Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit

In November 2001, James E. Loder Jr., Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education for forty years at Princeton Theological Seminary, suddenly died. He was a creative and profound thinker who had just completed a promising book. In it he developed a compelling interdisciplinary model to disclose how the divine Spirit affirms, reconstitutes, and transforms the human spirit to bring new energy and creativity into human experience. He called it redemptive transformation. You now hold that book in your hands. Those who know Loder's work are confident that Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit, though delayed for over fifteen years, will still become the best introduction to his complex thought. More important, it offers the imaginative means by which we may learn to attune ourselves and our faith communities to what God is doing in our fractured, distracted, and self-destructive world to bring about a revolution of love--the fruit of Christ's Spirit and the center of our human vocation.

""In each of his long-awaited lectures on Christian education, Loder's vital and complex theology challenges approaches to education that can destroy the redemptive powers of the human spirit. The reader is shown how ministry in the 'logic of the Spirit' can restore these redemptive powers to the center of educational process in what is nothing short of a dramatic paradigm-shift in educational theory, vocation, and practice.""
--John S. McClure, Vanderbilt Divinity School

""Here we see the mature vision of Loder's pneumatological and trinitarian theology of human redemption and transformation . . . read in an educational key. Loder's witness to the Spirit that leads to all truth thus finds amplification through Wright's efforts and will be of interest to all those who not only believe that Christian education ought to make a difference, but also want to know more about how that difference happens.""
--Amos Yong, Fuller Seminary


James E. Loder Jr. (1931-2001) was the Mary Synnott Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1962 until 2001. He authored The Transforming Moment (1981/1989), The Knight's Move (with Jim Neidhardt, 1992), and The Logic of the Spirit (1998).

Dana R. Wright is the Director of Christian Formation and Discipleship at the First Presbyterian Church in Everett, Washington. He coedited two earlier books influenced by Loder's thought: Redemptive Transformation in Practical Theology (2004) and The Logic of the Spirit in Human Thought and Experience (Pickwick Publications, 2014).