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.

In Loder the genius and the witness became one flesh in testimony to the Word made flesh! 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.

Not everyone responded to him or his writings and teachings in positive ways, and by some accounts he was a difficult man to know. 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.

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. The life and labor of James Edwin Loder, Jr.

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