Relational Theology of James E. Loder : Encounter and Conviction.
Title:
Relational Theology of James E. Loder : Encounter and Conviction.
Author:
Kovacs, Kenneth E.
ISBN:
9781453908020
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (314 pages)
Series:
Practical Theology ; v.2
Practical Theology
Contents:
CONTENTS -- List of Abbreviations ix -- Introduction 1 -- I. Encounters with the Convictor 9 -- Conviction 9 -- The Princeton Years: The First Transforming Moment 11 -- The Harvard Years: Freud and Kierkegaard 15 -- The Return to Princeton: The Second Transforming Moment 23 -- II. Personalist-Relationalism 37 -- Hans Hofmann 38 -- Personalism 42 -- Relationalism 45 -- Personalist-Relationalism in Loder 54 -- III. A Theology of Conviction: Relational Phenomenological Pneumatology 57 -- An Overview of Loder's Major Contributions 58 -- Convictional Knowing 64 -- The Logic of Conviction and the Grammar of Transformation 68 -- The Human Spirit's Drive Toward Meaning 73 -- Four-Dimensionality 78 -- The Interactionist Tradition 86 -- The Primal Experience and the Search for the Face 89 -- The Dynamics of Negation 94 -- The analogia spiritus and the Work of Spiritus Creator 98 -- IV. A Radicalized Spatio-Temporal World 113 -- The Problem of "History" 114 -- History as Human Construct 115 -- The Search for Order and the Grammar of Absence 118 -- The Search for the Face and the Power of Negation 122 -- A Loderian Reading of Historical Existence 135 -- V. Life in the Field of Encounter: "Openness to the World" 153 -- Conviction and the Christomorphic Pattern of the Holy Spirit 154 -- Discerning the Christomorphic Pattern 158 -- The Dialectic of the koinonia and the ekklesia 163 -- Transformation and Formation 167 -- Critical Engagement of the World 182 -- Transforming the Witness of the Church 187 -- The Christian Life as the Transfiguring Love of the Creator Spirit 192 -- Notes 199 -- Loder Bibliography 267 -- Bibliography 271 -- Index 291.
Abstract:
The work of practical theologian James E. Loder, Jr. (1931-2001) deserves a wider audience. For more than forty years, he developed and exercised an interdisciplinary methodology that identified patterns of correlation in the fields of psychology, educational theory, phenomenology, epistemology, and physics, producing a compelling theological vision that centers on the person and work of the Holy Spirit engaging and transforming human life. At his untimely death in November 2001, Loder was the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Philosophy of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he lectured primarily in the areas of human development and the philosophy of education. This book introduces and examines, explores and untangles the complexity of Loder's thought in order to make it more accessible to a broader audience. At the core of Loder's work is a relational phenomenological pneumatology of inestimable value to the theologian engaged in the ongoing renewal of the church. The Christian life is preeminently relational, distinguished by a relationship with God constituted by Jesus Christ, and sustained by the Holy Spirit. Relationality, Loder claims, takes place in and through the life of the Holy Spirit who operates within a complementary relationship with the human spirit, through an analogia spiritus: a profound, transformational interrelation of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit. The Holy Spirit, intimately connected to the person and work of Christ, takes up and extends the work begun in the incarnation by enfleshing the presence of Christ, thus transforming human life. Loder is distinctive for articulating a pneumatology that incorporates 'how' the self participates in the relationship and the way the self, through the relationship, comes to have a full knowledge of itself, the world, and God. It is precisely the logic of
this Christomorphic dynamic that has extraordinary implications for the way we attempt to fathom the depths and convey the meaning of Christian experience. Loder's relational phenomenological pneumatology contains rich and principally unrecognized resources for providing new frameworks for the Christian life.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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Electronic Access:
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