The Urantia Book Fellowship

The Challenges of Faith in the Quest for Cosmic Citizenship:
3. The Specific Stages of Faith Development: James Fowler

Introduction to the Stages of Faith Development

In a study of The Urantia Book, it becomes possible to construct a model of spiritual development in which there are specific stages through which we pass on our journey from infancy to old age.

In Paper 180 we're told about the four levels of the Golden Rule.  In Paper 101 we're told about four levels of philosophy.  Hidden away in Paper 5 is a discussion of four levels of the realization of values. And in Paper 110 the seven psychic circles are described as "progressive levels of consciousness of experiential relationship to the Supreme Being -- cosmic citizenship." 

If we attempt to find some correlation between these developmental stages, a model emerges which fits nicely with developmental stages of psycho-social growth identified by Erick Erickson, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and James Fowler. 

Please note that not everyone fits into the pattern which is described here.  Some people move through all the stages; others move slowly through some of the stages but not all of them; the majority of people find equilibrium at a particular stage and never move on at all.

It is also important to appreciate that these stages refer to faith attitudes which dominate the decision-making processes of the personality.  For example, we may be in intellectual accord with the idea that all men and women are our brothers and sisters, but this does not mean that we have yet reached the place of social or spiritual maturity where we make our all our value choices relative to this idea in our interactions with people in day-to-day life. 

These stages of faith may be understood as paradigms within which our lives as persons take place.  We'll consider each of these stages to be conditioned by five factors which are:

    • Personal values
    • Social values
    • Supportive stories
    • Faith experience
    • Faith challenges 

We will proceed by looking at each stage of faith and the changes which occur in the five elements as we progress through life.

 

Primal Faith: Parental establishment of personality foundations for spiritual development

There are some important precursors to faith which develop between infancy and the beginning of language acquirement. 

Fundamental faith attitudes are established almost exclusively as a result of the relationship between the newborn child and its caretakers.  The Urantia Book refers to parenthood as “the supreme responsibility of human existence.”  Jesus “exalted family life as the highest human duty.”  I refer you as well to the conversation which Jesus had with John Mark about the importance of early home life in Paper 177.

In this early stage of life the seeds of trust, courage, hope and love must be nurtured in an environment in which fears of abandonment, inconsistencies and deprivations may be present. The quality of personal interaction, the strength of trust, autonomy, hope and courage developed in this period support all that comes later in faith development.

Stage 1 Faith: Intuitive/Projective Faith

The faith experience at this stage consists of the attitudes which we form toward our interactions with our primary caregivers.

Stage 1 Personal Values

In this stage personal values center completely around the needs of the self.

Stage 1 Social Values

In this stage we learn how to manage life by imitating our primary caretakers.  We are powerfully influenced by their examples, moods, actions and the characters in the stories they tell us. 

Ideas of justice and fairness are viewed in terms of punishment and reward.

We assume without question that the experiences and perceptions we have of life represent the only available perspective and that this perspective is identical to that which is held by everyone else. 

Stage 1 Supportive Stories

Imagination, stimulated by stories, gestures and symbols, and not yet controlled by logical thinking, combines with intuition and feelings to create long-lasting images that represent both the protective and threatening powers in our life.

Stage 1 Faith Experience

We experience faith as trust in primary care givers.  Our beliefs are unconsciously assimilated from the basic beliefs and attitudes of family members. 

Stage 1 Faith Challenges

The challenge of this period results from the emergence of rational thinking combined with the arrival of a Thought Adjuster.  At the heart of this transition is a growing concern to know how life works and to clarify for ourselves the distinctions between what is real and what only seems to be real.

Stage 2 Faith: Mythic/Literal Faith

The emergent strength of this stage is the forming of stories of faith; stories which help to explain our role in social systems, and which contain our first symbolizations of the mysterious and the unknown.  At this stage we experience entrance into the seventh psychic circle. Cosmic citizenship becomes potential here because the personality has exhibited the capacity to make choices relative to the well-being of other personalities.

Stage 2 Personal Values

In this stage other people are viewed in terms of how they will impact the needs of the self to feel secure, needed, loved, free, important, and esteemed.

A basic form of moral judgment emerges which is based on ideas of reciprocal fairness. “I did this for you, now you must do this for me.”

Understandings of God in this stage also take on a pattern of reciprocity.  We engage in prayers and acts of praise in an attempt to store up God’s good favor against times when special help or forgiveness may be needed -- we try to make “deals” with God.

Stage 2 Social Values

The boundaries of social consciousness in this stage extend to people who “are like us” in familial, ethnic, racial, class and religious terms. 

The locus of authority is in the family and the family’s immediate community.  People in authority roles recognized by the family become authority figures for us. Experiences in school and exposure to mass media create the beginning of awareness that a larger world exists than that of the family and immediate community.

Stage 2 Supportive Stories

If we picture the flow of our lives as a river, this stage tells stories that describe our perspective from the middle of the river.  In this stage we do not have the ability to step out on the bank beside the river and reflect on stories about the nature of the river itself.

In this stage we begin to take on for ourselves the stories, beliefs and observances that symbolize belonging to our community. 

Stage 2 Faith Experience

In this stage we place full trust in our primary care givers and the values of our significant community.  We become idealists and assume that everyone and everything should be perfect -- family, friends, teachers, school, neighborhood and church. "Perfection" at this stage is understood to be conformance to the values of our significant community.

We tend to possess a great degree of certitude; we have complete confidence in our perceptions (things are either black or white) and in our opinions (we are always right). 

Stage 2 Faith Challenges

Our transition into Stage 3 begins with the discovery that there are competing stories whose meanings contradict each other.  This leads to reflection on those various meanings.  The transition to more formal thinking makes such reflection possible and necessary.  Previous literalism breaks down and an overconfidence in our own assessments leads to disillusionment with previous teachers and teachings.  Conflicts between authoritative stories must be faced.  For example, conflicts between the Genesis story of creation and evolutionary theory.  The discovery of such conflicts as well as growing awareness of a greater world create the need to find some means of unifying the increasingly diverse content of mind and experience.

Stage 3 Faith: Conventional and Synthesized Faith

In this stage faith attitudes are synthesized from one’s own experience combined with the attitudes expressed within one’s significant social communities.   The emergent strength of this stage is the forming of identity and the shaping of a personal faith.  In many people this stage is sustained throughout life.

Sage 3 Personal Values

In Stage 3, values center on the support of roles which we imagine ourselves to be playing in the social environment.  Moral judgment is based largely on interpersonal expectations and implicit understandings reached between people.

Stage 3 Social Values

In stage 3, other persons are known and evaluated in terms of their supposed personal qualities and interpersonal ways of relating. 

Our self-image is increasingly derived from roles we imagine ourselves to be playing in our families and in our peer relationships.  In a strongly religious person, identity at this stage is usually derived from an imagined role in a powerful mythological story or drama.

Stage 3 Supportive Stories

The forming of a personal myth is a primary element of this stage -- the myth of our own becoming.  We create this personal myth by incorporating stories of our past and anticipated future into our understanding of the world.

Because at this stage our religious hunger is for a God who knows, accepts and confirms our deepest self, with its developing myth of personal identity and faith, it is not surprising that many of the images for transcendence that appeal to us in this stage have the characteristics of a divinely personal significant other, such as a personal saint, angel, companion or other divine being.

Stage 3 Faith Experience

In this stage, the growing extensions of social boundaries lead to the synthesis of a world view derived from stories and symbols of the family, religion of the family, peer group beliefs, and mass media.

At this stage, faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of an increasingly complex and diverse range of involvements.  Faith must unify values and information; and it must provide a basis for temporal identity.

Stage 3 faith typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for the majority of people it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium.  It is a “conformist” stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of other people.  It does not yet have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective.

At Stage 3 we acquire an “ideology,” a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but we have not examined it and in a sense are unaware of having it.  Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in “kind” of person.

Stage 3 Faith Challenges

At this stage, formal operational thinking, with its new capacity for reflection on our own thought and ways of experiencing, invites us mentally to step outside the flow of life’s river and to analyze the process.  From a vantage point on the river bank, we can take a look at the flow of the river as a whole.

Faith at this stage is “synthetic” in that it is non-analytical;  It develops as a result of choosing various meanings and values which exist in the social environment and which are implemented in the behaviors of significant persons in our social communities.

A discussion of values and beliefs by a Stage 3 person is a means of asserting his or her solidarity with the community which is considered one's own and from which social identity is derived.  This person does not discuss values in order to be sure that they accurately reflect cosmic reality.  Rather, in discussions he or she seeks to establish a sense of commonality with significant other individuals or members of a significant community.  In fact, at this stage intellectual analysis of the elements of faith is often viewed as a lack of faith, a failure of faith, or a betrayal of faith. 

The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold.  The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized.  Interpersonal betrayals may give rise either to despair about the possiblities of a personal God or to a compensatory intimacy with God which is not really related to practical matters of daily life.

Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources, or the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how our beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how “relative” they are to our particular group, education or background. 

Stage 4 Faith: The Reflective Faith of an Individual

The emergent strength of this stage is the reflective construction of a personal ideology and the formation of a vocational dream with its imagined social identity. 

Stage 4 Personal Values

In this stage we become conscious of being an individual with values which may differ from those held by our significant social groups.  But we are still not likely to attend to the unconscious factors influencing our judgments, beliefs and behaviors.

Stage 4 Social Values

In Stage 4 we construct a perspective more aware of social systems and institutions. The ability to function relative to social systems seems to be the key to breaking through the third psychic circle.  Just as the making of a moral choice indicates the presence of a personality ready to begin the process of developing interpersonal relationships, so does the ability to function consciously as a living part of a social system indicate potential for functioning consciously as a living part of the Supreme.  This means that we have become capable of making moral choices which are simultaneously relative to the welfare of a social system as well as to the welfare of specific individuals comprising that social system. This is the point at which we are assigned a personal seraphic guardian of destiny.  This seraphim will then work to guide us through the remaining circles, toward functional identity with the Supreme and true cosmic citizenship.

Many people complete only half of the transition to Stage 4.  By virtue of experience, many persons come face-to-face with the relativity of their perspectives on life.  But they fail to interrupt their reliance on external sources of authority—and may even strengthen their reliance upon them—in order to cope with the insecurity of this relativity. 

Stage 4 Supportive Stories

Rational thinking dominates; symbols and stories which were meaningful in earlier stages are consciously rejected although they inevitably continue to operate unconsciously.  The dominant story of this stage is often a vocational dream with it's projected identity in the social mileu.

Inherited beliefs and stories are replaced with stories and symbols of the scientific and philosophical world.

Stage 4 Faith Experience

For those who have previously enjoyed an unquestioning relationship with God and to their fellow worshipers through a set of religious symbols, the Stage 4 translation of the meanings and values of religious symbols into the elements of rational thought can bring a sense of loss, dislocation, grief and even guilt.  Of necessity, if we are to make this transition, we must grapple with doubt and we must have the courage to take the risk of moving forward to wherever the unflinching quest for truth might take us.

1773:5  160:1.8 "The solution of life problems requires courage and sincerity. Only honest and brave individuals are able to follow valiantly through the perplexing and confusing maze of living to where the logic of a fearless mind may lead. And this emancipation of the mind and soul can never be effected without the driving power of an intelligent enthusiasm which borders on religious zeal. It requires the lure of a great ideal to drive man on in the pursuit of a goal which is beset with difficult material problems and manifold intellectual hazards."

Stage 4's strength has to do with its capacity for critical evaluation.  But there is danger in this strength.  An excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought can create excessive self-confidence.  At this stage there is usually passionate attachment to the philosophical or metaphysical universe frames which we construct for ourselves.

Stage 4 Faith Challenges

The task of this stage is the construction of an individual world view based on critical, reflective thought.

Stage 5 Faith: Integrative/Expanding Faith

Unusual before midlife, Stage 5 knows intimately the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts.  Its emergent strength is the ability to live with paradox and to develop a sense of responsibility for the world which spans beyond the attainables of one’s lifetime.

Stage 5 Personal Values

Stage 5 involves going beyond the rational systems and clear boundaries of Stage 4 to include our unconscious processes.  In this stage we must come to terms with the fact that the conscious ego is not master in its own house.  Stage 5 understands that the content of faith, as well as the symbols and stories used to understand and share faith, are all shaped by unconscious processes.

The disrupting trends of our unconscious processes are one of the great problems of religious life.  If we fail to consciously establish a uniting center of values, relative to which we attempt to relate all of the processes of our inner lives—including our unconscious needs and desires—the result can be an uncomfortable failure of personality integration.

By this I mean that we find ourselves functioning relative to different sets of values in different social settings.  We have failed to integrate our personality relative to a central core of values.  The establishment of such a central core of values results in an orientation of personality  which persists across our participation in various social contexts.  Achieving this degree of personality integration is a crucial precursor to Adjuster fusion.  It is a necessary achievement for the attainment of a functional level of cosmic citizenship. 

Moral judgment in stage 5 reaches beyond the interests of the self and one's community and seeks higher principles which are universal in nature. There is a deepened sense of self as both individual and an integral part of the human community.  There is a recognition of oneself as paradox: both gifted and flawed, strong and weak.  There may be a revival and expansion of earlier perceptions of the self as defined by a role played in a metaphysical drama.

The tasks of this stage are:

  • 1. The recognition and acceptance of life as having contradictory or inconsistent qualities.
  • 2. A reworking of the image of self and world integrating symbol, story and scientific/philosophic understanding.
  • 3. An understanding that “truth” is found within numerous stories and interpretations, not exclusively within one’s own.
  • 4. A claiming and reworking of the meaning and value of one’s own life, past and present.

Stage 5 Social Values

The boundary of social consciousness now seeks to become more universal in nature.  There is a deepened interest in the values of groups, social classes and traditions other than one's own.

There is an integration of our judgments and experiences with reflection on claims made by others and of various expressions of cumulative human wisdom.  We begin to function in more consciously effective liason with the Adjuster in the choosing of the values relative to which we make our decisions. 

Symbolic thinking regains equal value with critical and reflective thinking.  The power and logic of the rational intellect is increasingly utilitzed to identify and integrate unconscious processes.  Old symbols acquire a new richness of meaning and value.  There is a growing recognition that all “knowing” is metaphoric; there is a readiness for participation in the reality expressed in symbol and myth.

Our world view is becomes that of the universe as a living organism of which the self is a living, contributing part.  This is not merely an intellectual assent to an idea.  Rather does this concept of the universe as a living organism become the central point of value relative to which we choose the moral and spiritual values which are implemented into our behaviors and decision-making processes.

Stage 5 Supportive Stories

At Stage 5, self-selected supportive stories provide symbolic representations of the infinite.  There is an openness to meanings and values which might be derived from other stories.  There is a recognition that the purpose of stories is to facilitate the choosing of higher meanings and values rather than to authoritatively represent actual reality.

Stage 5 Faith Experience

In the domain of faith there is an increasing effort to live relative to one’s best understanding of God’s purposes.  There is a sense that we are participants in a created, ordered universe; that the Creator is ultimately in control; that our existence contains meaning and is of value in the universe.

Belief at this stage includes a realization and acceptance of the fact that all human ideas and understandings are fallible and destined to change.  There is an understanding that God alone is infallible and changeless.  A genuine openness to the truths of traditions and communities other than one’s own appears.

Stage 5 Faith Challenges

Stage 4 is satisfied with an “either/or”, “black and white” view of reality in which concepts are well-defined by rigorous logical thinking.  Stage 5 sees both (or the many) sides of an issue simultaneously and suspects that things are organically related to each other.

Stage 5 understands that truth is more multidimensional and organically interdependent than most theories or accounts of truth can grasp.  Stage 5 also sees that the relativity of religious traditions which matters is not their relativity to each other, but their relativity to the reality to which they mediate relationship.  Stage 5's radical openness to the truth of other traditions is not mere tolerance; it stems from the awareness that the reality of the infinite is greater than any medium of expression.

The new strength of this stage is a capacity to fully accept the most powerful meanings of our personal experience or of our social group, while simultaneously recognizing that these values are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality.  The danger of this stage lies in the direction of a paralyzing complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.

1138:5  103:7.7 "What both developing science and religion need is more searching and fearless self-criticism, a greater awareness of incompleteness in evolutionary status. The teachers of both science and religion are often altogether too self-confident and dogmatic. Science and religion can only be self-critical of their facts. The moment departure is made from the stage of facts, reason abdicates or else rapidly degenerates into a consort of false logic."

Stage 5 involves a critical recognition of our social unconscious–the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of our nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.

Crisis leading from Stage 5 to Stage 6

The crisis leading to Stage 6 is the recognition that loyalty to emerging new meanings and values may require sacrifice -- of our lifestyle, social position, or in some cases, of life itself.

Stage 6 Faith: Universalizing Faith

Here we begin to participate in “the faith of Jesus” as described in Paper 196.  This is also the level of the first psychic circle.

Stage 6 Personal Values

In Stage 6 the center of value is the evolving Supreme Being.  All moral values are calculated relative to this central reality and an attempt is made to understand the will of God as a critical determiner of value choices.  The self and all others are regarded as children of God.

Stage 6 Social Values

This stage sees the emergence of universal ethical principles.  The boundaries of social consciousness are expanded to include personal identification with an evolving universe of personality relationships

Not only does Stage 6 understand its relationship to the Supreme, the Stage 6 individual’s life is dominated by motives deriving from this insight.  Stage 6 understands the nature of one’s participation in an inclusive commonwealth of being.  While Stage 5 acts out of loyalty to the present order, to its institutions, groups, and compromise procedures, Stage 6 involves becoming an activist incarnation of the imperatives of the great commandment which Jesus gave us -- that we love one another as he loved us. 

The locus of authority is centered on personal judgment informed by the experiences and truths of previous stages, purified of egoistic striving, and linked by disciplined intuition to the principle of being and to the purposes of a transcendent power.

The world is understood as a living part of a universal spiritual creation of a divinely integrated intelligence. 

Stage 6 Supportive Stories

Personal and social identity at Stage 6 is experienced as relationship to the Supreme.  It transcends forms of social identity projected from roles in social or metaphysical stories which supported faith in earlier stages.  Stories may be used to symbolize various truths but the individual is likely to draw upon a larger pool of stories instead of relying on a single story.

In earlier stages our stories provided a means for imagining and projecting identity within the social mileu.  Stage 6 identity becomes a repercussion of our fuller participation in the work of the Supreme.  It is no longer something we project and try to sustain -- consciously or unconsciously.  Someone like Mother Thresea might be a good example of a person whose social identity was a repercussion of her service to the Supreme rather than an artifact created by her psychological processes and projected into her social environment.

Stage 6 Faith Experience

Stage 6 faith is faith in God and in God’s purposes; the dedication of our will to the doing of the will of God to the best of our understanding.  

In stage 6, beliefs about God become less important than our personal experience of God as active and present in our life and in the world.

Stage 6 Faith Challenges

The tasks of this stage are:

  • 1. Steadfast and loyal devotion to doing the will of God, as it is best understood.
  • 2. Living a life of service -- to both friends and enemies.
  • 3. Non-resistance to evil
  • 4. Living out, through faith, the highest interpretation of the Golden Rule -- learning to love one another as Jesus loved us.

Stage 6 is exceedingly rare.  The persons best described by it have become incarnators and actualizers of the spirit of an inclusive and fulfilled human community.  They are powerful in the sense that they create zones of liberation from the social, political, economic and ideological shackles we place and tolerate on human life.  Through their decisions and actions they help humanity to experientially know the meaning of living in the presence of God. 

1095:6  100:2.2 "Spiritual growth is first an awakening to needs, next a discernment of meanings, and then a discovery of values. The evidence of true spiritual development consists in the exhibition of a human personality motivated by love, activated by unselfish ministry, and dominated by the wholehearted worship of the perfection ideals of divinity. And this entire experience constitutes the reality of religion as contrasted with mere theological beliefs."

Beyond paradox and polarities, persons in this stage are grounded in a oneness with the Supreme.  Their visions and commitments free them for a passionate yet detached spending of the self in love, devoted to overcoming division, oppression, and violence.

It is important to appreciate that we are not engaged in the faith adventure alone.  God is seeking to find us and to commune with us.

1733:6  155:6.18 "You are my apostles, and to you religion shall not become a theologic shelter to which you may flee in fear of facing the rugged realities of spiritual progress and idealistic adventure; but rather shall your religion become the fact of real experience which testifies that God has found you, idealized, ennobled, and spiritualized you, and that you have enlisted in the eternal adventure of finding the God who has thus found and sonshipped you."

Next: How Do We Work to Progress Through The Stages of Faith?