degree loomed large. And again, Loder’s attention turned rather accidentally toward Christian education. Loder had become aware while at Harvard that the meta-theoretical foundations of Christian education needed to be reconstructed in order to integrate the wisdom of Athens (i.e. the knowledge and interdisciplinary breadth of liberal contributions to religious education) with the convictional depth and theological vision of Jerusalem (i.e. crisis theology’s contribution to Christian education). He suspected that Christian education might provide him with a proper vocational context for bringing what he called his “Harvard influence” (shaped especially by Kierkegaard) to bear on re-conceiving the foundations of religious/Christian education at a new depth. Indeed, when he told Hans Hofmann of his decision to move into Christian education rather than pastoral care, Hofmann replied, “Maybe you can do something for that field.” Though the fruit of the Harvard experience and the generative insights of Kierkegaard would mature to their fullest theological extent only after 1970, Loder’s course was now set for making a significant contribution to both Christian education and practical theology at the meta-theoretical level.

Indeed, Princeton’s Christian education department in the early 1960s provided the perfect place for someone to “do something” foundational for the field. D. Campbell Wyckoff, an expert in every facet of the curricular dimensions of Christian education, stood at the center of the department, and Freda Gardner, an experienced practitioner of congregational education, had been hired in 1961. But shortly thereafter, in 1962, Donald Butler, primarily a philosopher of education, left Princeton for Austin Seminary, leaving a void in the department’s coverage of foundational disciplines in Christian education. Seward Hiltner, who had worked with Loder at the Menninger Clinic and now taught at Princeton, asked him if he would be willing to take his interdisciplinary acumen and “put it into Christian education” at the seminary. Convinced that Loder could with integrity commit himself to Christian education, Hiltner persuaded Princeton President James I. McCord that Loder was the right choice to bring interdisciplinary depth to this discipline, even though the young scholar had little academic or practical experience in the field itself. Loder, with the support of Hiltner, Wyckoff, Dean Elmer Homrighausen, and now President McCord, subsequently received a call from the Seminary to teach the foundational courses in Christian education, with the title of Instructor of Christian Education. In an interview in 2002, Wyckoff recalled meeting Loder in Chicago to discuss his willingness to shift his focus from psychoanalysis to Christian education. He allayed Loder’s concern for having no experience in Christian education, and Loder confirmed what Hiltner had told Wyckoff, that he looked forward to taking his interdisciplinary understanding in a different direction, moving from dealing with sick people in clinical settings to working with normal people in normal (congregational) settings. In 2001 Loder recalled his early desire to bring a Kierkegaardian critique to Christian education: I wanted not only to raise people back to normal but to raise them more deeply into normal. I didn’t say it then, but I wanted to bring [people] up psychologically at a higher level. See, all this time I had in the back of my mind Kierkegaard, his critique of the aesthetic…of ordinary Christianity in Denmark. And I’m thinking, ‘This is really necessary. It has to be done.’”

Wyckoff assured Loder that he could focus his work on integrating the foundational disciplines of philosophy, psychology, educational psychology, and socio-cultural studies, and would not have to teach the courses on administration, curriculum, pedagogical method and the like, which were Wyckoff’s (and Gardner’s) forte anyway. According to Gardner, the required courses in Christian education for M. Div. students were “a disaster” in those days and needed the kind of intellectual stimulation Loder could supply. Loder reflected on these early years of his role in shaping the curriculum of Christian education philosophically, and of the vision that began to take hold of him.

I did have an inspiration about [Christian education]. I could see this thing opening up to…tremendous opportunity. I could see that through Christian education you could teach anything and everything in the seminary. It takes in the whole thing…[it] requires you to come from all these different perspective [including] theological, philosophical, psychological, social, cultural, and it was a wonderful place to be, having been trained in interdisciplinary studies. Christian education needed a better way to deal with the interdisciplinary stuff.

Thus, Loder set out to re-conceive the entire theoretical basis for the discipline of Christian education. His Harvard work provided him with a theoretical framework upon which he would begin to connect his dynamic understanding of the creativity of positive religious experience, based upon the “hypnagogic paradigm,” to social theory, theories of language and culture, and to ecclesial practices (see below). He had strong ideas of what he wanted to do, and at Princeton he was given the space and freedom to do it. When asked if Loder shared his vision with his colleagues, Campbell Wyckoff responded with droll understatement “Jim pretty well worked all that kind of thing out in his head, and didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone else…Loder went his own way.”

Going His Own Way: Conflict and Creativity through the Human Spirit in Loder’s Vision of Transformational Learning (1962-1970)

Not only were the needs of the department of Christian education relevant to Loder’s expertise, the decade of the sixties was in many ways Taylor-made for Loder to develop “his own way” in Christian education. Indeed, Loder was cut from the same cloth as the revolutionary times. First, all claims to authority were coming under question in American culture, including academic authority, with the result that students openly challenged professors in class. This blistering of authority ramified through culture, and mainline religion in particular buried itself in defensive posturing, magnifying its culpability in the eyes of many students who brought with them to seminary charges of hypocrisy and compromise. But Loder’s immersion in the exemplars of critical suspicion, like Freud and Kierkegaard, under the discipline of his own razor-sharp mind, equipped him with the perfect weapons with which to engage the intellectual unrest and the ideological warfare in ultimately positive ways. Indeed, he could out-duel any of the student provocateurs who charged his way. While many professors dreaded the contention, Loder in fact admitted to loving this kind of intellectual “duel-ism.” Even his pedagogy emphasizing “conflict learning” in religious education fit well the tenor of the times. Students flocked to his courses.

Second, many of these same protesters, especially those students who felt lost in their own rage and contempt, were looking more for understanding and acceptance than argument, more for emotional stability and mental health than heated rhetoric. And many of them gathered around Loder almost from the time he set foot on campus. Fresh from the Menninger Foundation and from Harvard, he brought mental health credentials with him to an institution almost devoid of spiritual and emotional support-structures for students or faculty—no campus chaplain, pastor, or counselor in those days. Randy Nichols, one of Loder’s first doctoral students and now Director of the seminary’s Doctor of Ministry Program, recalls that Loder had a “huge load” of counseling in those days. Loder apparently proved competent to counsel from the start of his time at Princeton. The troubled sought his counsel.

Third, as we have already noted, Christian education as a discipline was ill equipped to deal theologically or conceptually with the cultural upheavals assaulting the church and the nation. The separation of religious content and educational process in those days rendered Christian education anemic and irrelevant to the difficult task of integration that needed to be done. Compelling rationales for re-conceiving Christian education as a prophetic vanguard challenging both church and culture had difficulty coming forth in a discipline that was largely conceived as little more than technique. At Princeton in the early 60s, Christian education focused primarily on practices, attracted persons (mostly women who were not accepted to the full range of academic vocations) who sought employment as educational practitioners in congregations (Directors of Christian or Religious Education), and had little scholarly attraction.

Therefore, if true progress was to be made, the theological, critical and interdisciplinary dimensions of the field itself needed to be addressed at the foundational level and reconstructed in a way that (1) made the educational implications of the Gospel relevant to a culture no longer content to give unambiguous consent to a largely domesticated Judeo-Christian sacred canopy, and (2) made the intellectual capital gleaned from the human sciences relevant to the Gospel’s educational initiative. Like Kierkegaard of nineteenth-century Denmark, Loder believed that in American society Christian education had become a lie. A new dynamic vision of the conceptual dimensions and the experiential dynamics of Christian education begged to be discovered and articulated. The intellectually gifted sought him as their mentor.

Loder responded to the times and to the situation at Princeton by refining the interdisciplinary epistemology he had worked out at Harvard, and by perfecting his conflict model of learning based upon that work. This conflict model of learning and his paradigm of creativity (known by his early students simply as “the paradigm” ) attracted the attention of virtually everyone who came in contact with his generative mind. Loder’s classes at the seminary became extraordinarily popular because of his intellectual power and his flair for the dramatic (one of his former students likened him to the Robin Williams’ portrayal of John Keating in Dead Poet’s Society!). His courses were compelling, if often somewhat intimidating. Wyckoff recalled with amazement that 70-80 students regularly signed up for Loder’s educational psychology courses, an unheard-of number of students for an elective, especially in Christian education. Wyckoff mused, “Something was going on there that was pretty important—that’s the way I felt. I said to myself, don’t mess around with it.” Loder, according Nichols (and confirmed by Gardner), “really opened up Christian education to the M.Div. population.”

But Loder’s influence extended beyond Princeton as well, as people seemed attracted to his intellect wherever he went. He participated in the growing criticism of religious education as an intellectually under-developed discipline, interacting with and developing critiques of, the works of major figures in the field—Randolf Crump Miller, C. Ellis Nelson, James Smart, and John Westerhoff, to name a few. Wyckoff helped introduce Loder to many of these theorists by taking him (“kicking and screaming” as both Wyckoff and Gardner recalled!) to professional meetings like APRRE (American Professors and Researchers in Religious Education). In spite of Loder’s disdain for such gatherings, the young scholar became something of a sensation because of his fecund mind and profound grasp of the disciplines undergirding Christian or religious education. Loder became a speaker at some of these meetings, and at denominational gatherings and seminary forums. A major publishing company sought him out to persuade him to leave Princeton and to enter into curriculum design, based on his conflict model of learning. In all of this scholarly activity Loder proved himself to be one of the rising stars in practical theology and Christian education. More importantly, as Nichols observed, Loder was “on to something that instinctively people knew we needed…to learn about, that is, the sort of deep, experiential substrate of the theological ‘stuff’ we were kicking around on the surface.”

By the late 1960s, Loder began to attract gifted persons like Dan Batson and Randy Nichols to study with him. Although most of his doctoral students came after 1975, Loder was regarded to be a gifted and stimulating mentor from the start. One factor that made him better known was Wyckoff’s encouragement to publish his dissertation, which became his first major book, Religious Pathology and Christian Faith (1966). This book reconfirmed for the broader ecclesial and academic readership Loder’s concern to “develop an epistemology [for practical theology] that is both theologically and behaviorally sound, but that at the same time has enough integrity of its own to give it critical and constructive power both for its parent disciplines and for other interdisciplinary studies.” The principle reason for engaging in what Albert Outler called Loder’s “spelunking venture” in epistemology was his concern “that in current years diverse ‘alien’ disciplines have found their way into theological curricula without their being critically evaluated in terms of their relatedness to the classical theological disciplines.” Thus, there is an “unfinished business” in the sense of the “broader need…for interdisciplinary studies that can speak responsibly to several areas such as social ethics, public education, and psychiatric theory and practice, where theological and behavioral thought are inevitably and often inextricably involved.” Through this epistemology of religious experience Loder sought “by colligation, correlation, and functional analogy [to]…penetrate more deeply into the nature of human change in Christian experience,” the “locus” of which would be “in the patterning of the phenomenon of consciousness,” developed in relation to Freud, Kierkegaard, Harold Rugg and Herbert Silberer, “the hypnagogic paradigm.” In relation to Christian education, the conflict model of creative development addressed the problem of the separation of process and content in teaching and learning that plagued theory construction since the onset of crisis theology.

Loder wrote: The pernicious distinction that has been ruinous to a great deal of theoretical thinking in Christian education lies between content and process. One of the unique disservices that Barthiana did for Christian education was to precipitate radical opposition to the Christian appropriation of John Dewey’s thought…the distinction is false and misleading….The paradigm asserts that the aim of education is expansion of the boundaries of paradigmatic freedom. Moreover, it asserts that paradigmatic freedom is a fusion of content and process; indeed, it is precisely in the fusion that consciousness is generated.

As we have noted, Batson absorbed Loder’s conflict model and drew implications from his work for diverse application to practical theological and social-psychological domains. Nichols also found Loder’s work attractive because he felt his theory opened up insights into the creative process which, through generative conflicts, underlay doctrinal formulations about revelation and the effective Word or “saving knowledge.” These doctrinal formulations had no behavioral analogues that connected them to human experience or events of consciousness that had become the object of inquiry among secular theorists. Nichols recalls: “I thought ‘the paradigm’ could get at [these issues for preaching], that this was the sort of creative act, going through those dynamics, and that what we really wanted to happen in preaching was to lead people into an engagement of conflict, through this process…[as] a vehicle for trying to understand the experiential foundation for the high neo-orthodox theological claims about preaching—that the Word is really heard.” Others also picked up on the potential significance of Loder’s early work for fundamental issues in practical theology and theological education. Nelle Morton, for example, recognized early on that Loder’s interdisciplinary vision for practical theology bore an enormous transformational potential for Christian education, counseling, preaching, and administration, and, indeed, for re-conceiving the structure and dynamic of theological education itself.

In her review of Religious Pathology and Christian Faith, she discerned in Loder’s argument five issues that, taken together, “call into question the whole of theological education as it exists today…and plac[es] us on the verge of a new era…” Loder’s work, avers Morton, has the potential to overcome the fragmentation of theological education by (1) realigning the relations among disciplines making up theological education, (2) by focusing upon a way to preserve the integrity of each discipline in relation to the others, (3) by identifying a grammar for the imaginative process that generates knowledge so that (4) the dynamism of learning is opened up and (5) the theory-to-practice dichotomy is exposed as fallacious and is overcome.

Morton concludes: …Loder allows a new way of looking at process and form to emerge as he sets two gigantic figures in relation with one another. If the method and content of what the document is about have validity, then it is all up with the dichotomies and the splitness of learning and being. Learning content of the faith in one discipline to be applied by another becomes an illusory and fallacious approach to both theology and education. Learning techniques of perception in one situation to be applied in another situation has long since been outmoded. The method IS the content. All traditional ways of communicating may be called into question.

Clearly, no one really questioned the intellectual perspicacity of this dynamic young scholar. About the power of his mind Wyckoff acclaimed, “People stood in awe of him.” By 1964 he was promoted to Assistant Professor; by 1968 Associate Professor; and by the late 1960s Loder was traveling far and wide to lend his expertise to the educational concerns of both church and culture. The boundaries of his creative mind seemed to all who knew him to know no limits. In 1968-1969 he took his first sabbatical, receiving an American Association of Theology Schools research fellowship to do postdoctoral work at Piaget’s Jean J. Rousseau’s Institut des Sciences de l’ Education in Geneva. By then a second daughter, Tamara, had been born into the Loder household.

But the proficiency by which Loder connected the wisdom of Athens and the vision of Jerusalem according to the Harvard influence, and which inspired so many students and colleagues (and no doubt intimidated others!), had muted the existential dimensions of Loder’s own faith convictions, at least in public. For example, when one reads his 1969 Bonnell Lecture “Adults in Crisis” in light of his later, more explicit Christological and pneumatological commitments, one is struck by the manner in which Loder worked out what he called “paradigmatic madness” within an explicit psychoanalytic framework, suggesting that he then understood the power of Christian faith mostly in terms of facilitating qualitative advances in positive mental health. Furthermore, some persons were offended by Loder’s demonstrable lack of public piety in those early years. Indeed, evidence of Loder’s existential experience of Christ at the death of his father, which thrust him on to Kierkegaard and brought him to Harvard in the first place, remained tacit and largely unacknowledged, at least in the classroom and within the academic guild. Wyckoff, Gardner and Nichols all remembered that some students, overwhelmed by his intimidating intellect and under-whelmed by is demonstrable lack of piety in class, questioned whether Loder was even a Christian. Wyckoff remarked: “It was customary [at that time] to begin and end, usually to begin and often to end, class sessions in prayer. [Loder] was not about to do that. And…we accepted that. What are you going to do—force him to pray?”

Yet the image in those days of Loder being indifferent to faith, while certainly bearing some justification, is finally unfair. Loder’s colleague Freda Gardner wrote in her memorial tribute to him: Fresh from graduate work and his time at Menninger, Jim never prayed or displayed much typical interest in matters of faith. It was apparent in private conversations, however, that he was rooted in faith, but his faith did not easily surface in public discourse. His experience of assurance at the time of his father’s death had given him firsthand knowledge of the human-God connection, but he was not comfortable at his point with the personal.

Kim Loder Engelmann, his elder daughter, acknowledged that while during these years the Loder family practiced a consistent devotional life, and that her mother had experienced, through prayer, a profound healing of her abdomen while in Europe during her husband’s Sabbatical there, it is also fair to say that her father did not manifest publicly his deep commitments during this period. Prayer was not a large part of his pedagogical repertoire, and his faith was highly intellectualized. His driving concern was to make faith relevant to a scientific culture, to make religion useful for the healing of social and psychological ills. Only later did his family and his students and colleagues come to know him for his spiritual depth of experience as much as for his intellectual power, for his faith testimony as well as his academic credentials, for his prayers as well as for his scholarly achievements, for his transparent brokenness as well as for his sharp-minded critiques, for his “suffering divine things” as well as for his brilliance. An even more devastating “ruination” of his life had to occur “at Golgotha” at the hands of Spiritus Creator before Loder’s deepest intellectual grasp of divine and human action could become the bearer of joyful Good News to his students, colleagues, and friends. The 1970 transformation of homo religiosus (the religious genius) into homo testans (the witness) marks the generative turning point of Loder’s life and vocation.

Loder’s Ruination unto Redemptive: The Epistemological Significance of Convictional Experience (1970)

The full power of the Cross became generative for Loder only after 1970, and in this case the experience that shaped Loder’s life and scholarship was accidental in the literal as well as the figurative sense. That is, the experience through which this power was released in his life was an accident late that summer on the New York thruway that literally threatened his life. This experience, recorded in his groundbreaking book The Transforming Moment and re-lived with all of his students in classrooms, conferences and church gatherings since the early 1970s, became the catalyst for Loder to radically redefine his understanding and practice of Christian faith as a participation in what he came to call the “logic of the Spirit.” As the story goes, Loder, on vacation with his family driving north toward Albany, New York, stopped just short of Kingston to help two women change a tire by the side of the road. As Loder crouched in the front of the car to secure a place for the jack, a truck driver fell asleep and rammed into the car under which Loder was working, shoving it on top of him as he desperately tried to keep his head and shoulders from being crushed by the impact. The body of the car continued to drag him through the gravel, ripping off his right thumb, nearly smashing him into the rear of his own camper, before finally coming to a rest on his chest, breaking five ribs and puncturing his left lung. At the sight of the car now pinning her husband to the ground, Loder’s diminutive wife Arlene, praying “In the Name of Jesus” before momentarily losing consciousness, apparently lifted the car far enough off her husband to allow him to break free. Crushed but alive, confronted by a terrible Void rushing in to negate all of that for which he had lived and worked, startlingly Loder actually found himself more fully aware of One whose life authorized his own and guaranteed his own.

In words recorded at the beginning of his book The Transforming Moment, Loder testified of this experience in the following way: As I roused myself from under the car, a steady surge of life was rushing through me carrying with it two solid assurances. First, I knew how deeply I felt love for those around me, especially my family. My two daughters sat crying on the embankment, and a deep love reached out of me toward them. The second assurance was that this disaster had a purpose. These were the words with which I repeatedly tried to reassure my wife and children: “Don’t worry; this has a purpose.”

Walking from the car to the embankment, I never felt more conscious of the life that poured through me, nor more aware that this life was not my own. My well-being came from beyond my natural strength, and I lay down on the grass mostly because I thought I ought to….My state of being was not strictly controlled by adrenalin. The adrenalin activated aggression toward the driver who had caused the collision, but the flow of life in me was both a stronger and quieter force, so that the thought of retaliation was subdued. By far, the most significant and memorable effect was not the pain, nor the anger, but the gracious nature of the life I was experiencing.

During the next few hours as Loder entered treatment in a nearby Catholic hospital, he continued to sense another’s Presence living through him, convincing him that he couldn’t die and assuring him that all was well. In this Golgothan landscape the cruciform images [i.e. the crucifix] displayed on the hospital walls signified “the combination of physical pain and the assurance of a life greater than death” that “gave objective expression and meaning to the sense of promise and transcendence that lived within the midst of my suffering,” so that even as the pain increased and the signs of trauma asserted themselves, “the enduring essentials of love and purpose remained.” As he entered surgery he continued to experience “the power of life from beyond me [which] once again rushed into my body. Moreover, my sense was that this power was not impersonal, but emanating from the center of Another’s awareness—an awareness that positively, even joyfully, intended my well-being.” He began to sing “Fairest Lord Jesus” until nurses informed him that the attending physician was Jewish, at which point Loder conversed with him about the Hebrew Scriptures. Over the next few months he made a full recovery. He returned after some time to his responsibilities at the seminary, entering again into his familiar academic pursuits. Yet all was not the same. He was not the same! The next few years brought great agony of soul, but greater renewal of life to Loder’s spirit.

For two years following this devastating yet, paradoxically, life-affirming experience, Loder struggled to make this event intelligible to himself and to others, in the face of great temptation to repress such experiences for the sake of science and scholarship. He struggled to know how to be faithful to the Presence of Christ revealed in and through this Golgothan event, and still have integrity as a scholar in a scientific culture. Nichols recalled that Loder, already a very private person, underwent “an enormous withdrawal” after the accident, secluding himself from others and suffering embarrassment about his disfigurement, so that no one really knew for certain just what had happened to him. Moreover, Gardner recalled that Loder’s sometimes “uncontrollable weeping” when he told the story of the accident left some wondering about his mental stability. Yet the aftermath of the experience cannot be understood in strictly social or psychological terms. What seems certain is that amid the doubts that plagued him from without and from within, a new depth of conviction was laboring to come to expression through him. A dimension of the brokenness and struggle and yet conviction he experienced is reflected in a handwritten prayer Loder scribbled on lined paper, found in his office after his death, probably written in the early 1970s during this crisis of faith.

This is who I am. This is who I must be. The one who was convicted on the thruway and thus renewed [by] his “convictor” of several years before. If teaching this way is destructive to my fellows or classes who want something else, if this means I lose [my] job and esteem, then at least I do not lose my Lord. I do not by this expect to stop my intellectual work. But I do hereby stop, in the name of Jesus Christ, any effort to say that I can exhaustively deprive myself by my own efforts. Thou art holding me fast, and I am so grateful I will be obedient to the heavenly vision, as Paul said, and not fall away (Heb. 6:4-7).

In more formal terms, Loder described this convictional struggle in The Transforming Moment as follows: Although I resisted the implications of this experience for over two years, the eventual consequence was that I had to act on the growing internal necessity to identify myself with the ministry of the church and to complete ordination proceedings, which I had held in reservation for several years. This became a matter of conscience, not derived from any moral sense of obligation or abstract principles, but in the sense of knowing within oneself the necessary direction of one’s integrity….This episode, in fact, raised countless new questions, disturbed several personal relationships, and forced me to reenvision the spiritual center of my vocation—not an easy matter when one is already teaching in a theological seminary. It undoubtedly presented me with the reality to which I have had to be true and from which I have departed only with a keen sense of having violated my own soul. I had been and remain convicted.

The impact of this convictional experience compelled Loder to radically reopen the question of reality, to re-learn his own relation to things seen and unseen, to become attentive to the dimensions of intelligibility toward which these kinds of experiences pointed, and to place himself and his subsequent work in the service of the church. Loder began to see his life and work, personal and public, within a larger fiduciary framework that did not begin and end with him or anything human, but rather with what Luther called an “alien” Presence. He began to know himself, his life and his work “in the Spirit.” Two years after the accident, fighting considerable skepticism from some of his colleagues who regarded his “turn to the Spirit” a regression into some kind of experiential theology unfit for Reformed theological consumption, Loder concluded that his ministry and his scholarship must take place “in the Spirit” if they were to bear testimony to redemptive practical theology in the Reformed tradition. Not only his life had to change, but also his intellectual understanding of the underlying structures of reality redeemed in Christ had to become convictional to the core.

When asked in 2001 “What changed in your understanding and practice of Christian education after 1970?” Loder responded: That’s a good question, because before 1970 I was doing all of my teaching within a basic psychoanalytic model, that conflict learning is basic to psychoanalysis. So I was upgrading psychoanalysis a little bit. But that was the basic shape of my understanding. After 1970 I realized it was the Spirit of God who creates the problem and guides us into truth. And the whole convictional picture in four dimensions began to become a way for me to talk about what I know had happened, and what could happen. And so, it was still conflictual but now it had shifted into a much bigger perspective. And the dynamics involved were not just limited to the human spirit but also to divine redemption in action.

As a doctor of the church Loder had “to write all of this out in a book” in order to make it credible to his academic audience. As a matter of conviction he needed to verify the experience for himself as having integrity with the movement of the Spirit toward “faith seeking understanding.” This professional and convictional effort became his groundbreaking book The Transforming Moment.

An Epistemology of Convictional Experience: The Transforming Moment (1971-1981)

After 1970, Loder began to recognize that not only did “the Spirit of God create the problem and guide us into truth,” but the creativity-through-conflict pattern of the human spirit which he had been investigating through his work at Harvard and Princeton bore an analogical relationship to the affirming, crucifying and resurrecting pattern of the Holy Spirit which he had experienced in the 1970 accident and earlier at the death of his father. The One who reveals Himself to us at “Golgotha” and our experience of this One is more real than any articulation of the experience, but the pattern of interaction Spirit-to-spirit can be discerned. Thus, Spiritus Creator must be recognized and appreciated as the explicit Reality underlying and generating all knowing that is convictional. The scholar who rarely prayed in public would now have to learn to teach “in the Spirit.” The counselor steeped in the theories of depth psychoanalysis and individuation now had to place his methods in the service of the Spirit who created the context for healing in ways that may include traditional therapy but clearly did not depend on them. The intellectual who had mapped out the conceptual contours of the learning process to great advantage and success now had to relearn pedagogical science as an act of worship “in the Spirit” without losing intellectual integrity in the process. The intimidating professor who had mastered all subjects now had to bend his spirit toward One who had mastered him and to transform his scholarship into testimony, and to weep if necessary at the miracle of it all, not worrying if tears of joy and gratitude (his own or his students’) offended or embarrassed those who heard him.

So radical were the changes that Loder initiated to conform his work to the Spirit’s Presence that not only was the state of his mental health under suspicion, but also his theology. The claims Loder made for the Spirit’s power reminded many of his colleagues and students of past controversies on campus over spiritual excesses, especially regarding glossalalia. Indeed, Loder himself knew of these controversies that had rocked Princeton in the early 1960s. Peter Marshall Jr, a student in those days, had nearly split the campus over the issue of tongues, according to Randy Nichols. So Loder’s radical experience of the Spirit raised the specter of spiritual excess and disorder once again. His only defense as a scholar under the conviction of the Spirit, both to those who supported him and to his detractors, was to write a theological and interdisciplinary epistemology of convictional experience that was fully Reformed and compelling, while also recommitting himself to the Presbyterian church.

Thus, over the next decade, Loder embarked on this intellectual project-testimony while also committing himself to complete his ordination to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church, something he had put on hold during the 1960s. Regarding the latter, Loder was ordained July 9, 1978.

Regarding the former, his efforts to seek a deeper understanding of the Holy Spirit’s interaction with the human spirit, Loder mined important works like Regin Prenter’s Spiritus Creator and George Hendry’s The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology, Karl Barth’s teaching on the Spirit, along with Catholic writers, Pentecostals and mystics, for their insights into the work of the Holy Spirit in human transformation. What the accident made available to him was the convictional courage to recognize and act upon the Church’s confession that our human participation in the work of the Holy Spirit, not the transformational capacities of the human spirit alone, finally makes human transformation itself redemptive.

Of this relation of the human spirit to the Holy Spirit he wrote: …the logic of transformation participates in a much larger theme running throughout scripture, which…is characterized by the same logic. It is a theme the church has classically called “Spiritus Creator” or the Creator Spirit. Lutheran scholarship, Regin Prenter in particular, suggests that Spiritus Creator is the best way to characterize Luther’s entire theology of the Spirit. Here the process of convictional knowing is taken up into classical theological categories as the “grammar” of the Holy Spirit; here the analogy of the Spirit becomes theologically explicit…The Lutheran emphasis is that we cannot experience authentic transformation anywhere except in the work of the Holy Spirit.

Loder began to realize that when the dynamics of transformation he had associated with the human spirit come under conviction, those dynamics are taken up into the life of the Holy Spirit and are themselves transformed, so that Christ becomes the living mediator of our knowing of reality. Loder described the impact of this transformation in powerful language, noting how the “grammar” of transformation begins as the Spirit of Christ makes the Gospel meaningful for us; that is to say, it begins in “inner conflict.” To have the Gospel come to us with meaning is to be thrown into a conflict of immense proportions. The Spirit of Holiness makes us sinners, the enlightenment makes us blind, dimensions of the Holy call into play the threats of evil, annihilation, and damnation. The self and all its “worlds” are exposed as alienated from each other and within themselves. This is the intention of the Spirit to Luther: to convict through conflict and then to overcome that conflict through the Word of the Gospel.

As was mentioned, Loder sought to develop an interdisciplinary epistemology of convictional knowing that expanded his earlier work on the hypnagogic paradigm in terms of pneumatology and Christology under the theme of transformation. He identified what he claimed to be the innate, transformational pattern of the human spirit, so powerful that it generates intelligence itself in all meaning-contexts—psychological, social, linguistic, political, cultural, scientific and theological. However, the human spirit, undergoing existential anxiety over the loss of the Face of the mother early in infancy, constructs through the spirit a defensive posture grounded in negation (the ego) which serves under the aegis of socialization processes to reduce the experience of reality to two dimensions, the self and the “worlds” the self constructs, “worlds” that feedback to construct the “composing self.” This interactive developmental process governed by the defensive ego expresses the fundamental distortion of “normal” development, distortion which can be understood theologically as “original sin” recapitulated in the developmental history of every person. Yet the generative source underlying the power of the ego is the human spirit.

Loder developed the five-stage “logic” of the human spirit (conflict, scanning, insight, release, interpretation/verification) to describe dynamic structure of this generative source, claiming that “to the extent that this is the pattern governing the dynamics of the human spirit, it can be said that the developing person is spirit.” Loder went on to develop what he called the analogia spiritus (an analogy between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit), from which he asserted that the epistemological impact on the human spirit under the convicting action of the Holy Spirit is to reconstruct the contours of consciousness redemptively in four dimensions, not two as under the aegis of ego and socialization. Thus, these four dimensions—the self, world, the Void, and the Holy—define the theological contours of human existence as they come to be known “in the Spirit,” since in the normal course of human development the last two dimensions are repressed by the defensive nature of ego under the power of socialization to govern the meaning of self-world interaction. In fact the proximate destiny of ego and culture is the Void, or nothingness, which haunts being. Convictional experience guided by the Spirit of God exposes the self-world construction to the full power of the Void in order that the ego might give up its heroic but futile efforts to provide the ground for its own existence and allow the power of the Holy to ground the self transparently in the power that posits it (Kierkegaard).

Craig Dykstra made this comment on the significance of Loder’s theme of convictional experiences: In this four-dimensional context, Loder argues, conflicts of existential proportions to the self are borne and, when resolved, normatively reveal a transformed self and world related intimately to a loving God who upholds and renews the whole of being. Loder’s premier example is the story of Cleopas and Simon on the road to Emmaus. He traces the logic of conviction through this story in a way that stunningly reveals an epistemology of the work of Christ in his eucharistic presence in relation to the activity of the human self as it comes to know and be known. This is an unabashedly Kierkegaardian agenda. As Loder himself tells us, “What we have come to understand in convictional knowing is how the objective truth of the revelation in Christ may be subjectively known” (p. 122).

Loder’s description of the epistemological impact of the Holy Spirit in human transformation as the power of convictional knowing in the Spirit provided Christian educators with a credible alternative to the near normative status which James Fowler’s faith development paradigm had attained during that time. The concurrence of the release of Loder’s Transforming Moment and Fowler’s Stages of Faith led the Religious Education Association to stage a debate between the two authors in Lansing, Michigan, in 1982. The substance of the debate was published in Religious Education in March-April of 1982. In this extended dual-book review, the authors summarized the argument of the other’s book and then offered their critique of it.

Fowler summarized Loder’s central argument for the necessity of the transformation of transformation through the Spirit of Christ. Against our human efforts to secure our lives from the ever-present threat of the Void, Christ works a double negation that frees us to give love sacrificially. Fowler then lifts up several other themes in The Transforming Moment that he thought were important: (1) Loder’s emphasis upon the tragic dimension at the heart of human development and change, the ego’s participation in negation incorporated; (2) the four dimensions of convictional knowing as a fuller description of human reality under the impact of grace; and (3) the Christo-centric nature of the book which “tries to penetrate to those points of divine-human intercourse in which the possibility of faith and new being are generated” and in doing so “gets very close to the heart of what the gospel is about” (145f). He then criticized Loder’s theory for (1) overstating his emphasis on process or stage dynamics over the stages themselves; for (2) centering too strongly on Christ in a way that compromises inter-religious dialogue; for (3) his heavy commitment to Reformed and Lutheran anthropological insights that are negative; and (4) for his lack of attention to the need for giving guidance to persons “in between” transforming moments.

On his part Loder summarized Fowler’s book, then highlighted Fowler’s imaginative use of a fictional conversation among Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson. Then he commended Fowler for his development of a superior interview procedure. But he criticized Fowler’s definition of faith, arguing (from G. Ebeling) that Fowler’s understanding was unbiblical. He then pointed out what he perceived to be the built-in contradiction of Fowler’s model, avering that the normative goal of faith development, stage six, renders an interest in stages irrelevant. Loder exposes Fowler’s obvious interest in stages to be sub-normal according to his own theory. “What kind of system,” Loder asked, “sets up as a normative goal which, if attained, exposes the whole model as invalid?” Loder found Fowler’s efforts to describe faith development more descriptive of the ego’s developing drive toward repression of the Void and the Holy in the name of social control, conforming more to the “ritualization of progress in an achievement-obsessed society.” He argued that Fowler’s Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning should have been re-titled The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning: Stages of an Aspect of Faith.

Loder’s intense search for “the logic of the Spirit” in convictional experiences and the meaning of these experiences for a scientific culture and an enculturated church began to be appreciated by the late 1970s. He was promoted to full professor in 1979; then became the Mary D. Synnott Chair in Christian Education in 1982. The Transforming Moment itself was made possible by a research grant from the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton and by further study at Oxford University as an advisor to the Alistar Hardy Research Center. As the decade wore on, Loder incorporated his critique of Fowler’s paradigm in his ED 216 (Human Development) and ED105 (Educational Ministry of the Church) courses, and in several doctoral seminars (Some 17 years later, he released what should be considered his full-fledged rejoinder to Fowler’s Stages of Faith called The Logic of the Spirit: Faith Development in Theological Perspective, 1998—see below). And by the late 1970s a steady stream of students flowed to Princeton to study with Loder, many of whom have taught or now teach in our major seminaries and divinity schools, including Craig Dykstra (Princeton Seminary now Lilly Foundation), Sharon Parks (Harvard, now the Whidbey Institute), Frank Rogers and Carol Hess (Claremont), John McClure (Louisville, now Vanderbilt), Daniel Schipani (Mennonite), Susanne Johnson (Perkins, SMU), Marilyn Adams (Yale, now Oxford), Ronald Cram (PSCE now Columbia), Anabel Proffitt (Lancaster Seminary), Margaret Krych (Luther Seminary of Philadelphia), and Ernie Hess and Elizabeth Frykberg (pastors). Loder provided these students with a radically different way to understand and talk about the Spirit in human development. But he also had larger concerns to share with them, the core of which was to work out a relational logic for interdisciplinary methodology grounded in Jesus Christ, “the God-man structure of reality” (P. Lehmann). He wanted to create an epistemological model of relational knowing in the Spirit with the generative power to integrate the wisdom of Athens and the wisdom of Jerusalem at the level of spirit. We might call this development in Loder’s work his effort to create a neo-Chalcedonian practical theological science of provident-contingent relationality.”

Loder’s Neo-Chalcedonian Science of Provident-Contingent Relationality (1981-1995)

During the 17 years between The Transforming Moment and the appearance of The Logic of the Spirit, Loder worked to deepen his theological understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit for fundamental practical theology in a scientific culture. His study of the Council of Chalcedon, at which the early Church discerned the normative status of divine-human relationality revealed in Jesus Christ, led him to believe that Chalcedon thereby set the parameters for understanding the relation of Christ to culture and the nature of interdisciplinary studies. But Chalcedon’s insights into “the consequences of the Spirit’s actions” or “the results of the Spirit’s mission” largely ignored “the character or nature of the Person [of the Spirit] to their own spirits.” He suspected that “theological reflection on the person and mission of the Holy Spirit” was deficient because it had “not taken sufficient notice that spiritual action in the world may require somewhat different forms of reflection…the Holy Spirit, interpreted as Divine self-knowing, is more elusive than Source (Father) or Manifestation (Son), since it presupposes them both but dynamically returns each to itself and both to each other in deepening illumination.” An alternative form of rationality that allied itself with God’s self-knowledge had to be constructed in order to illuminate the nature of life in the Spirit.

Meanwhile, his study of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of science led him to believe that the “grammar of transformation” in convictional epistemology worked out in The Transforming Moment corresponded to the “stereoscopic” and “kinetic” nature of scientific discovery (a relationality of focal and tacit dimensions), including the hard sciences of physics and mathematics. Loder discerned that when human reason in science is pushed to the ultimate limits of understanding, paradoxical forms of observer-determined knowing emerge and call out for articulation. Thus, the more Loder indwelt the theological nature of the God-man as discerned in Kierkegaard and as revealed in experiences of convictional knowing, the deeper he felt himself moving into the inner nature of created reality itself, and he began to connect his own work to the natural science of physicists like Niels Bohr, an enthusiast of Kierkegaard who developed the notion of complementarity to discern the nature of quantum “worlds.” Again, the circumstances which led Loder on this journey to overcome the dualism between science and faith by connecting them both to life in the Spirit, resulting in his fourth major publication, seem almost accidental.

In 1984, Loder returned to Harvard for a Sabbatical as a visiting scholar to the Divinity School, during which time he planned to work on the problem of pluralism. But when the move proved unworkable, he returned to Princeton, where he applied to and was accepted at the Center for Theological Inquiry. There, his explication of a neo-Chalcedonian science began to take shape, primarily through his dialogues with theologians T.F. Torrance and Harold Nebelsick, and in particular with physicist Jim Neidhardt, with whom he would later co-author the The Knight’s Move: Relational Logic in Theology and the Sciences (1995). Loder met Neidhardt on the elevator at the Center for Theological Inquiry, while the latter was in conversation with Nebelsick and Torrance. Neidhardt informed Loder that he had read The Transforming Moment and appreciated Loder’s use of Polanyi in that book. Neidhardt had developed an understanding of bi-polar relationality in relation to the doctrine of perichoresis and human action, and had written about it for The Asbury Theological Journal in an essay entitled “The creative dialogue between human intelligibility and reality: Relational aspects of natural science and theology.” But while the model was compelling formally, the kinetic and existential dimensions of it were lacking. It had no “living” movement. As Loder and Neidhardt conversed about the issues raised in this paper, and in Loder’s work, the two men discovered an academic and spiritual kinship which “took on a life of its own.” Kay Vogen, longtime secretary, administrative assistant, and primary typist of just about every Loder manuscript, remembers the two men disappearing for hours at a time into Loder’s office, out of which peels of laughter, heartfelt prayers, and the unalloyed joys of camaraderie and collaboration echoed forth unashamedly.

The physicist Neidhardt taught Loder some of the finer points of physics in relation to theological concepts, and the practical theologian Loder in turn tutored Neidhardt in the dynamism of the analogia spiritus and its analogues in psychology and psychoanalysis. In a lively, six year-plus interchange, which Loder regarded as the richest professional relationship he was to enjoy in his life, Loder and Neidhardt made connections between theology and the human and natural sciences in pursuit of a generic model of spirit they called “the strange loop” (patterned after the image of the Mobius strip), a generic epistemological lens which they argued bore incredible promise for integrating scientific culture, and for relating Christ to culture in a way consistent with both Chalcedonian reality and postmodern science, especially the notion of complementarity.

In The Knight’s Move the authors drew on insights from natural scientists like James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Polanyi, Albert Einstein, Nels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Illya Prigogine; from human scientists like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, and from theologians like Karl Barth, T.F. Torrance, Wolfhart Pannenberg, the early Church fathers, and especially the ever-present Kierkegaard, to develop “the strange loop model,” a generic, asymmetrical version of complementarity they hoped would enrich the theology/science dialogue and testify to the nature of reality as relational, according to the definitive revelation of relationality in Jesus Christ. Loder/Neidhardt described their purpose and scope in The Knight’s Move as follows:

…theology and science qua science need to find new grounds for dialogue that will reach into their common epistemological concerns and restore what once was, contrary to popular opinion, a profoundly rich reciprocity between theological concepts of creation and the scientific study of nature…the underlying theological premise of this entire study [is]…that relationality is revealed to us definitively in the inner nature of Jesus Christ. In Christ’s nature as fully God and fully human, we have the definition of relationship through which all other expressions of personal, social, and cultural relatedness are to be viewed. This applies as well to the model we are using in the methodology of this study; the inner nature of Jesus Christ ultimately defines the scope and limits of the relational model; not the reverse. Our use of the model is intended to reveal the illuminative and explanatory significance of viewing all creation through the eyes of faith in Jesus Christ.

This statement reveals that the authors’ concern to develop an asymmetrical model of relationality (complementarity) structurally consistent with the nature of relationality revealed definitively in Jesus Christ, is also the generative clue for discerning the nature of relationality in every domain of human action, and beyond human action to the natural order. In doing so, the authors provide Loder’s convictional epistemology developed in The Transforming Moment with its proper Christological grounding, while at the same time connecting it more securely to discussions in postmodern science. In essence he and Neidhardt argue that the closer one gets to the mystery of God-in-the-flesh, the closer one gets to discerning and elaborating scientifically the nature of human reality as a contingent and unfolding order of meaning and purpose that is able to render the nature world as creation. This knowledge is scientific and confessional, and no less scientific because it is confessional.

For Loder and Neidhardt, the sciences become sub-disciplines of theology when discerned convictionally at the level of spirit, and they find their ultimate meaning and value in that sub-disciplinary role, just as human beings find their ultimate meaning and value in the service of the Gospel. In a 2001 interview Loder interpreted his concern for the priority of theology in interdisciplinary practical theology, which he believed had guided his life’s work from the beginning, even when the full implications of this concern were not fully evident to him. Loder responded to a question about his critique of developmentalism by moving to Chalcedon:

Question: “Did you have any sense that something was at stake in the discipline of Christian education itself? Did you have a concern that the developmental paradigm would lead us into error or a loss of something vital?” Answer: “Yes. Well, the concern that I had that came more and more into focus was, [originating in my critique of] C.E. Nelson [in the 1960s], that the definitive discipline is theology, and not anything else. The point is that we are not trying to work theology into our behavioral sciences or our philosophy. And that shift was definitive for me. The Spirit made that definitive for me, I knew that…Basically, I learned what I continued to learn more profoundly from Torrance. ‘You have to start with the answer.’ You know the answer. Don’t try to work up to it. Go from the answer. Start there. And then do the rest…You always think it’s not legitimate to start with the answer. You [think] you have to get to it from somewhere. No. Start with the answer. And unpack it so that it can be appropriated. Because you can’t get from nature to grace. So if you start from grace as the only theological premise that you can work with, then everything is continuity in reverse. And about the Chalcedonian model. When I began to try to work out the interdisciplinary thing theologically, obviously, that’s already worked out. The nature of Jesus Christ, the relationship [of divine to human action] is already established. You don’t get into that [from somewhere else]. That’s the power of the Spirit. So it all began to unfold, and the significance of the Spirit into the testimony of the Spirit through Christ, and the interdisciplinary material is already given to us. That’s again starting from the answer.”

One could reasonably assert here that for Loder, to begin with the Answer is also, and always, to begin with the Question, for the “God-man structure of reality” revealed in Jesus Christ places the human community ever under radical question as to the meaning of its existence. Loder’s neo-Chalcedonian science marked his attempt to propose a way to think about the integration of theology and the human and natural sciences in a theological manner consistent with the nature of Jesus Christ and relevant to the cultural crisis of the West. T. F. Torrance saw the promise for integrating science and theology in his review of the book, which became the book’s forward.

This is an altogether remarkable book with unusually fresh creative thinking about the relations of Christian theology and science which seeks to do justice to the unanalysable nature of divine truth disclosed to us through the Spirit, and to the elusive dynamic nature of created reality and its subtle contingent rationality increasingly brought to light in modern science. One of the distinctive features of this work, written by a theologian and a physicist in intellectual and spiritual harness, is the brilliant way in which basic forms of thought, taken and developed from theological and scientific thinkers like Kierkegaard and Einstein, are allowed to interpenetrate one another with a creative feed-back fruitful for both theology and science.

From this standpoint, we must regard The Knight’s Move as a programmatic effort by Loder and Neidhardt to set something of an agenda for practical theology in witness to the dominant culture. This agenda is discernable in his early work at Harvard and in an interview during the last year of his life. When asked in 2001 if he was generally hopeful or pessimistic about the contribution of practical theology to human existence in the years ahead, Loder responded:

I think that it is absolutely crucial that practical theology flourish. But I think it has to be somewhat reconceived according to the great themes of the 21st century, which are on the one hand “science” and on the other hand “spirit.” And it is not my idea that the 21st century should emphasize these things. But the practical theology that is going to last is going to show the relevance of those two themes to what we want to talk about in the church and in the teaching of pastors, and in theological seminaries. There is so much to be done in the interplay of those two driving forces. So, I am hopeful because [a] we need it and [b] because I think it is possible for practical theology to adapt to these emerging needs of the church put on it by the changing of culture. And “science” of course applies to technology and “spirit” implies the Holy Spirit not just human spirit. But I think we will adapt to that. I mean we’ll adapt [practical theology] to the transforming work of the Spirit.

It is important to understand that for Loder, this crisis of the relation of spirit to science included but went far deeper than the contemporary call in practical theology for “public” relevance that guides so much of the imaginative energy of the guild at this time. Christianity has the conceptual and convictional resources to engage scientific culture itself and to move scientific culture to discover hidden orders of intelligibility that participate in the life-giving power of Jesus Christ, who became “life-giving Spirit.” Loder’s fertile imagination had traced the provident-contingent relational thread that ties the universe together, stretching from the inner nature of Trinitarian relations (perichoresis) to cosmology (the anthropic principle), to the relation of transformation to socialization in cultural contexts, to the mind-body relation in philosophical anthropology, to the quantum world, and finally to the spirit of the mind transformed by the Spirit that allows us to see all of the above. This theme of provident-contingent relationality as a theological reality provides Loder’s answer to the core problematic of practical theology:

The core problematic [for practical theology] is that such issues [like practices, programs, organizations, spiritual life, etc.] require that two ontologically distinct realities, the divine and the human, be brought together in a unified form of action that preserves the integrity of both and yet gives rise to coherent behavior. This paradoxical problematic implies that God’s action and human action, although ontologically distinct, are not ultimately dichotomous.

Loder insisted that this core problematic and the provident-contingent relationality that answers it are convictions revealed to the transformed mind by the Spirit of Christ. In all science the nature of the knower determines what can be known, and for practical theology the nature of the knower means knowing reality as Christ’s Spirit knows it, which is relationally according to the nature of Jesus Christ. The same concern applies to the interpretation of the human sciences, and in particular the developmental sciences. The importance of tracing the work of the Spirit in human nature and human development is never far from Loder’s heart. After the publication of The Knight’s Move, Loder set about to get his mature reflections on human development in theological perspective published. In 1998 his fourth major book, The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective, was released.

Human Development as the Journey of Intensification into Christ’s Nature: The Logic of the Spirit and the Transformation of Human Nature (1995-2001)

By the 1990s, Loder continued to attract doctoral students to Princeton, including Bradley Wigger (Louisville Seminary),Robert Martin (St Paul’s School of Theology), Kyoo Min Lee (Semang Seminary), LeRon Shults (Bethel Seminary), John Kuentzel (Teacher’s College, Columbia University), Kenda Dean and Dana Wright (Princeton Seminary), Ajit Prasadam (India), Tom Hastings (Tokyo Union Theological Seminary),Russell Haitch (Bethany Seminary) and Lisa Hess (Continuing Education, Princeton Seminary). For many of these students, the importance of theological anthropology for thinking and doing practical theology came to the forefront. Under Loder’s tutelage they read early renditions of The Knight’s Move in relation to Pannenberg’s magisterial Anthropology in Theological Perspective. They also proctored two of Loder’s long-standing courses at Princeton, out of which Loder wrote his final two books: ED216 Human Development, from which developed The Logic of the Spirit (1998), and ED105, Educational Ministry, from which Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit was constructed (unpublished). In relation to the former, Loder had taught human development in theological perspective for many years in diverse places and settings. His refinement of these lectures resulted in what may someday be regarded as a classic, The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective (1998). This book, which expands Loder’s shorter treatments of transformation and human development in The Transforming Moment and The Knight’s Move, centers on his understanding of, and insights into, the Holy Spirit’s redemptive relation to the human spirit through the life span. “What is a lifetime?” and “Why do I live it?” mark the generative psycho-social and theological themes which unfold through its chapters.

Toward the end of The Knight’s Move Loder had written: The Absolute Paradox of the God-man, Jesus, works in three ways to increase passion and thus to allow the inner vision of Christ to emerge with wholistic (sic) power. First, it contradicts the existential dichotomy that…pertains between human finitude and the infinite God….[Second] it declares all that led up to this paradox to be the passionate discovery of Error….third, he presumes to bestow himself upon the individual and recompose the individual’s nature in accordance with his own. In the language of the intensification model, the God-man will become the inner vision in whom God and humanity form a complex bisociation…It is the passion for this coherence that represents a transformation of all other passions and visions….It is impossible to enter even partially into the wholeness of Christ’s nature—fully Divine and fully human—without finding that same asymmetrical polarity of the incarnation grasping the polarities of one’s own being and calling for the wholeness for which human nature was created to be released as re-creation. This is the calling to spiritual maturity.

Now, in The Logic of the Spirit, Loder takes his Chalcedonian framework and his transformational grammar and develops an interdisciplinary study that seeks to catch the power of “the transcending human spirit generating and inspiring human intelligence” in all its glory and tragedy, and to argue for the need for the spirit’s “transparent grounding in the Power that posits it” in order to know truly “What is a lifetime?” and “Why do I live it?” He argues that we answer these kinds of questions according to “the central driving force in human development,” the human spirit. It is the spirit which makes us “uniquely human” and which legitimates in the first place, the act of studying the human enterprise, an act which requires the generative power of the human spirit. Loder argued for a kind of “mirror” relationship between the human spirit generating and inspiring human intelligence according to certain structures in the mind, and the hidden structures of order in the universe. More important still is the analogy between the self-transcending and self-relating human spirit and the actions of the Holy Spirit.

…the human spirit searches the human mind, and so the human mind comes to know itself through its spirit. Analogically, the Spirit of Christ searches the mind of God. This is to have the mind of Christ: the disclosure by God of the mind of God Spirit-to-spirit. Apart from the Spirit-to-spirit communication of the mind of God, the attempt of the human mind to know itself, to say nothing of knowing the mind of God, is utter foolishness, says Scripture…the human spirit…must be grounded beyond itself if it is to become intelligible even to itself…The human spirit makes all acts of human intelligence self-transcendent and self-relational. When God acts, Spirit-to-spirit, then human intelligence is transformed into a “faith seeking understanding” of God’s self-revelation…the disclosure of God’s mind in the Face of God in Jesus Christ.

But the process of human development unto knowledge of the self in Jesus Christ is a perilous journey. Loder marshals insights from theology and the human sciences to trace the recapitulation of the Fall in normal human development, laying the foundation for ego and the social construction of reality on the profound negation that underlies all human existence. Loder shows how “normal (adaptative) human development” is subnormal from a theological point of view, for such development inevitably places children, youth, and adults in insoluble double-binds which can only be undone through acts of liberating grace. He articulates in detail how the developing ego competencies supported by society engender a structural loss of intimacy in every stage, supported by a false sense of ultimacy that blinds us to the meaninglessness of human existence apart from God. He explicates the developmental origins of many of the cultural pathologies that plague our society, and how the crisis of spirit lies at the heart of all our social problems and potential solutions. Human development inevitably tells the story of the “triumph of negation.”

Yet the inevitable “triumph of negation” in human development is not final in relation to the Spirit of Christ, a truth he illustrates programmatically by citing he case of “Helen.” “Helen” is a women who had undergone horrific emotional, psychological and spiritual disfigurement that placed her on the precipice of suicide. But in a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit she found herself fully and joyfully restored to her true identity in Christ. Loder argued through this story that the human spirit’s restless search for meaning and purpose comes to nothing unless the Holy Spirit seizes the human spirit in a relational bond that liberates the person to be spirit, a bond that is prefigured in the infant’s experience of the mother’s face. He avers that “human nature is so constituted that built into its ego structure and implicit in its achievements is a cosmic loneliness that longs for a Face that will do all that the mother’s face did for the child, but now a Face that will transfigure human existence, inspire worship, and not go away, even in and through the ultimate separation of death.” Christ’s Presence is the “bond that liberates” the human spirit by calling it to participate in the dual nature of Christ, who “mediates relational unity Spirit-to-spirit, without mixing or confusing the two spirits, holding the divine above the human, but eliminating neither one in favor of the other.” For the Holy Spirit is working within, under, through, and around human development to awaken all of us to the redemptive transformation actual in Jesus Christ. The struggle of the spirit leads, under the Spirit’s power, to the release of the spirit in human experience as humans awakens to, and abide in, the Holy Spirit. On Loder’s understanding T. F. Torrance commented, “No writer or thinker, to my knowledge, has penetrated so deeply, illuminatingly, lovingly, and convincingly into the often tortured tangles of the human spirit, at different stages of its development, and brought to bear upon it the creative and healing presence of the divine that characterizes the logic of the spirit.” Loder took up the call of an evangelist in this book, calling all who read it to risk abandoning their lives to the only One who gives it back to them, filled with his nature.

A Practical Theology of Christian Education: Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit

Toward the end of the decade of the 1990s Loder continued to teach at Princeton and lecture and teach in other settings, most notably Fuller Theological Seminary, South Korea, and in India. He also worked to complete a fifth major book, to be titled Education Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit, which he had submitted to a publisher only days before his untimely death (it was never published). This work, based upon his perennially popular course ED105 at Princeton, was to complete what might be called a trilogy (along with The Transforming Moment and The Logic of the Spirit), one that would outline his radical revisioning of the nature and dynamic power of Christian education, integrating the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem according to the deep conceptual contours revealed to convictional knowing. This book represents Loder’s only completed manuscript on Christian education per se. It consists of a compelling argument that the “crux” of Christian education is the proper alignment of two powers that govern every dimension of human action, socialization and transformation, powers which find their definitive relationship in the Presence of Jesus Christ. This book is important for a number of reasons.

First, it addresses one of the criticisms Loder has received throughout his career, that he is focused only on the individual. Loder shows, in this text, the relevance of redemptive transformation in Christian education in terms of bodily, psychological, social, and cultural dimensions. He begins his study with an apology for the privileging of theory in academic science, against the grain of current wisdom. He elaborates the nature of the two powers of socialization and transformation that undergird the study, and their relationship to one another. He defines socialization as “a tension-reduction, pattern-maintenance process designed to serve the purposes of adaptation and incorporation into larger and more complex social milieu.” Transformation, on the other hand, is “a patterned process whereby in any given frame of knowledge or experience, a hidden order of meaning emerges with the power to redefine and/or reconstruct the original frame of reference.”

He argues that the task of the Holy Spirit is to empower the transformational dynamics of the human spirit to participate in the Spirit’s transformative redemption of every domain of human action. Using a theological modification of Talcott Parson’s action theory to elaborate the dialectical movement of socialization and transformation under the power of the Spirit, Loder creates a chiasmic structure to this book that initially shows the dominance of socialization in cultural, social and personal dimensions of the social construction of reality. He avers that the power of socialization dominates human initiatives in each of these domains of human action and cuts off the power of the human spirit to create a transformational life style. Therefore, theorists like C. Ellis Nelson, who try to conscript socialization dynamics as the clue to Christian education finally do not take socialization seriously enough.

Loder writes: To take the action of God’s Spirit and the action of God in the community, and bring them under the canons of social science is in these very fundamental ways a violation of what we would want to say theologically about God’s action. God stands over and against the socialization process. When God uses socialization, it is to transform it, which means that socialization is in the service of transformation. But if we take Nelson’s premise, experiences and events which bring us into relationship to God socialize transformation at best. The theological premise regarding the priority of transformation over socialization makes all the difference.

He then traces how the power of the Spirit of Christ works to transcend socialization dynamics transformationally in each of these domains—personal, social, and cultural—by negating the negation riven into the dynamics of ego formation (the core of personal transformation), role structure formation (the core of social transformation), and symbol formation (the core of cultural transformation), liberating the human spirit to embrace four dimensional reality revealed according to the nature of the Spiritual Presence of Christ.

For example, in the social domain, Loder asserts that …the “communion-creating reality of Jesus Christ,” the koinonia, frees us from the double-binding conditions that role structures place upon us. This is because the koinonia relationship is grounded in and secured by the spiritual Presence of Christ. So, as Lehmann understands it, koinonia is a four-dimensional phenomenon. It exists only because the power of Christ as the fourth dimension creates and sustains a set of relationships among us. By love, the Holy Spirit is transforming us into each other, while building up in us a corporate awareness of Christ’s Presence; the fourth dimension is here at work transforming the other three. It is making us aware of the inherent negation in role structured and role determined institutional life. It is putting us into a two-dimensional world with a four-dimensional perspective so we can mutually create each other. As one student suggested, this is a corporate version of our dialectical identity in Christ… “we, not we, but koinonia.”

The purpose of Christian education from this convictional standpoint is therefore to construct a Christian style of life in response to the work of the Spirit, in which each domain of human action learns to intentionally participate in the Spirit’s redemptive initiative to conform human reality to the nature of Christ. Loder concluded this study by placing worship at the center of redemptive transformation, showing how the structure of the liturgy is an enactment of the transformation of transformation through which a community of faith participates redemptively in the life of God.

The Last Years: Loder’s Passion for “Pressing Toward the Infinite in All Directions”

In the final years of his life, Loder seemed to be pushing the practical theological guild to recognize the need for a richer theological approach to the discipline. In “Normativity and Context in Practical Theology: The ‘Interdisciplinary Issue’” (1999) Loder argued that practical theology must “establish systematic procedures for remaining accountable to the phenomenon [it investigates] as well as to the disciplines involved in disclosing the inner substance, structure, and dynamics of that phenomenon.” While “disciplines stay alive and potentially transcend their enculturation limitation…by being open to change…the key to understanding the core of a discipline is to grasp what does not change or what maintains the continuity of a discipline as it unfolds historically.”

In practical theology, “the core of the discipline is not its operations, procedures, practices, roles, congregations, and the like. Rather, its core problematic resides in why these must be studied; why these are a problem.” Thus, practical theology is a problem because it “requires an inclusive theory of action” that “combines two incongruent, qualitatively distinct realities, the Divine and the human, in apparently congruent forms of action.” He then offers his own Christomorphic relational model of complementarity as one that takes a required “critical perspective” on transpositions among the disciplines that inform practical theology. Such a model “calls forth a transformational dynamic which is repeatedly awakening us to contradictions between theology and the human sciences, intensifying oppositions until there is a new insight, finally bringing about a re-appropriation of the original situation as parabolic of the new relationality in Christ.”

In his essay “The Place of Science in Practical Theology: The Human Factor” (2000), Loder again addresses the core problematic in practical theology but this time focuses upon the self-involvement of the knower. The fundamental claim of the essay is as follows:

In the theology-science dialogue, science, as distinct from technology, is the primary dialogue partner with theology. However, no view of science is adequate that fails to recognize that all knowledge of the universe is incomplete and probably misleading until it includes the person, the knower himself or herself. Indeed, it is precisely through persons that the universe becomes conscious of itself.” He then cites in some detail three revolutionary discoveries in the natural sciences during the twentieth century—general relativity (Einstein), complementarity (Bohr), and chaos theory (Heisenberg) to illuminate the significance of self-involvement not only in the natural sciences but also in the theological sciences.

Loder contended that just as human rationality reaches its logical limits in all of these scientific discoveries, compelling the knower to reconfigure the structure of rationality itself, so in the Church’s confrontation with the reality of the God-man, her ability to know reaches its logical limits and compels her to reconfigure theological rationality accordingly. Loder is pushing the practical theological guild to commit itself to doing good science, and his remarkable correlations between physical and theological sciences serves to warrant this concern. This essay is also important because (1) it shows Loder’s relevance to corporate (business) culture, and (2) because it elaborates Loder’s re-interpretation of the anthropic principle in relation to human development under the theme “relationality precedes rationality.” One passage from this text provides us with an appropriate conclusion to this survey of his life’s concern to “press toward the infinite in all directions.”

Relationality supercedes rationality both ontologically and developmentally. As the anthropic principle taken in its strong sense makes very clear, the moment of the big bang initiated immensely powerful relationships which had to remain in an infinitely delicate balance for the physical universe to give rise to human intelligence by which the universe becomes conscious of itself…the natural order unfolds according to its power to create the relational condition in which new order may emerge…relationality is an essentially consitutent, ontologically prior to and a condition of the emergence of human reality as we know it…The development of a child replicates en nuce the themes articulated above. The rationality by which we learn to think scientifically is an emergent resultant of transformational dynamics operative in the context of human relationships. Delicately balanced relationalities are prior to the creation of conscious rationality by a series of transformations which bring new order out of disequilibrated states exemplified by birth, adolescence, middlescence and senescence…”quantum weidness” …points to the ontological priority of relationality at the subatomic level and thus to the necessity for all rational conceptualizations to understand itself (sic) always as an open system. Human nature, like physical nature in an expanding universe, presses toward the “infinite in all directions…”

Honors and Memberships, Death and Memorial

Loder anticipated working many more years. He had finished considerable research for a serious examination of the potential impact of Kierkegaard on practical theology, connecting a concern for responsible breadth and convictional depth in theological education which has defined his career with Kierkegaard’s critical genius. He also wanted to write a commentary on the Gospel of John to show the hermeneutical significance of the transformational pattern for biblical studies. Furthermore, a massive outline and one 82 page chapter of another major work in Christian education entitled Transformational dynamics in Christian education: A study in practical theology, have been recently found. These visionary projects did not get finished, and only time will tell whether these significant works will ever get published posthumously. Loder has much more to say to us, and the need to study his work critically and appreciatively remains of paramount importance (see the contribution essay). What we do know about him is that for over forty years, Dr. James Edwin Loder, Jr. worked at the highest academic levels to achieve a significant body of work worthy of serious and sustained attention by established scholars.

During his education at Princeton Seminary, Harvard University, and at other significant centers of intellectual investigation, and during his almost 40 year ministry at Princeton Seminary, he interacted with “the best and the brightest” scholars of his generation and he taught a generation of church leaders to risk living “in the Spirit” in a scientific age. Though never a “joiner,” he belonged to several academic guilds: the American Scientific Affiliation, The International Academy of Practical Theology, the Center for Theological Inquiry, the Religious Education Association, the Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education, and with the Professors of Religious Education on the Eastern Seaboard. And in 1992-93 he served as the chairman of the Practical Theology department of Princeton Seminary.

Loder died on November 9, 2001, of a heart attack. He was survived by his beloved wife, Arlene, two daughters, Kim Engelmann a pastor in California, and Tamara Tiss, a lawyer in Minnesota, and three grandchildren, Christopher, Julie, and Jonathan Engelmann. He was buried in the Princeton Seminary plot at the Nassau Presbyterian Church cemetery in Princeton, New Jersey. His life and work were celebrated in a Service of the Resurrection on November 14, 2001, at Miller Chapel on the Princeton Seminary Campus.

Note

References used in the writing of this biography came from the published and unpublished corpus of Dr. Loder’s writings, especially The Transforming Moment and The Logic of the Spirit, from several audio and video taped courses or interviews, from my transcribed interview of him in April, 2001 and from my tribute to him (2002) Ruination unto redemption: A short biography of a reformed ‘wise Guy’,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, XXIII (1), from memorial tributes to him by Thomas Gillespie, William Gaskill, Tamara (Loder) Tiss, Kim (Loder) Englemann (in that same issue) and from Freda Gardner, (2002) James Edwin Loder, Jr: A tribute, Princeton Seminary Bulletin, XXIII (2); from taped and non-taped interviews of several of Dr. Loder’s family, friends, colleagues, and former students, including Marilyn Adams, Kim (Loder) Englemann, Beth Frykberg, Frank Rogers, D. Campbell Wyckoff, Margaret Krych, Randy Nichols, Matthew Frawley, Ken Kovacs, Daisy & Ajit Prasadam, Freda Gardner, Tom Hastings, Theresa Latini, Michael Lansford, Andrew Root, Wesley Brown, and from many other informal conversations with many others who knew and loved him. My thanks to Daisy Prasadam and Margo Dudak for help transcribing these several interviews, and especially to Ajit Prasadam, who helped me so faithfully and joyfully with this whole project.

The task that lies before us—to write a succinct but meaningful essay on the nature and significance of James E. Loder Jr’s contribution to Christian Education—is problematic in the extreme. Three sets of problems initially present themselves. The first set lies with the fact that Loder directed most of his scholarly efforts to re-conceiving the fundamental conceptual contours of practical theology as an interdisciplinary science, so that his labors in relation to Christian education centered on meta-theoretical and methodological issues where few scholars are content to linger very long. The practical “payoff” for reading Loder on Christian education does not come quickly or easily, or without mind-bending effort. One first must believe that Loder was getting at something vitally important, something “below the surface” of common sense or conventional thinking that most people miss. One does not “get” Loder casually because his work is simply too complex. Second, one must be motivated to stay “with” Loder long enough to learn his language and to indwell his conceptual framework if his challenge to practical theology and/or Christian education is to become discernable and compelling. Loder is simply not an easy read for anyone.

To compound this problem set, much of this work in fundamental practical theology oriented specifically toward Christian education remains unpublished, including two major manuscripts: Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit, a major treatise outlining a practical theology of Christian education directed towards church leaders, and an even larger, thus-far-not-fully-located manuscript entitled Transformational Dynamics in Christian Education: A Study in Practical Theology, presumably directed towards scholars, a work I would judge to have been Loder’s magnum opus. Hence, a quick perusal of Loder’s bibliography reveals that during the almost 40 years he taught in the Christian education department at Princeton Theological Seminary he actually failed to publish even one major book on Christian education itself, and very little on the “craft” of Christian education. One might be tempted to conclude from this ostensive lack of production (compounded by the complexity of what he did write) that Loder’s contribution to the field of Christian education was negligible at best. Such a conclusion, of course, while understandable, would be an egregious error.

No doubt we could bypass this negative conclusion by setting aside intellectual criteria like publications as the only measure of Loder’s contribution, and appeal instead to anecdotal evidence of his significance. From this standpoint, Loder was influential because of (a) the consistent popularity of his basic core courses at Princeton Theological Seminary—Human Development (ED216), Philosophy of Education (ED215), and Educational Ministry (ED105); (b) the steady stream of doctoral students who studied under him, who now teach in major institutions around the world; (c) the hundreds of students and lay persons who received the wisdom of his professional-level counsel through the years, and (d) the many enthusiastic responses to the lectures he gave and to the sermons he preached in seminaries and congregations around the world. In this regard I have lost track of how many students told me during my years as his student, teaching assistant, and finally colleague on the faculty at Princeton Seminary that his courses and/or his counseling were the most important influences they received while matriculating there. And almost every student I met at Princeton who had not yet taken a course from him announced to me, at the very mention of his name that s/he intended to take a Loder course before graduating. Thus, one might simply appeal to his unmistakable influence on an entire generation of church leaders at the flagship Presbyterian seminary as evidence of his significant contribution to Christian education during the last half of the 20th century.

But such an appeal to anecdotal evidence, while surely noteworthy in itself, begs the question as to the actual nature and significance of Loder’s contribution. Why? Because it ignores the overriding intention of Loder himself to make a difference in the arena of his obvious expertise—i.e. to reconstruct the conceptual contours of the field of Christian education at the meta-theoretical level. We must ever keep in mind that in relation to assessing Loder’s contribution, that he was the Mary Synnott Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education, hired first and foremost to address fundamental issues in the field. Therefore, we must assess Loder on his own terms. That is, we must fully engage his intellectual efforts to conceptualize the nature, structure and dynamics of divine accommodation to human action at the level of fundamental practical theological science—and discern the ability of this science to deepen our understanding of the redemptive and re-creative power of the Gospel—if we are to talk at all about Loder’s potential significance to Christian education. And the difficulty intrinsic to making this kind of critical assessment of a body of work so complex but partially unpublished will take great pains and a long time. This fact brings us to a second major set of problems judging the nature and significance of Loder’s contribution to Christian education.

This second reason is simply that few scholars have actually attempted a sustained analysis of his work as a whole. Almost no established scholar, to my knowledge, has hazarded a truly educated guess as to what Loder was really up to during his 40+ years at Princeton, a guess that might help us render a credible judgment of any kind, positive or negative, as to the substance of his project. Few scholars have attempted to discern the significance of his efforts in practical theology to “think things whole” (Kierkegaard). Moreover, what interest he has generated has generally centered on only one, albeit vital, aspect of his total vision—the dynamic “grammar” of transformation he discerned in the context of convictional experiences, which he argued was central to the nature of the human spirit’s creativity in various domains of human action and problem solving. Even his former students have, with few exceptions, only appropriated this single aspect of his work as a major contribution to Christian education—i.e., as the “grammatical” key to identifying the power of the human spirit in profound religious experience and in generating creativity in various forms of ministerial praxis. Almost no one seems to have discerned that this “transformational grammar” requires radical reconsideration of many of the epistemological and ontological assumptions we bring to practical theology and to religious education, not to mention those we bring to a theological understanding of scientific culture in general.

Thus, Loder’s work as a whole has not received the critical attention it deserves from the practical theological guild, or from Christian and religious educators. Compare, for example, the scrutiny James Fowler’s developmental paradigm has enjoyed since 1980 with the attention paid to Loder’s redemptive transformational paradigm over that same time period. Both theorists, along with Thomas Groome, published a significant work with Harper & Row in the field of Christian education over twenty years ago—Fowler’s Stages of Faith (1981), Groome’s Christian Religious Education (1980), and Loder’s The Transforming Moment (1981). Since that time, the developmental approach championed by Fowler has generated probably three times as much attention from practical theologians and Christian or religious educators than Groome or Loder. And Loder in particular has received only modest attention to limited aspects of his visionary work. Furthermore, the dominance of critical correlation methodologies in practical theology that privilege apologetic concerns for judging theology’s relevance to culture over the theological or prophetic challenge the Gospel brings to culture, bends the ears of practical theologians away from the critical confessional science Loder developed. No doubt, the failure of Loder to publish the aforementioned two books on his practical theology of Christian education has contributed mightily to this lack of attention to his thought as a whole. Ironically, his death now makes his work more available than ever before, now that his papers are being catalogued. This brings us to a third set of problems.

A third set of problems that hinders our assessment of Loder’s potential contribution must be laid squarely at his feet. As we noted in the biographical essay, Loder was a private man in many ways, who worked largely by himself and who did not seem to be in a hurry to get his work out into the public. He also showed a general disinterest in the organizational or institutional aspects of scholarship, those that necessarily impact the “marketing” of one’s academic interests. Loder did not mix casually with others, nor was he comfortable attending professional gatherings to “network.” He refused to jump on popular intellectual band-wagons, or to take up particular causes d’ jour just because they were in vogue. And potential collaborations with other theorists rarely materialized, for one reason or another. His only truly collaborative relationship, a seven year intellectual-spiritual harnessing with Jim Neidhardt, the physicist with whom he wrote The Knight’s Move, ended when Neidhardt died prematurely in the early 1990s, just after their book came out. When I asked Dr. Loder in 2001 about his friendship with Neidhardt, he responded, with a wistful smile, that Neidhardt uniquely appreciated what he (Loder) was getting at.

Loder had “something on his mind” that few others discerned fully, even to a large degree his own students. Now that Loder has passed, and his archive is being prepared at the Luce Library on the campus of Princeton Seminary, perhaps both established scholars and the next generation of practical theologians will have a chance to look more carefully at his fundamental proposals and begin to appreciate more fully the substance of this “something” Loder had on his mind for so long. The question I will try to answer in this essay is, “Why should they bother?”

We must remember, of course, that because Loder’s work as a whole has yet to be examined critically by the guild of professional practical theologians and others (like Kierkegaard scholars ), it remains premature to give a definitive answer as to its significance. In this essay I see myself representing a small cadre of scholars whom I have gotten to know and with whom I have spoken at some depth over the past few years. Like me, they suspect that Loder’s work does indeed offer to the church and to the academy profoundly generative meta-theoretical lenses for radically transforming our understanding of the nature of human participation in divine action for practical theology and Christian education, as well as for the relation of Christ to scientific culture, as we move into the next millennium. My efforts here should not be seen as sour grapes recriminations from one defending his dearly departed Docktovater against the tyranny of neglect by an ignorant guild. Rather, my purpose is grounded in the conviction that Loder’s work is, at the very least, as profound and compelling as that of Groome or Fowler or Don Browning, or any other major theorist of the past 40 years.

In this essay I merely seek to keep the proverbial ball (of potential interest in Loder’s work) rolling, as well as to generate new interest. I want to entice scholars to take a sustained look at Loder’s project by offering them my best educated guess as to its overall significance, at this stage of my understanding of it. That is, I want to try to articulate what I think lies at the heart of Loder’s theory, and from there to articulate summarily its possible significance to Christian education—and beyond. But the question lingers—“Why should anyone bother with Loder?” This brings us to a fourth problem for evaluating Loder’s significance, one that requires more elaboration and the risky use a provocative metaphor.

James E. Loder Jr.: Post-foundational Alchemist of Spirit and Science

As we have already stated, almost no one has analyzed in depth the core themes and central concerns of Loder’s overall theory, nor picked up on the larger implications of his vision for reconstructing the nature and dynamics of theory and practice in practical theology and Christian education, nor for the critique that his work makes available for re-conceiving implicitly (as in science) or explicitly (as in theology) just about every dimension of the kinetic interrelation of divine to human action. Almost no one has identified a conceptual thread that “connects the dots” of his work in a way that brings his whole vision into view. Moreover, few have even attempted to assess his transformative understandings of the “dots” themselves. For example, few psychologists, educators, or researchers in the human sciences have taken notice of his profound and highly original critical re-interpretations of Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Erikson, Kegan, or Fowler, all of whom he read and re-read through his convictional imagination for their insights into the nature of the human.

Social theorists and theologians of culture have not appreciated Loder’s insights into the nature of psycho-social and socio-cultural dynamics, especially his reconstruction of classical Parsonian action theory in terms of the reciprocal relation of socialization and transformation as it expresses implicitly a “religious thematic” (Pannenberg) that pervades human experience within every domain of human action. Nor have his unique insights (his theological and interdisciplinary reading of) the way in which existential negation gets incorporated into bodily existence and subsequently permeates intra-personal, inter-personal, communal and symbolic-religious dimensions of experience to generate pathological lifestyles or ethoi that dehumanize and destroy the fabric of the body politic and insulate us from the politics of God: i.e. obsession with achievement (as in corporate [business] culture), protean relativism (like in Generation X), unreflective submissiveness to, or bind rage against, systemic oppression (like the oppression the once-oppressed inflict upon those they now rule), or authoritarianism (as in fundamentalisms of the left or right).

Furthermore, practical theologians have not appreciated fully the profundity of Loder’s single-minded devotion to discerning and explicating the core problematic of the field theologically, which he described as the persistent theological “Why?” the field is a problem. Nor have they considered the generative capabilities of his generic models of relationality centered on his analogia spiritus, which he conceived in Christomorphic detail, like “the strange loop” model (his reconstruction of complementarity) that can be transposed to discern patterns of relationality in different domains of scientific research according to the nature of Christ. Moreover, systematic theologians have not thought to assess his persistent claim that the underdeveloped theology of the Holy Spirit in Christian tradition must now be reconstructed and deepened by attending to self-relational structures intrinsic to, and constitutive of, spirit—not only the human spirit’s movement outward but the Holy Spirit’s own movement human-ward.

The Holy Spirit, averred Loder, requires a unique epistemology that conforms itself to the kinetic nature of the self-involved knower under conviction by the Self-involved Spirit. Nor have theologians taken time to appreciate the depth of Loder’s re-appropriation of Kierkegaard and Barth (through Torrance) for engaging the human and natural scientists who remain over-dependent upon misguided stereotypes of these two magisterial figures. Nor have scientists really appreciated Loder’s efforts to enhance the theology-science dialogue through his Christological yet scientific reconstructions of (1) convictional epistemology (along with its ability to overcome “eikonic eclipse,” as he called it ), (2) the anthropic principle, (3) the theory of complementarity (his insistence on asymmetry in the complementary relation), and (4) the power of his Chalcedonian imagination to address a scientific culture at the level of spirit.

This rehearsal of the depth and breadth of Loder’s intellectual horizons makes it obvious that the unique nature of Loder’s practical theology remains difficult to catalogue or classify, although Richard Osmer’s intuition of him as a post-foundationalist scientist is quite appropriate, I think, if not quite adequate. Different taxonomies of the field of Christian education (Burgess, Seymour and Miller, Brueggemann, Boys ) and of practical theology (Mudge and Poling, Browning, Osmer ) are generally not comprehensive enough to do justice to the scope and complexity of Loder’s imaginative project, not only because Loder’s emphasis on spirit tries to reach back into the generative source of conceptualization itself, but also because he tried to take full account of the impact of the Holy Spirit’s work on the spirit of the one who conceptualizes. To my knowledge no other practical theological approach makes this kind of radical theological, epistemological and ontological claim about the necessary convictional transformation of the nature of the knower by the Holy Spirit for re-conceiving practical theological science.

Loder sought to conform his practical theological science to the movement of the Holy Spirit in a scientific culture, a work conceived to be both supremely orthodox and wholly scientific at the same time, while grounded beyond both theology and science in the Trinitarian life of God. And perhaps this is the real reason Loder’s work as a whole has not compelled interest—it sounds like fantasy in a scientific culture still largely dominated by the reality principle. That is, perhaps the real reason Loder’s work remains “unknown” is that his project conjures up images of the hermetic alchemist working by himself in his secret laboratory on some arcane formula that promises to make gold out of lead, thus uniting elements that have no intrinsic common bond (like spirit and science, or faith and knowledge, or God and humanity) into a unified whole. Furthermore, his claims concerning the need for the Christomorphic transformation of the knower herself in order to discern the nature of reality appears maddeningly alchemical to some who are committed to a more pluralistic and neutral or “objective” science.

Loder opted to take seriously, for scientific investigation itself, Paul’s assertion that natural intelligence and/or systems of rationality cannot discern the things of the Spirit until the human spirit as the generator of intelligence is reconstituted onto-relationally in Christomorphic dimensions (“I, yet not I but Christ” taken as a scientific epistemological and hermeneutical principle!). Thus his claim that human knowing “in the Spirit” approximates how the Spirit of Christ knows the human condition, sounds pretty far-fetched to many theorists, and perhaps downright elitist to others. Indeed, Loder’s insistence on the necessary transformation of the spirit of the mind of the practical theologian to enlarge the epistemological framework of the human knower takes the control out of the theorist’s own hands and places it squarely in the work of Spiritus Creator, while paradoxically it demand more rigor (and risk) from the practical theologian herself to learn how this dialectical knowing in the Spirit can effectively address a scientific culture that routinely represses the things of the Spirit. Simply put, Loder’s practical theological science “in the Spirit” sounds too oddly alchemical to be true science, and too scientific to be spiritual.

So my intentionally provocative thesis is that Loder was an alchemist in the service of Spiritus Creator seeking to persuade a skeptical scientific world that the epistemological key for gaining true knowledge of the human condition is Spirit-to-spirit relationality revealed convictionally to those reconstituted ontologically according to the nature of Christ. I am arguing that Loder’s alchemic search for faith seeking understanding in a scientific culture at the level of spirit fired him into the world of human experience under God with a velocity not his own, and allowed him, on analogy to the Word of God, “to pierce the division between soul and spirit” (Heb. 4: 15) in order to be liberated from the “spiritlessness” of so much scientific work in the contemporary world, especially manifest in the intellectual centers of our culture, and from the irrationality of so much contemporary spiritualism. One can discern his relentless commitment to know reality through the spirit of the mind on several levels.

First, Loder refused to rely on secondary sources or “paraphrases” of classical works in the scientific disciplines he studied, I think because (1) he wanted to get as close to the core generative insights of contemporary science as he could (his tremendous confidence in the human spirit to discern the nature of things—especially at the boundary conditions where the spirit came under conflict); and (2) because he wanted to avoid as much as possible the homogenizing effects of making the complex insights constructed by the human spirit more palatable for public consumption (his profound suspicion of the socializing impact on the integrity of the human spirit, what Frank Lentricchia called “the social grammar of confinement” pervasive in liberal societies).

Second, he always tried to get to the underlying relational structure of concepts to critique them from the “inside-out” (according to their explicit claims and tacit assumptions) and from “outside in” (i.e. according to their tacit or implicitly religious meanings). For example, when Loder began his work in the late 1950s and early 1960s, practical theology and religious education were caught in a major impasse between psycho-social insights into the process of development (the great contribution of the liberal religious educators) and the theological claims centered around the content of divine-human relations (the equally great contribution of the crisis theologians). Loder intuited that this impasse could be addressed more successfully for practical theology by attending to the creative fusion of process and content in therapeutic and religious experiences that restore persons to mental and moral heath, which he began to work out in his dissertation on Freud and Kierkegaard.

Third, Loder was ever alert to the problem of tertium quid, the introduction of alien conceptual frameworks that distort the relational integrity of interdisciplinary work. Thus, for example, when socialization and enculturation were in vogue during the 60s and 70s claiming to provide the language and grammar of communal faith formation, Loder argued precisely why these unredeemed dynamics, representing the powers of death and entropy, could not finally be Christianized until and unless the death (negation) in them was itself negated by Christ’s Presence. When the developmental paradigm surged into prominence during the 70s and 80s, again Loder penetrated to the underlying structures of that theory and argued why “normal” human development could not be considered “normal” if we took Christ’s Presence in relation to human development as Normative. He argued that the “negation in the ‘normal’” had to be negated if human development was to be “normalized” (i.e. transformed) in the service of Christ’s Spirit. When praxis modes of conceptualizing attracted the attention of theologians and educational theorists in the 80s and 90s, Loder proposed, against that trend, that theory must always have priority in relation to praxis (they are linked in an asymmetrical, bipolar relational unity with theory in marginal control) because (1) the relational unity of theory and practice is embodied in undifferentiated or primal wholeness in the infant’s experience of the mother’s face, so that relationality always precedes and generates differentiations like meaning, rationality, intelligence, and practice out of a tacit sense of wholeness; (2) the theoretic pole of the theory-praxis relationship always represents (tacitly if not explicitly) this prior relationality as the larger frame of reference required by intelligence, one that is tacitly religious; and (3) the relation of the humanity to the divinity of Christ reveals the definitive relational structure by which all other relational structures are finally determined, including the relation of theory to practice.

Thus, Loder always sought to render interdisciplinary integrity through the mind of Christ. Whatever theories became available to his critical mind—multiple intelligence theory (Gardner), object-relations theory (Winnecott et al), post liberal theology (Lindbeck et al) or process thought (Whitehead to Cobb to Griffin)—Loder tried to discern the presence of frames of reference that he thought were “alien” to the revealed nature of Jesus Christ under the redemptive transformation of the Holy Spirit. Of course, Loder’s judgments may have been inadequate for constructing practical theology according to his own intention to avoid such alien frameworks, and he may not have escaped the tertium quid himself.

Nonetheless, Loder sought out a post-foundational practical theological science, one that was grounded beyond all human foundations in the deep grammar of Spiritus Creator, who alone makes theoretical work redemptive. He ever sought to do fundamental practical theology “in the Spirit.”

Loder’s choice of dialogue partners needs to be mentioned here in light of his single-minded devotion to the alchemy of the Spirit-to-spirit relations revealed in Christ. Significantly, Loder really never deviated intellectually from the trusted interlocutors he had encountered early in his academic career whom he critically appropriated—the ever-present Kierkegaard in philosophical theology and psychology, Freud, Erikson and Jung in depth and ego psychology, Piaget and Kegan in genetic epistemology and developmental psychology, Talcott Parsons in sociology, along with Einstein, Bohr, Polanyi and Prigogine in the natural sciences. He also largely stayed theologically attuned to the neo-Reformed tradition of Brunner, Karl Barth & Tillich, and, after 1970, to re-constructors of Barth’s work, especially T.F.Torrance and Wolfhart Pannenberg. He distinguished his work from other re-constructors of orthodoxy, notable the post-liberals (Lindbeck et al) and from the radical orthodoxy now associated with John Milbank.

He also drank deeply from pre-modern sources—the Gospels and Paul, from the Greek Fathers (especially the magisterial work of Chalcedon)—and from Lutheran and Reformed understandings of Spiritus Creator (through Regin Prenter and George Hendry ). Here it must be noted that Loder did not fail to engage and learn from those with whom he disagreed. It is not that Loder believed he was superior, or that he could not learn from anyone. But like Bunyan’s pilgrim on the journey of faith seeking understanding, Loder maintained a vigilant course to reach the goal he had set for himself to get to the heart of practical theology at the level of spirit as a clue to getting at the nature and meaning of human participation in the divine life. He never wanted to get seduced from this singular concern to plumb the depths of divine-human relationality, the hidden orders of meaning and purpose that are revealed to the eyes of faith and to the well-prepared mind, because I think he believed the Gospel demanded nothing less from those who professed Christ, whether in academic settings or in ordinary life. His relentless Christocentrism has opened him up to the charge of being too narrowly focused on the Christian tradition to be of any good for the pluralistic times in which we live. On his part, Loder believed Jesus Christ scandalized all well-intentioned efforts to be relevant to the Zeitgeist by any other means than the Spirit of Christ.

My selection of the metaphor of alchemy for Loder is provocative for another reason, related to the legacy of the Enlightenment and the so-called disenchantment of the world that came about in the West, arguably starting with Descartes, and its affects on modern science (including practical theological science). Morris Berman argued in his book on the origins of modern consciousness called The Reenchantment of the World that “disenchantment” in the Western world (i.e. the separation of faith and knowledge, or in Loder’s terms, spirit and science) can be dramatically revealed in the psychic history of foundational thinkers like Isaac Newton who represent the modern mindset. Berman argued that Newton’s life and work in particular was motivated out of a deep sense of absence originating from the tragic early loss of his father and the neglect that ensued thereafter from his mother.

Drawing on important studies of Newton by Frank Manuel and David Kubrin, who showed the devastating impact of this parental absence on Newton’s development on his life and on his work in science, Berman argued that Newton’s true longing, buried under repression of this existential loss, was never to construct the mechanical universe in absolutist dimensions for which he became immortalized in the annals of science, but rather to discover the arcane hermetic secrets integrating all knowledge in the universe, a destiny for which Newton felt himself to be uniquely chosen. That is, Newton was a closet alchemist all the time he was revered as a rational scientist! Manuel and Kubtrin argue that Newton “cleaned himself up” for public consumption, having been seduced by the notoriety and enthusiasm his mechanistic views received by the Cartesian juggernaut that pervaded European culture at the time. Therefore, he was “forced” to abandon (at least in public) his alchemical enterprise in order to retain his reputation as a scientist in the scientific ethos of the times.

Closer to our own concerns in this essay on the alchemist James Loder, one should recall that a similar reductionistic confinement of religious sensibilities by rational science (leading to the repression of a religious thematic in their work) took hold of two important figures in the history of religious education in the 20th century. Both Jean Piaget and George Albert Coe, contemporary theorists whose works remain today a source of insight for practical theology and Christian/religious education, were “forced” to abandon the at-one-time more explicit religious concerns that initially motivated them to think about the world holistically, succumbing to the seduction of rational scientific ethos. Both theorists, in their formative years, entertained seriously the power of religious experience to impact the meaning of their lives and their choice of vocations.

Coe agonizingly sought a Methodist-styled conversion that would authorize his search for understanding the human condition, while Piaget seriously considered a career as a theologian because of his early religious experiences and the influence of Henri Bergson. But both of them finally abandoned and repressed their religious longings in order to keep faith with the scientific ethos that beckoned and rewarded them. For Piaget and Coe, as with Newton, the alchemical longing of the human spirit to connect spirit and science was repressed in order to conform to the conditions of modern scientific assumptions and to carve out a reputable vocation in the modern world. If we return to the biographical essay of James Loder for a moment, we see that he struggled with the same kind of repression calling him to abandon alchemy for rational science.

As the biographical essay makes clear, Loder too had an early religious experience (the death of his father) that motivated his initial search for faith seeking understanding at Princeton and Harvard. But seduced by the ethos of Harvard and science, he too constructed his early work within the framework of acceptable scientific limits defined by the academy, repressing the deeper spiritual motivation that launched his practical theological vocation in the first place. However, his second convictional experience, the accident in 1970, re-awakened in Loder, at a much stronger level, the alchemical link between spirit and science according to their intrinsic relations as revealed to faith. Loder’s work on the transformational intelligence of the human spirit was itself transformed under the conviction of Loder’s own spirit by Spiritus Creator.

Under conviction, Loder discerned that divine and human actions were inevitably linked together in what he called an “asymmetrical bipolar relational unity” grounded in Jesus Christ, who revealed the God-man structure of reality to human intelligibility. This convictional realization guided Loder’s subsequent work in what might be considered his search for “a scientific alchemy of the spirit” in which the interrelation of spirit and science that is proleptically unified and generative in the primal experience of every infant with the face of the mother in the power of the human spirit becomes ultimately unified and generative through convictional experience of the God-man, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Scientists since Newton have been wary of the alchemical charge, and modern science is ever more alert to resisting lapses into alchemy.

Though Loder was as careful a theoretical scientist as can be imagined, who always made his thought public through carefully crafted books, articles and lectures, the substance of what he tried to do in his life-work remains a mystery to most, tainted by the alchemic charge that I think secretly works against its acceptability. No one really picked up on Loder’s project, not only because, as Campbell Wyckoff put it, “nobody really knew (and I would add “knows today”) what Loder was up to,” but also because what he was suspected of being up to was not acceptable within the ethos that mainline practical theology and Christian education has created for itself, one that was primarily concerned about healing the “two culture” dualism that plagues modernity by seeking a non-theological base-line to overcome that dualism. This bias toward the apologetics of relevance has little tolerance for Christological convictions that seem to run contrary to the social grammar of confinement that wants to keep confessions of Christ secluded from public discourse.

As Brian Gerrish wrote, in reference to Barth’s confessionalism, “Anyone who believes that theology is possible and meaningful in the church alone, that it begins with God in his revelation in Jesus Christ, and that it is scientific just insofar as it corresponds to the word of God through obedience of faith, will need to come up with a quite different account of theology’s credentials as a university discipline, or may prefer to pursue it somewhere else.” Loder, taking up just this challenge, was foolish enough to believe that “a quite different account of theology’s credentials as a university discipline” was possible from a confessional stance, one that was compelling enough to speak with integrity to the modern university out of a Christological concentration, despite the alchemical connotations of such a position.

What Might Loder have been Up To: An Educated Guess about Loder’s Fundamental Practical Theological Science of the Structure and Dynamics of Provident-Contingent Relations. In what follows I want to elaborate what I believe Loder was up to as an alchemist of spirit and science. Perhaps if we could get a sense of the direction and substance of Loder’s alchemy as a whole we could come up with a tentative surmise about the significance of his 40 plus years at Princeton, and we might yet be intrigued enough by what we see to guess also why he took the alchemical risk that so many like Newton, Piaget and Coe have forsaken. I offer this surmise of the substance and direction of Loder’s alchemical science as a vehicle for others to take a second look at this vision and to mine its potential contribution to Christian education—and I would argue, to a whole lot more!

Out of his reconstruction of the source, structure and dynamics of convictional knowing according to what Paul Lehmann called “the God-man structure of reality,” I think it can be argued that Loder constructed a fundamental practical theological science of provident-contingent relations with the power to illuminate the nature, dynamic structure, and power of the actual relational Reality that holds all things together and apart according to the nature of Jesus Christ. Loder imagined that this asymmetrical but reciprocal relationality he constructed out of his neo-Chalcedonian integration of wisdom and science bore credible (not infallible) witness to certain essential dimensions of the actual Reality that bridges the incommensurable gap between divine and human action revealed through the Church’s deepest reflection on the Incarnation. Loder created conceptual lenses and an interpretative framework for the Church that he thought would “cut the world at its [relational] joints” so to speak, including for example:

• the perichoretic relational structure constituting Trinitarian relations (the Norm and Generative Source of all relationality)
• the cosmological structure inferred from the Big Bang (with its asymmetrical relation of gravity to energy that makes the life of the observer of the universe possible in the first place—the anthropic principle)
• the nature of light, the universal constant in science (wave and particle relationality)
• the bipolar structure of the social construction of reality, constituted by a reciprocal relationality of socialization-transformation
• the paradoxical structure of Israel and the Church, both communal paradigms of simil iustus et peccatore and the relation of koinonia to ecclesia
• the canonical relational structure of divine revelation in human words that constitutes Scripture
• the revelation of the Christ Event (definitive relationality revealed to and accommodated within human experience)
• the Chalcedon’s doctrine of the hypostatic union
• the Reformation affirmation of a transformative relationality between Christ and culture
• the dis-relational impact of Modernity (where relationality is pervasively distorted and in which faith and knowledge are split apart)
• the turn to relationality in postmodern science and theology
• the core generative experiences of all human development, including the tacitly religious experience of the mother’s face imprinting on the child and the explicitly redemptive impact of the Spirit of Christ on human development
• the central generative reality in human existence, the human spirit (powerfully revealed when confronting the intrinsic limits of intelligibility at the quantum level (complementarity) or at the theological level (Chalcedon).

This relational structure of reality Loder sought to trace from the “big infinity” (his euphemism for cosmology) and beyond (the Trinity) to the ‘little infinity” (quantum reality) and beyond (the human spirit), characterizes, I believe, Loder’s unifying theme and potential contribution to fundamental practical theological science on multiple levels. I would argue here that Loder’s fundamental practical theological science of provident-contingent relations effectively responds to the call John Webster, an authority on Barth, gave to theologians, in particular theologians of hope—to elaborate the central structure of the ontology of grace revealed in Christ.

A Christian theology of hope will be disoriented from the outset unless it is securely anchored in an account of grace as constitutive of created being and action. Modern Christian thought…leaves us seriously deficient in this regard: eager to establish connections with worlds outside the gospel, it rarely takes the time to explore the primacy of grace in its ontological dimensions…modern Christian theology is rarely committed to articulating the ontologically definitive status of that which is confessed in the Christian credo. As a result, the descriptive force of Christian convictions is blunted…If we are to make some headway…it will have to be by taking with great seriousness the Christian confession that the new reality brought about in Jesus Christ is reality.

Loder’s sojourn into the wilderness of scientific rationalism, postmodern relativity and academic repression under the discipline of the Spirit in search of alchemic connections resulted in a body of work that tried to discern and to articulate the relational structure of the ontology of grace that reveals in every level of human action contingent created-ness as it participates in Spiritus Creator, and the convictional epistemology that allows human creatures transformed by grace to know their own lives as creatures and the natural universe as creation. This is a contingency that can only be discerned when the Spirit of God acts convictingly on the human spirit and reconstitutes the knower, so that in knowing the universe through convictional experience we make the universe understandable and articulate to itself as created and sustained by grace.

In a sense Loder’s work is an extraordinarily complex commentary on Barth’s intuition: “Covenant is the internal basis of creation” while “creation is the external basis of the covenant.” What the convictional experiences Loder suffered did for him was to “awaken” him to the provident-contingent relationality revealed in Jesus Christ as the structure of created reality, including the mind that grasps that reality. To be known and to know contingently is to be able to trace this relational structure that stretches from the inner life of the Trinity to the spirit of the mind which grasps all things from the standpoint of the conviction by the Spirit of Christ. In and through the Mind of Christ revealed to the convicted knower, alchemy becomes an actuality because Christ the Alchemist has determined to bestow his Spirit and Nature on all things that exist.

To attend to the generative source of human knowing (being known by God!) and to learn to think out of that intimate connection is to be restored to the imago Dei as “new creation in Christ.” Out of this generativity one begins to integrate a lifestyle that participates in the perichoretic relationality that unites divine and human action, thus restoring oneself and one’s community to “sanity,” not by adapting to the religious conventions of cultures (which are finally “insane” in relation to the Gospel’s judgment of them) but by being reconstituted according to the Trinitarian culture that is the ground of all being—including all social constructions of reality. Loder discerned the inner dynamic structure of contingent creation in relation to divine action as the analogia spiritus, arguing that this contingent ontology can only be known “Spirit to spirit.” When we are known in the Spirit, we testify with that Spirit that we are children of God, in both personal and public spheres.

Loder sought to extrapolate the diverse ways in which this testimony played out as practical theology in a scientific culture. His whole alchemic project can finally be understood as testimony, witness, or even evangelism. To be recreated in the Spirit so as to accept our contingent creaturehood as the central core of our humanity, what I call homo testans, is to participate fully in the True Witness, Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of His Testimony to a world that can only be saved by Grace. Loder sought to bear witness in a scientific culture to the One who holds all things together and apart according to the provident-contingent relationality revealed to the human spirit by Spiritus Creator. Perhaps Loder’s efforts to bear prophetic testimony to Jesus Christ through his practical theological science is the fifth and major reason his work fails to find its intended audience in the professional guild—he stayed too close to the Stone of Stumbling upon which all things human suffer shipwreck.

If this is an adequate, if all too brief, description of Loder alchemic project, how might the potential significance of his work be delineated in terms of its implications for redemptive transformation in practical theology as a challenge to practical theologians and others?

Potential Challenges of Loder’s Convictional Science to Practical Theology and Beyond

A. Loder’s work compels practical theologians to reconsider the meta-theoretical contours of their discipline as a science of Spirit-to-spirit relations, a reconsideration that is faithful to the Trinitarian God of the Gospel, to the postmodern turn in science towards relationality, and to the dynamics of the human spirit.

Loder loved the discipline of Christian education because it demanded interdisciplinary work that tries to discern the nature and impact of redemptive transformation by the Spirit of Christ in virtually every dimension of human action and to the whole universe of discourse in a scientific culture. In his Christomorphic reconstruction of the conceptual coordinates of these disciplines at the level of Spirit-to-spirit relations, Loder reached “inside” the core problematic of practical theology to discern what God was doing in the world to make and keep human life human (Paul Lehmann), and to articulate the nature of this relationality to a scientific world. If Loder has indeed brought fundamental insight into the true nature and structure of provident-contingent relations to describe the core dynamic of divine-human interaction, as well as to discern analogues of that provident-contingency in the human and natural sciences, then his work is significant because it requires a radical reconsideration of the meta-theoretical contours of Christian education according to the movement of the Holy Spirit human-ward.

For Loder, both the content of faith and the process of faith are inextricably united according to the dynamics and structure of provident-contingent relations revealed in Christ. In classical theological terms, Loder’s work reconfigures the debate over Anknupfungspunkt (point of contact between the Divine and the human) because it preserves divine initiative (the ontology of grace) without diminishing the full participation of the human knower by showing how that initiative in convictional experiences accommodates to the knower without destroying the integrity of the knower but by transforming her to a higher level of integrative thinking, one demanded by the Object of her investigation.

Furthermore, Loder addresses the point of contact issue by insisting that his efforts to integrate the disciplines of practical theology take place not through the “products” of the generative spirit (ego, rationality, intelligence, praxis, symbolic experience, etc.) but through addressing and explicating the kinetic relational dynamics that give rise to these “products”—the generative human spirit in intense dialectical relations with the regenerating Presence of Christ. By getting to the generative source of creativity constituted in the human spirit as the locus of the Holy Spirit’s convicting work, transformation according to this provident-contingent relational pattern becomes redemptive transformation into the nature of Christ, the ontological basis for the scientific knowing of reality.

B. Loder’s convictional epistemology, unique in Christian education theory, lays the groundwork for offering to the Church a compelling way to integrate insights into the human condition (both experiential and scientific) and revealed confessional commitments (tradition) through profound religious experiences that transform the meaning-making capacities of homo poeta into the faith seeking understanding of homo testans, uniquely uniting the subjective and the objective in a scientific cultural context through faith.

Loder’s fundamental work on the nature of spirit as a self-transcending and self-relating reality, which under the convictional impact of the Self-Knowing Spirit of God leads to human knowing of reality that approximates knowing according to the Mind of Christ, is powerful because it unites being and thinking, process and content, spiritual passion for continuity with scientific attention to discontinuities, etc., in a way that gives both certitude to existence while at the same time inspiring the courage to grasp meaning in an open universe.

Thus, Loder’s convictional epistemology provides not only an experiential basis for overcoming the dualism between faith and knowledge, or spirit and science, into which we are socialized and out of which we normally learn to think in a highly differentiated society, but also for recovering the intrinsically subjective nature of all serious objective thinking. Loder redefines objectivity and subjectivity in epistemology by placing both of them in the service of a relational continuum that is implicitly religious (and therefore calls out for ultimate intelligibility) and which becomes explicitly theological under conviction as the vital structure for knowing all things “in the Spirit.”

C. Loder’s analogia spiritus and his “strange loop” model of complementarity, derived from and reflective of, his convictional epistemology, demonstrate the power of convictional imagination to generate disclosure analogies as conceptual resources designed not only to overcome the dehumanizing dualisms in modern culture that separate faith and knowledge, spirit and science, imagination and rationality, etc., but also for overcoming the equally dehumanizing monisms of popular spiritualities that collapse or confuse the divine and the human.

Loder created uniquely generative models of relationality for theology, science, and human experience based on his convictional epistemology. As was noted, these models of relationality compel us to discern that the crucial factor in knowing anything truly lies not in the mind of the knower (Kant) nor in the object of investigation (naïve realism) but in the relationality between them, especially when the nature of the knower as human is taken at full force. These models of relationality are particularly relevant to knowing that necessarily reaches beyond common sense and logical rationality, where the human spirit reaches its own intrinsic limits of intelligibility and is compelled to create qualitatively new modes of reason that are intrinsically relational and observer influenced, like in quantum physics or in Chalcedonian theology. Out of these limit situations the human spirit creates “classic” resources that reveal the hidden intelligibilities that hold polar opposites together and apart, like time and eternity (the finite and the infinite) in the structure of the human spirit (Kierkegaard), like particle and wave in the structure of the light (Bohr), and like divine and human in the structure of revelation (Chalcedon).

Loder not only discerned the nature of convictional epistemology, but he demonstrated how the convicted imagination creates models of disclosure with tremendously generative power to make life intelligible.

D. Loder’s work advocates reconstructing and deepening the Church’s understanding of the dogma of the Holy Spirit in onto-relational terms, according to the self-relational dimensions of the analogia spiritus, with enormous implications for calling mainline, evangelical, and charismatic or Pentecostal traditions to consider a new basis for dialogue and mutual discovery of our common participation in the nature, power and truth of the Holy Spirit.

Loder’s work on the relation of Holy Spirit to human spirit calls us to reconsider the dogma of the Holy Spirit at the creedal level, by taking into full account the self-relating nature of spirit on both sides of the analogia spiritus. In drawing upon the Patristics (mostly the Greek Fathers), the Reformers (Luther and Calvin), and their modern interpreters (Kierkegaard, Barth, Hendry, Prenter), Loder argued that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition requires a unique epistemology, grounded in revelation, to discern theologically the nature of human participation in the kinetic structure and power of God’s Self-knowing as it is accommodated to human reality. Thus, Loder’s work could revolutionize the larger Church’s understanding of the Holy Spirit and in particular how the Holy Spirit works transformationally on the human spirit in order to make divine reality in relation to human reality knowable to human beings.

The implications of this contribution are profound in terms of (a) the recovery of the Spirit in the life in evangelical and Reformed congregations that tend to intellectualize or moralize faith, and in terms of (b) correcting the excessive or sometimes reality-denying claims of charismatic and Pentecostal spiritualities. In relation to the tendencies of the former, Loder asserted that the Holy Spirit puts us into the life and mind of God in a way that resists objectifying faith morally or intellectually. In relation to the tendencies of the latter, Loder contended that the Holy Spirit puts us into the world and into the life of the mind in a way that overcomes the irrational fideism and escapism of so much that passes for spirituality today.

E. Loder’s work addresses the historical impasse between the Religious Education Movement and Crisis Theology out of which the current renaissance in practical theology and Christian or religious education has arisen, one that offers a major meta-theoretical proposal for uniting a century’s worth of scientific insight into the “What?” of human reality (the contribution of liberal theorists) with a near century’s worth of convictional insight into the “Why?” of human reality corem Deo (the contribution of the Barthians), without compromising the integrity of either science or theology.

Loder was on the ground floor of the renaissance in practical theology that continues to day, including the near century-long debate about the theories that give order to religious or Christian or Christian-religious education practice. He not only re-envisioned theologically a dynamic model for integrating the disciplines that inform practical theological science in general, but he also provided the conceptual resources to overcome specifically the century-long impasse in religious education theory that failed to adequately integrate liberal and neo-orthodox contributions to the discussion. He did this by directing his attention to the generative source of all creative thinking (liberal or conservative) the human spirit, the power of which is released most fully when confronting realities that stretch the spirit’s intense desire to know to its intrinsic limits.

Out of these confrontations at the outer limits of human experience, limits that were not sufficiently appreciated by either liberal or neo-orthodox theorists, Loder’s work places religious or Christian education theory under question at a new depth, even requiring theorists to construct radical new forms of rationality. Perhaps no other practical theologian of his generation has indwelt at such depth and breadth the core generative problematic at the heart of practical theology and religious education to discern the inner structural relations that hold divine and human action together and apart according to the nature of Jesus Christ and our best scientific readings of human reality known convictionally. F. Loder’s appropriation and reconstruction of Kierkegaard and Barth for a scientific cultural context provides an important and possibly revolutionary resource for developing a critical and confessional practical theological science of human participation in divine reality, while at the same time perhaps helping other scholars to recover the crucial importance of these two programmatic thinkers for understanding the meaning of the postmodern world.

Loder reconstruction of contemporary Reformed faith (Barth through Torrance) and especially his appropriation of Kierkegaard (in dialogue with Chalcedon, Pannenberg and the human and natural sciences) serves as a major interpretation of the relevance of these two prophetic figures for a scientific world. In particular, the way Loder brings both Kierkegaard and Barth into dialogue with postmodern science is perhaps unparalleled for its potential contribution to the Church’s prophetic witness to a scientific culture, especially from a Reformed convictional stance. No other practical theologian has, to my knowledge, made such a comprehensive and compelling argument for critical confessional practical theology in the Reformed tradition, reconstructed through Kierkegaardian and Barthian (i.e. neo-Chalcedonian) lenses, with the potential for both deepening the insights of the secular academy while also equipping the Church in its prophetic witness to culture.

G. Loder’s work offers up new conceptual coordinates for challenging and deepening the theoretical contours of evangelical Christian education and practical theology, especially in relation to his convictional epistemology (which resonates to the evangelical emphasis upon conversion) while at the same time it pushes evangelicals to discern the epistemological and ontological implications of conversion for life in the world, helping to overcome the ambiguity within evangelicalism concerning the Christ-culture relationship.

Loder’s emphasis upon convictional experiences (his language for conversion) and the way in which he integrates his convictional epistemology into every domain of human action (organic, psychological, social and cultural) offers to evangelical scholars a splendid and perhaps uniquely important resource for taking evangelical practical theology and Christian education theory to the next level of complexity. Loder’s vision offers a significant conceptual re-orientation to evangelical practical theologians and Christian educators that gives to them a more solid, nuanced, and generative understanding of the kinetic relation of Christ to culture revealed through convictonal experience.

Furthermore, the integration of process and content in Loder’s thought helps overcome the tendency of evangelical practical theologians to focus primarily on pragmatic and applied concerns to the neglect and under-development of hard thinking at the meta-theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary levels. The possible impact of Loder’s vision for re-conceiving the conceptual contours of evangelical practical theology and Christian education theory may be the most significant implication we can draw from this rehearsal of his potential relevance on the field, given the general failure of evangelical practical theologians to develop a convictional science that is adequate to illuminate conceptually the theological claims evangelicals make for the transformational power of the Holy Spirit in evangelical experience (conversion).

H. Loder’s understanding of the nature and dynamic movement of human development from a theological perspective and the journey of intensification that marks maturity in the faith offers a profound resource for practical theologians, educators, and those involved in spiritual direction or counseling, who depend on their ability to discern rightly the nature of the relationship between so-called “normal” human development (under the power of negation) and spiritual re-development in the Spirit of Christ.

Loder’s reconstruction of human development in theological perspective, which (1) placed emphasis on the dynamics of stage transition not the stages themselves, which (2) took seriously the recapitulation of the Fall in unredeemed human development through the triumph of negation centered on the socialized ego, which (3) offered theological re-interpretations of classic theorists like Freud, Erikson, and Piaget to explicate a “thick” description of normal human development as a “truth producing error,” and which (4) accounts for the impact of the Holy Spirit’s power to negate the negation of human development at any stage of development, is perhaps unrivaled in practical theological breadth and depth. Loder’s account of human development in theological perspective is neither occasionalistic or conversionistic (God only “zaps” persons in remarkable experiences of discontinuity) nor reductionistic or Pelagian (God reduced to human dynamics “writ large”), but it is fully dialectical and intensive (God and human in a tensive dialectical relationality) in a way that takes both the human spirit and the Holy Spirit with utmost seriousness. In doing so Loder argues, in the tradition of Athenasius, that the glory of God is humanity fully alive.

I. Loder lays a non-foundationalist basis for constructing a dialectically-structured theological anthropology by grounding it in a Living Actuality that reveals through convictional experiences the human condition corem Deo as a four dimensional reality (self, “world,” the absence of being, and New Being), calling the disciple community to live into the New Being as the New Being transforms the other three dimensions in the service of the Politics of God.

Ever since Calvin opined that the human knowledge of the divine and the divine knowledge of the human are the essential parameters of Christian understanding, one might argue that the central theological task has been to discern, between the “theology as anthropology” of Feuerbach and the “humanity of God” of Barth, an adequate ground for theological anthropology. Loder’s work brings this search for a compelling ground into focus for a scientific culture by showing that the God-man structure of reality in relation to human reality is a Living Actuality that cannot be fully “captured” by comprehensive systems of thought or action, because such illusory “foundations” blind the thinker/actor to (a) the pervasive Nothingness underlying all human constructions of reality, theoretical or practical, and to (b) the Spirit’s power to overcome the Nothingness through convictional experience.

Loder is, in my judgment, one of the few practical theologians who take the third dimension of human experience—what he called “the Void”—with penultimate seriousness in terms of both living and thinking “in the Spirit,” and therefore he is one of the few practical theologians who take the fourth dimension—what he called “the Holy”—with ultimate seriousness.

J. Loder’s transparent theological commitments and his penetrating insights into the hidden intelligibility underlying the human and natural sciences compel practical theologians and religious educators to “come clean” concerning their own theological assumptions, tacit or explicit.

Loder’s concern for re-conceiving practical theology at the meta-theoretical level is an example of John Milbank’s challenge to theologians to overcome their “false humility” by seeking to understand and affirm theology properly as “metadiscourse.” Milbank wrote that “an ultimate organizing logic” for theology “cannot be wished away,” and if theology doesn’t supply one self-consciously, some other discourse will. Loder’s forty-year effort to avoid the conscription of alien frameworks to integrate theology and the sciences (the problem of tertium quid) calls all practical theologians and Christian educators, as well as scientists, to be more conscientious about making their theoretical assumptions as explicit as possible. Whether he himself was successful in avoiding the tertium quid or not, his concern to “come clean” with theological and meta-theoretical commitments is exemplary for practical theologians, Christian educators, and others.

K. Loder’s work provides a new theological baseline for re-conceiving the nature of theological education itself and its relation to secular culture, including rethinking the place of theology in university discourse that is scientifically credible, and thereby provides a powerful witness to the dominant culture for re-conceiving the philosophical contours of culture itself as a proximate testimony to God in Christ. Loder’s work is potentially powerful and sophisticated enough scientifically and conceptually to provide Christian scholars with resources for engaging the highest echelons of intellectual culture and for re-considering the place of theology in culture.

The pluralistic times in which we live are ripe for introducing comprehensive and credible proposals for discerning the nature and structure of reality from various viewpoints, and Loder’s work could aid Christian scholars whose vocation is to witness to Christ in the intellectual centers of culture, like academia. Furthermore, Loder’s work challenges the century-long hegemony of secular prophets (innovators like Freud, Piaget, Skinner, Erikson, Parsons, etc.) to determine the intellectual parameters of true science, parameters often grounded in reductionistic versions of rational science and limited imagination (what Loder called science under “eikonic eclipse”). Loder took seriously the Lordship of Christ in relation to every challenge and alternative claim from the Empire, but he did so in a way that gave full if de-limited play to culture itself.

L. Loder’s work provides resources for constructing comprehensivel critique of the social construction of reality, and especially of the ruling distortions of the human spirit that shape contemporary culture in dehumanizing and unjust ways.

Loder’s trenchant critiques of various lifestyles in the United States—obsession with achievement as the distortion of love, authoritarianism as the distortion of power, proteanism as the distortion of freedom, and oppression as the distortion of justice—are directed at the generative source of distortion or dis-relationship in the human spirit—the triumph of negation or existential despair that permeates the social construction of reality. These distortions of the spirit plague not only culture but the Church as well, destroying the integrity of the best efforts to teach and preach the faith (i.e. to teach right doctrine in an authoritarian or achievement spirit is to distort the doctrinal integrity as well as the pedagogical integrity of the process!). Loder’s critique moves deeper than most approaches because he gets at the source of the distortion—the dis-relation of the finite-infinite structure of the human spirit recapitulated through every dimension of the social construction of reality—not at just the inevitable “manifestations” of this relational distortion (i.e. modernization or globalization).

M. Loder’s work has potential for re-conceiving the relationship of koinonia (the body of Christ) to ecclesia (the church as institution) in a way that neither separates these dimensions of a unified reality nor confuses or conflates them, liberating the church to be a living demonstration of redeemed relations according to the nature of Jesus Christ.

Loder’s project is perhaps underdeveloped in terms of ecclesiology. Nevertheless, his fundamental insights into theological anthropology in terms of Spirit-to-spirit relations offers practical theologians a uniquely dynamic understanding of the core dialectical structure of the Church in the world (simul iustus et peccator). Loder argues that the Church is a social reality that at the same time is not the product of socialization. The Church in the power of the Spirit is one in which the socialization dynamics have been affirmed, crucified and resurrected by the dynamic Presence of Christ.

In Loder’s construction, the role structures that lie at the heart of socialized reality and that distort the intimacy which the Holy Spirit seeks to create, must be transformed redemptively (the Spirit makes role structures reversible in Loder’s theory) so that the role structures now serve, rather than distort, the intimacy of the Spirit. Loder’s call for churches to live “in the Spirit” and to be centered beyond themselves through worship contains the seeds of recovering the Church’s prophetic and living vocation in a culture of despair—i.e to demonstrate koinonia-ecclesia as a visible enactment of, and witness to, Trinitarian-human relations in a fallen world.

N. Loder’s understanding of the impact of the Holy Spirit on the body, on ego, on social roles, and on culture has implications not only for redeeming personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal relations within primary and secondary socialization of specific cultures, but also for re-conceiving international relations among cultures and ethnic groups.

In a post/9/11 world in which relations are distorted at all levels of interchange, new understandings of inclusive identity that accept the otherness of the other are needed now more than ever. Loder’s insights into the transformation of human action by the Holy Spirit in bodily, psychological, social and cultural dimensions toward the restoration of relationality according to the nature of Christ provides valuable resources for re-conceiving international relations as well under the impact of the Spirit. Loder’s vision for redeemed relations complements recent proposals by philosophers like Emmanual Levinas and theologians like Miroslav Volf who are addressing, in very different ways, how we might transform our understanding and practice of identity-formation in order to overcome both the overly-centrifugal forces of exclusion and the overly centripetal forces of inclusion that threaten life together in a globalized world community. Here, Loder’s definition of love as “the non-possessive delight in the particularity of the other” articulates the intended outcome of the Holy Spirit’s work in every dimension of human life under God, including international relations.

O. Loder’s work provides conceptual resources for constructing a four-dimensional, convictional hermeneutic of divine-human relations, one that is interdisciplinary and can be used to “exegete” both written texts and living “texts” according to the nature of Jesus Christ.

Loder’s imaginative reconstruction of human action in relation to divine action through convictional experience provides a basis for developing a convictional hermeneutic, one that allows Scriptural texts and congregational “texts” to be interpreted within a dynamic, four-dimensional framework that conforms to the Mind of Christ acting convictionally on the mind of the hermeneutist. Such a hermeneutical framework can incorporate with integrity higher critical concerns (“behind the text”), literary meanings and structures (“within the text”) and theological concerns (“in front of the text”) in a comprehensive interpretative movement that gets “inside” the four-dimensional conflict that gave rise to the classic or canonical texts themselves. Similarly, through this framework one gets “inside” congregational con-“texts” in order to help congregations interpret their life together and their symbolic world in four dimensions, so that congregations so engaged might become “canonical” expressions of life in the Spirit.

This convictional hermeneutic is manifest in Loder’s reading of Scripture (i.e. his programmatic interpretation of Luke 24, the Road to Emmaus) but it is not developed as a hermeneutical approach. Similar hermeneutical intuitions are visible in a curriculum project developed for Indian Christians by Beth Frykberg and Ajit Prasadam, two of Loder’s students. A full-blown convictional hermeneutic begs to be developed out of insights from his work.

P. Loder’s work is beginning to be discovered by certain well-known organizational theorists and adult educators in the Unites States who recognize the potential in his thought for discerning the spiritual nature of leadership and of creativity in business settings or for re-conceiving andragogy and curriculum theory.

Loder’s understanding of transformation as a constitutive element of the nature of reality itself parallels the discovery of transformation in postmodern science—such as the emergence of new order out of chaos associated with chaos theory. Scholars in business schools and in teacher colleges are appropriating these understandings of the nature of reality as transformative for rethinking the nature of leadership and creativity in the business world and in secular adult educational theory. As business leadership and adult education theories move from models of mastery and control and transmission of information and authority to models of self-organization through transformation, Loder’s thought may become an important resource in the secular academy as well as in congregations.

Conclusion

No doubt there are many other implications of the practical theological science of provident-contingent relations developed by James Loder to challenge practical theologians and Christian educators, but these will have to suffice. My hope is that, taken together, they provide the reader with an incentive to investigate his work as a generative resource for practical theologians, Christian or religious educators, and theorists of Christ-culture relations. The concern here is not to become Loderites, or to establish a Loderian “school” of practical theology, but to allow Loder’s close contact with the “things of the Spirit” and with the spirit of science to compel practical theologians and Christian educators to live closer to the center of divine-human relations revealed in Jesus Christ, where alchemy in the Spirit becomes a real possibility.

Loder’s practical theological science of provident-contingent relations was designed to take practical theologians, church leaders, Christian educators, and all disciples of Christ on a journey of intensification into the heart of the human condition where the boundaries of human knowledge are confronted by the dread of non-being, and then also by a Life so compelling and pure that they cannot but help see all things, including themselves and their disciplines, as if for the first time as a work of the Spirit, and as a work uniquely their own. Loder’s practical theological science could be propaedeutic for learning to think and live “in the Spirit” in the 21st century compelled by the themes of “science” and “spirit” and by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Who knows, it might, as Basil Mitchell warned, even choose us by “its sheer impressiveness” and demand to be imitated by us in a way that “radically revises our previous notions about what is worth imitating.”