Stages of Faith

In his book, Weaving the New Creation (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), James Fowler proposes six stages of faith that closely relate to our physiological developmental stages and that include cognitive, affective and behavioral elements of religious development at different life stages.

1. Intuitive-Projective Faith (early childhood): Here imagination, stimulated by stories, gestures, and symbols and not yet controlled by logical thinking, combines with perception and feelings to create long-lasting faith images. These images represent both the protective and the threatening powers surrounding one's life. This stage corresponds with the awakening of moral emotions and standards in the second year of life. It corresponds as well with the awareness of taboos and the sacred and with the struggle for a balance of autonomy and will with shame and construction in the child's forming self. Representations of God take conscious form in this period and draw, for good or ill, on children's experiences of their parents or other adults to whom they are emotionally attached in the first years of life.

2. Mythic-Literal Faith (elementary-school years through early adolescence): Here concrete operational thinking--the developing ability to think logically--emerges to help us order the world with categories of causality, space, time, and number. We can now sort out the real from the make-believe, the actual from fantasy. We can enter into the perspectives of others, and we become capable of capturing life and meanings in narrative and stories.

3. Synthetic-Conventional Faith (middle adolescence): The emergence of formal operational thinking opens the way for reliance upon abstract ideas and concepts for making sense of one's world. The person can now reflect upon past experiences and search them for meaning and pattern. At the same time, concerns about one's personal future--one's identity, one's work, career, or vocation--and one's personal relationships become important. These new cognitive abilities make possible mutual interpersonal perspective taking. Here in friendship or the first intimacy of "puppy love" young persons begin to be aware of the mirroring of self provided by the responses of persons whose feelings about them matter . . .These newly personal relations with significant others correlate with a hunger for a personal relation to God in which we feel ourselves to be known and loved in deep and comprehensive ways.

4. Individuative-Reflective Faith (presumably, young adulthood): One the one hand, to move into the Individuative-Reflective stage, we have to question, examine, and reclaim the values and beliefs that we have formed to that point in our lives. They become explicit [consciously chosen] commitments rather than tacit [unexamined] commitments . . .now one maintains that commitment and identity by choice and explicit assent rather than by unconscious formation and tacit commitment . . .By the time we are adolescents, we have a number of different characters we play in the drama of our lives. The task of the Individuative stage is to put in place an "executive ego"--the "I" who manages and "has" all these roles and relations yet is not fully expressed in any one of them. It means taking charge of one's life in a new way. It means claiming a new quality of reflective autonomy and responsibility.

5. Conjunctive Faith (mid-life or beyond): This stage involves the embrace and integration of opposites or polarities in one's life. . .Here symbol and story, metaphor and myth, both from our own traditions and from others, seem to be newly appreciated . . .Having looked critically at traditions and translated their meanings into conceptual understandings, one experiences a hunger for a deeper relationship to the reality that symbols mediate . . .In this stage it becomes important to let biblical narrative draw us into it and let it read our lives, reforming and shaping them, rather than our reading and forming the meanings of the text.

6. Universalizing Faith: Beyond paradox and polarities, persons in the Universalizing stage are grounded in a oneness with the power of being or God. Their visions and commitments seem to free them for a passionate yet detached spending of the self in love. Such persons are devoted to overcoming division, oppression, and violence, and live in effective anticipatory response to an inbreaking commonwealth of love and justice, the reality of an inbreaking kingdom of God.