with the element of “commitment” in faith, is first of all focused on the intellectual contents or “convictions.” And although he is not doing this to rate this or that set of beliefs — the Christian faith, or the Jewish faith, or whatever — still, it is clear that when such elements are considered along with those such as our understanding of authority, our view of our role in the world, and bounds or limits of social awareness, together all these factors have
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some bearing on our ability to relate to and cope with the world as it really is.
Put into other words — and we must try to make this as clear as possible — Fowler’s stages do not claim to judge the sincerity of a person’s faith, much less his or her moral goodness or holiness. One can, theoretically, be in an early stage of faith development, and still be a saint. This is particularly true when the person lives within a society that is predominantly operating within the same stage or level of faith. Holiness, which also can be described in terms of “human authenticity before God” or an “intensive” quality, can at least theoretically remain a “constant” through all faith and life stages. (See especially chapter seven of Daniel A. Helminiak’s Spiritual Development: An Interdisciplinary Study, Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1987). Nevertheless, it can be strongly argued that the quality of this holiness suffers unless one’s faith development is appropriate to one ‘s life stage.
Finally, another problem exists regarding the typical age or level of maturity that these stages seem to imply. Fowler tries to avoid assigning appropriate or typical age brackets, yet it is quite obvious that the first three or four stages are quite predictable in terms of child development. Nevertheless, the “mythic-literal” faith that typifies school-age children, although it seems inappropriate to older persons, is quite common in certain segments of our population, especially in the “Bible Belt.” In the next chapter we will have to pay particular attention to this peculiar American phenomenon.
Yet this in turn raises questions about the next level, the “conventional-synthetic” stage, which by definition, in that it is conventional, appears to be the norm (in the sense of “average”) level of religious consciousness throughout the rest of American society. Typically, this stage begins in the early teenage years, and, if we are to believe the researchers, is apt to continue for the rest of most persons’ lives. The fact
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that this “conventional” stage often persists is taken by some to be an indication that Fowler’s whole idea is off-base, especially when it comes to the idea that there are “higher” forms of faith. But this objection hardly seems worthy of serious consideration unless one ignores the whole tradition of spiritual development and thinks of faith as some kind of take-it-or-leave-it “package deal” coming down to us out of the blue — obviously, I don’t.
Aside from that, I think it is also clear that the progression through the higher stages of faith has a lot to do with one’s psychological growth, but that maturity in this area often lags far behind one’s chronological age. And conversely, the most that can be said here is that the more advanced stages are rarely, if ever, possible before a certain age is reached. Or if certain aspects of a more mature faith show themselves early on in life, one can hardly expect all the criteria of that stage to appear across the board. They rarely do so even in genuinely mature persons, so what can we expect when a younger person shows some of these characteristics except to say that this or that aspect of his or her thinking is “precocious” or even, to some extent, “premature”?
While many other criticisms have been leveled at Fowler’s ideas, I don’t think this is the place to deal with them. Most of them apply specifically to one or another of the stages, and we will consider each of them when the most appropriate time comes. What I would like to emphasize, however, is that my concern is not so much to familiarize the reader with each stage in all its details but rather to use each stage as the occasion to examine a typical example of the faith dynamic or process at work and to point out how and why the process of growth in faith can often be arrested or thrown off the tracks completely. To some extent Fowler’s “stages” are merely like rungs on a ladder. I’m much more concerned with the upward movement of the feet of
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the person than I am with either the order or the number of the rungs. But first we must look at the first two steps.
“Undifferentiated” or Instinctive Faith
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