Based on numerous interviews he has conducted, Fowler has come up with the six-stages of faith development: Intuitive-Projective faith(egocentric, fantasy-reality confusion); Mythic-Literal faith(narrative-centered, literal reciprocity); Synthetic-Conventional faith(little reflection, accepting what everyone else accepts); Individuative-Reflective faith(critical reflection); Conjunctive faith(critical reengaging with the religious); Universalizing faith(incarnation of absolute love and justice). For Fowler, faith is not necessarily to be equated with something religious; rather, it is universal among all human beings, and could be described as a mode of knowing(25). Even so, Fowler’s definition of faith in the following appears to be inextricable from religion: the person’s or group’s way of responding to transcendent value and power as perceived and grasped through the forms of the cumulative tradition (9).
In this review, for all the book’s enormous contribution to diverse academic discourses, stirring more research and debates in the field of human development, I would like to point out that the book is still fraught with presuppositions that were not thoroughly examined and justified, two of which I will primarily concentrate on. First, Fowler’s metaphor of faith seems unfounded in representing a ‘universal’ theory of faith development, given that not all religious faiths and spiritual movements could be centered around the term “faith.” For example, faith is not the keyword for many non-Western religious traditions, such as Confucianism and Shamanistic religions. In that regard, Fowler’s approach cannot avoid being criticized to be Eurocentric and Christian-focused. Fowler’s theoretical reliance in justifying ‘faith’ as capable of encompassing human spiritual development is upon his colleague and former teacher Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whom Fowler commends to be “one of the very few students of the history of religion who has the linguistic competence to study most of the major religious traditions in the languages of their primary sources”(9).
However, what Fowler did by drawing upon Smith is not how his metaphor of faith has been central in almost all the historic religious traditions, and Fowler still fails to provide sufficient rationale in this regard. Second, Fowler’s presupposition of faith as growing in stages is also questionable. Behind this assumption of faith-growing-in-stages is another groundless presupposition that the ideal of human development in psychology and the spiritual could be in accord with each other. As Robert Neville has persuasively argued in his book The Truth of Broken Symbols, the Western ideal of human flourishing and development cannot fully contain the spiritual in many religious traditions, which inherently has to do with the transcendental.1 More telling, then, is it be possible to presume that the spiritual could be safely packaged in the clothing of modern psychology, in the name of development? I am not sure of it, at least not by means of reading Fowler. What I am questioning here is not whether psychology can undertake doing research in the spiritual, but whether the spiritual could be nicely and safely put in terms of development in modern sense. Despite these loopholes, Fowler’s book is exerting significant influence on all reading public, both lay and professional academic, and it is an important read no one can afford to neglect in understanding the field of human development.
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