信仰发展阶段

信仰发展阶段（stages of faith development）是美国亚特兰大艾文理大学坎德勒神学院（Candler School of Theology）教授、发展心理学家詹姆士·福勒（James W. Fowler）在《信仰的阶段》（Stages of Faith）一书中提出的理论。概述提供了一个框架，其中许多思想有深刻的见解，其中大量来自于对 宗教的兴趣。

该书提出了人一生信仰（或灵性）的发展阶段。这个理论与让·皮亚杰、爱利克·埃里克森和劳伦斯·柯尔伯格关于儿童和成人心理发展的著作关系密切。

福勒的理论已经受到来自心理学和神学的质疑，而且未能得到经验证实。

福勒的阶段(待翻譯)

Faith is seen as a holistic orientation, and is concerned with the individual's relatedness to the universal. Fowler defines faith as an activity of trusting, committing and relating to the world based on a set of assumptions of how one is related to others and the world.

準階段 – "Primal or Undifferentiated" faith (birth to 2 years), is characterized by an early learning of the safety of their environment (i.e. warm, safe and secure vs. hurt, neglect and abuse). If consistent nurture is experienced, one will develop a sense of trust and safety about the universe and the divine. Conversely, negative experiences will cause one to develop distrust with the universe and the divine. Transition to the next stage begins with integration of thought and languages which facilitates the use of symbols in speech and play.

第一階段 – "Intuitive-Projective" faith (ages of three to seven), is characterized by the psyche's unprotected exposure to the Unconscious.

第二階段 – "Mythic-Literal" faith (mostly in school children), stage two persons have a strong belief in the justice and reciprocity of the universe, and their deities are almost always anthropomorphic.

第三階段 – "Synthetic-Conventional" faith (arising in adolescence; aged 12 to adulthood) characterized by conformity to religious authority and the development of a personal identity. Any conflicts with one's beliefs are ignored at this stage due to the fear of threat from inconsistencies.

第四階段 – "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-twenties to late thirties) a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for his or her beliefs and feelings. As one is able to reflect on one's own beliefs, there is an openness to a new complexity of faith, but this also increases the awareness of conflicts in one's belief.

第五階段 – "Conjunctive" faith (mid-life crisis) acknowledges paradox and transcendence relating reality behind the symbols of inherited systems. The individual resolves conflicts from previous stages by a complex understanding of a multidimensional, interdependent "truth" that cannot be explained by any particular statement.

第六階段 – "Universalizing" faith, or what some might call "enlightenment". The individual would treat any person with compassion as he or she views people as from a universal community, and should be treated with universal principles of love and justice.

批评

首先，(待翻譯) Fowler lifted his schema directly and uncritically from Lawerence Kohlberg's stages of moral development which research was based upon observation of Inuit villagers in a very traditional society, with established social structures in place to inculcate a given moral outlook within a set socio-ethnic environment. No evidence exists that these stages could be or indeed are replicated in the context of non-traditional, modern urban societies that lack the established means of inculcating moral outlooks that can be found in nearly all traditional societies.

In this sense, Kohlberg and Fowler share the identical mistake of generalizing from the particular to the universal, and of ignoring the disconnects between modern, secular urban society and traditional non-urban and religiously grounded societies. And in fact there really is no comparison between the two. Traditional societies have rather strictly enforced moral systems, and rely heavily on the humanity of what Max Weber called "traditional authority" (of shamans, priests, parents, elders, chiefs and the like) to inculcate and maintain these values. Conversely, modern secular urban societies lack any consistent means of inculcating a common morality, let alone a series of consistent developmental moral stages. This very fact has led to a radical kind of ideational and behavioral pluralism in modern societies, and philosophically to a complete moral relativism. For these reasons, Kohlberg's own conclusions about the existence of consisten human stages are highly dubious, and Fowler's dependent claims of a system of "faith development" are even more dubious.

Given the flawed basis of his system, it is not surprising that Fowler's model has been attacked from the standpoint of scientific research, due to methodological weaknesses. Thus, despite the widespread use of statistical & empirical approaches in psychology for at least a generation, only the first two of Fowler's seven (0-6)stages have found empirical support, and these were heavily based upon Piaget's stages of cognitive development. Even more damning is the fact that no evidence exists that children up to the age of twelve years tend to be in the first two of these stages. Empirical evidence shows, moreover, that adults over the age of sixty-one show considerable variations in displays of qualities of Stages 3 and beyond. Fowler's model has generated some empirical studies, and fuller descriptions of this research (and of these seven stages) can be found in Wulff (1991).

The tables and graphs in the book were presented in such a way that the last four stages appeared to be validated, but the requirements of statistical verification of the stages did not come close to having been met. The study was not published in a journal, so was not peer-reviewed, and never drew much attention from psychologists.

Other critics of Fowler have questioned whether his ordering of the stages really reflects his own commitment to a rather liberal Christian Protestant outlook, as if to say that people who adopt a similar viewpoint to Fowler are at higher stages of faith development. Of course, any one who has been around Fowler and his students (at Emory University deprecated as "Fowler clones") and especially who has studied with him, knows this claim to be true. Fowler's system creates a hierarchy of valuation by which various competing moral systems held by ethically mature adults can be judged and ranked. Thus, religious conversion to traditional Christianity or Judaism would rank third on a scale of 7 (as would conversion to the form of Mahayana Buddhism prevalent in Southeast Asia that stresses the role of the Bodisatva), i.e., Fowler's level 2, since he begins with "0". The loose universalism he places at the top of his scale employs Buddhist terminology ("enlightenment"), even though Buddhism takes a much stricter moral view than does Fowler. Fowler has thus structured his system to allow him to declare his own pre-conceived liberal world view as "enlightened" while at the same time denigrating other competing and equally (if not more) valid world views.

It is appropriate then, that the concepts Fowler introduced seemed to hit home with those in the circles of academic religion, and have provided a starting point for various theories and subsequent studies. In this context, however, it is an indisputable fact that the circles of academic religionists in which Fowler writes are overwhelmingly from the left, and espouse universalist notions of religion and ethics. According to Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post (29 March 2005, p. C1), "College faculties...lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined..." In the elite schools from which Fowler hails (Harvard) and in which he teaches (Emory), "87% of faculty are liberal and 13% are conservative." In religious studies, moreover, only 31% admit regular church attendance, while 51% "...never attend church or synagogue." Kurtz based his article on a study by Stanley Rothman (Smith College) and Neil Nevitte (University of Toronto) which surveyed 1643 full-time faculty from 183 institutions of higher learning.

Fowler's idea regarding stages of faith has been popular among proponents of transpersonal psychology.

参见

• 让·皮亚杰：认知发展理论
• 爱利克·埃里克森：埃里克森社会心理发展阶段
• 劳伦斯·柯尔伯格：柯尔伯格道德发展阶段
• 发展心理学
  • 发展阶段
• 宗教心理学

外部链接

• Craig R. Dykstra "Transformation in Faith and Morals" Theology Today 39(1)
• James Fowler's Stages of Faith in Profile

参考书目

• Fowler, James W. (1981). Stages of Faith, Harper & Row ISBN 0-06-062866-9.
• Wulff, D. M., Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (2nd ed), New York, Wiley, 1997.
• Volume dedicated to the Faith Development Theory of James Fowler in The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. 11(3). 2001. For example:
  • Heinz Streib, "The Symposium on Faith Development Theory and the Modern Paradigm", pp. 141-142.
  • John McDargh "Faith Development Theory and the Postmodern Problem of Foundations", pp. 185-199
  • Zastrow, C., Kirst-Ashman, K. (2007). Understanding human behavior and the social environment (7th ed.) Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
  • Howard Kurtz, "College Faculties a Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds", WP, Tuesday 29 Mar 2005, p. C1.
  • Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte (2005) "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty," The Forum: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1, Article 2.

Available at: http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2

• • Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, Fundamentals and Fundamentalists: A Reply to Ames et al.2 (July 2005)