by Kenneth E. Kovacs
Peter Lang Publishing, New York. 300 pages
reviewed by BENJAMIN SPARKS
This is a remarkable book that I would not have chosen to read had I not been asked to review it. James Loder influenced scores of Presbyterian ministers at Princeton Seminary. I knew little about him except that he and his family were in a serious car accident which became for him a transforming spiritual moment. It was for Loder a numinous event that transformed him during his tenure as professor of the philosophy of Christian education at Princeton Seminary. He had had his first transforming moment as a college student in direct answer to prayer.
Thanks to Dr. Kovacs, who is pastor of a local congregation, the theology of James Loder is now available to a wider readership. Kovacs demonstrates how timely such theology is, because he believes that “something is deeply wrong with the church in Europe and North America.” We have only begun to ask how the lives of the faithful can be more devoted to Jesus Christ, how congregations which are models of social ministry can once again know the transforming experience of personal, generative faith. In many congregations, if we have not lost that faith, we are incapable of speaking intelligibly and comfortably about it. This destructive loss of articulation has contributed to the fragmentation of every denomination in the United States. In decision making and in mission planning we are often practical atheists, not communities of believers led by the Holy Spirit.
Kovacs begins with a biographical sketch. James Loder was born into an unbelieving household, yet to compassionate and intelligent parents who encouraged his religious development. His first transforming moment occurred during college at the death of his father. It led him, a philosophy major, to a faith and psychological crisis. He demanded an answer from God, who answered. This shaped his theology of Christian Education around a personal revelation: There is a Convictor and there is the one who is the convicted. From that enduring (and renewed) relationship, faith and discipleship proceed.
By explicating Loder for a general readership, Kovacs offers the church a theological vocabulary, if not foundation, for its necessary discussion of the current malaise.
After his second encounter with the “Convictor” (the automobile accident) Loder reclaimed the work of the Holy Spirit in discipleship education, moving Christian formation from a “what do I know?” to “what do I believe and do?” This pneumatology of education was developed within the Reformed Tradition, and became an ordering and integrating principle for Christian faith and for all human existence.
As thousands of mainstream Christians are transformed by mission trips, by exposure to Pentecostals and Evangelicals, by engagement with the brokenness of urban American life, and by the emptiness of a gospel of greed, Kovacs gives the church a means to think faithfully, to live and worship with integrity, and to rejoice in a witness to Jesus Christ that is no longer borrowed, but authentic to who we are as a people.
This book received the “First Book Award” by the Presbyterian Writers’ Guild in 2012.
BENJAMIN SPARKS is an honorably retired teaching elder and former interim editor of the Outlook.
