Abstract:
This research proposes an analogical study of the human development aiming at spiritual maturation through discipleship. As an unfolding of this, an investigation is put into effect to recover the holistic perspective of Christianity, given the cultural duality of the ecclesiastical practice. Extending this perspective especially to discipleship, as a bond between Christians who mutually help each other in the knowledge of God and the practice of their faith in growing development, this work is developed through relationality; and this can be understood in translucid depth when co-related and visualized through human nature. Thus, a biblical perspective is edified in dialog with the theological and interdisciplinary postulates of James E. Loder, in which this is entitled as a divine Logic of the Spirit, intrinsically present in humanity. This logic will permit the analogy of the discipleship to a human pattern of development based on the relationality Spirit-spirit, of less complex forms to ever more complex forms, in transformational cycles which compose the course of human existence, anchored in the theories of human development of René Spitz. The referred pattern can be brought to the relation of discipleship, when understood in its transforming essence and capacity. Loder does not only conceptualize the processes of human transformation and development, in interdisciplinary dialog, but also re-signifies human existence in a Christian perspective, aiming at the fullness which stems from the discovery of the Sacred. One of the possibilities of the discovery of the Sacred emerges through the discipleship, in its multiple facets. In this relationality, a new meaning emerges for practical theology from this approach of Christianity
