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Stages of Faith

The document outlines James Fowler's stages of faith development, including primal faith in infancy, intuitive-projective faith in early childhood, mythic-literal faith in middle childhood, synthetic-conventional faith in adolescence, individuative-reflective faith in young adulthood, conjunctive faith in midlife, and universalizing faith attained by few. It also briefly discusses John Westerhoff's stages of experienced, affiliative, searching, and owned faith.

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Maria Arshad
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409 views

Stages of Faith

The document outlines James Fowler's stages of faith development, including primal faith in infancy, intuitive-projective faith in early childhood, mythic-literal faith in middle childhood, synthetic-conventional faith in adolescence, individuative-reflective faith in young adulthood, conjunctive faith in midlife, and universalizing faith attained by few. It also briefly discusses John Westerhoff's stages of experienced, affiliative, searching, and owned faith.

Uploaded by

Maria Arshad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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STAGES OF FAITH

James W. Fowler
• Fowler’s work is not focused on a
particular religious tradition
• For Fowler, faith is a universal quality of
human life
• “Faith” is a dynamic, changing evolving
process, a way of being
• Fowler’s “stages” are “still shots” in a
complex, dynamic process
• Fowler’s stages are not meant to be an
evaluative scale. There are individuals at
each stage who are persons of serenity,
courage and genuine faith
PRIMAL FAITH
• Infancy: bonding and attachment,
relationship, trust, baby’s memories of
maternal and paternal presence
• These early experiences shape the
images of God that take more or less
conscious form by the fourth or fifth year of
life
STAGE 1: INTUITIVE –
PROJECTIVE FAITH
• Age 2 – 7: language development,
communication, interpretation of the world
• Perception, feelings, and imaginative fantasy
make up the child’s principal ways of knowing
and transforming their experiences
• Stories, symbols and examples help give the
world unity and sense
• The symbols, stories and shared life of a
religious tradition give a child an expanded
horizon of meanings
STAGE 2: MYTHIC – LITERAL
FAITH
• Concrete operational thinking: stable categories
of space, time and causality make the child’s
constructions of experience much less
dependent on feeling and fantasy
• Ability to recognize others’ perspectives:
recognize right, wrong, goodness, evil
• Faith becomes a matter of reliance on the
stories, rules and implicit values of the family’s
community of meanings
• Narrative & story become important
• Faith involves valuing the stories, practices
and beliefs of one’s faith community &
tradition
STAGE 3: SYNTHETIC –
CONVENTIONAL FAITH
• Typically begins to emerge in early adolescence
• Formal operational thinking: ideal possibilities,
hypothetical considerations
• Synthetic: pulling disparate elements of one’s life
into an integrated unity
• Conventional: Values, beliefs derived from a
group of significant others
• Strong, deeply held beliefs, yet largely
unexamined, no critical self-reflection
• Strong sense of identity through face-to-face
membership with those with shared beliefs
STAGE 4: INDIVIDUATIVE –
REFLECTIVE FAITH
• Persons objectify, examine, make critical
choices about the defining elements of their
identity and faith
• More explicit commitment and accountability
• Emergence of “self,” no longer defined by the
composite of one’s roles or meanings to others
• Bringing beliefs and lived experience into unity
• This transition may typically occur in early
adulthood, but for others it comes, if at all, later
STAGE 5: CONJUNCTIVE FAITH
• Midlife or beyond; ‘coincidence of opposites’ –
emergent awareness of the need to face and
hold together polar tensions in one’s life:
life/death, old/young
• Acknowledges paradox of different perspectives
on truth as being intrinsic to that truth
• Genuine openness to the truths of other
traditions and faith communities
• We try to “shape our dance in relation to God’s
movements”
• Realization that God shows forth the divine
purpose for all persons and nations
STAGE 6: UNIVERSALIZING
FAITH
• Few individuals reach this stage
• A sense of being in but not of the world
• A decentration from self: circle of those who
count expands – all of humankind
• Valuing and valuation are centered in the
Creator: the individual participates in the valuing
of the Creator and values other beings, and
being, from the standpoint of the Creator
• Examples: Mother Teresa, Ghandhi, Martin
Luther King, Dietrick Bonhoeffer
STAGES OF FAITH
DEVELOPMENT: John
Westerhoff III
• EXPERIENCED FAITH: (preschool, early
childhood) Interactions with other ‘faithing
selves’; experiencing God’s love through
others
• AFFILIATIVE FAITH: Belonging to a faith
community, identifying with its ‘story’,
participating in its activities
• SEARCHING FAITH (adolescence, early
adulthood): Doubt, critical judgment,
inquiry into meanings of the “story”,
experimentation, testing one’s tradition by
learning about others, a need for
commitment
• OWNED FAITH: “Conversion” – sudden or
gradual, desire to witness to faith in both
word and deed, conscious part of a
person’s identity, desire to reach full
potential as intended by God, sense of
lifelong faith journey

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