Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian - Seven Stages of Faith (Stages 1 & 2)

In my previous post, The House of My Soul is Small..., I introduced a book by James W. Fowler entitled Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian and shared a brief line about each of Fowler's seven stages of faith in this book.

Today I'll share in more detail what he says about the first two stages: Primal Faith and Intuitive-Projective Faith. Fowler uses terms of our growth and maturity as humans (from infant to elderly) to describe our growth in God.

1) Primal Faith: this is the infant stage. "During the first year, the mutual task of the baby and those providing care involve bonding and attachment, as well as the generation of a trusting give-and-take." In this stage, the baby hasn't develop his/her full sense of selfhood but already struggles for some balance of trust in the worth of the self and in the rely-ability of the environment made up of those under whose care the self has begun to form.

"The first symbols of faith are likely to take primitive form in the baby's hard-won memories of maternal and paternal presence. As dependable realities who go away but can be trusted to return, our primary care givers constitute our first experiences of superordinate power and wisdom, as well as our dependence." Because of the profound impact that these "primal others" have on us early in life, their mixtures of harshness and tenderness and rigidity and grace all are present in the images of God that begin to take form when we are around 4 or 5 years old. We transfer what we experience from primary care givers onto our image of God.

In this first stage of development, the struggle is for "basic trust versus basic mistrust." A child that is raised in a relatively healthy loving environment enjoys basic trust in this stage.

2) Intuitive-Projective Faith: starting around age two a revolution begins for the child as language emerges to now mediate his/her relationship with others and the world. "Language makes possible a qualitatively new reflectiveness on the environment and a qualitatively new reflexiveness with regard to the self...The child, now able to walk freely and question everything, daily encounters novelties and newness...Perception, feelings, and imaginative fantasy make up children's principal ways of knowing - and transforming - their experiences." 

In this stage of growth, the child forms "deep and long-lasting images" that keep their world of meaning together. It's a time in which he/she is waking up to the larger community and world around them...

Faith is more intuitive in this stage of development. We know by perception and imagination more than by logic.

In the next post we'll look at the next two stages: mythic-literal faith and synthetic-conventional faith.