Fowler’s intellectual project is to put Christianity and other faiths on a Freudian foundation. More specifically he takes Erik Erickson’s model for human development (as well as a couple other psychologists’) and layers it with an account of God and man from Reinhold Niebuhr. What comes out is a kind of humanistic Deism, in which people ascend a ladder of transcendence via an expanding perspective of their place in the world. To buttress his case, Fowler provides excerpts from the many interviews he and his grad students have done, in which they probe for people's life narratives and core beliefs.
One interviewee, the book's main case study, reminds me of my own journey in faith. The woman, called “Mary”, came of age in the late sixties and early seventies. She says, “I was involved in all sorts of things; you know Eastern religions, pop psychology, the occult, illicit drugs and sex, and all that kind of stuff.” Then at age 22, she has a conversion to Christ (spurred in part by an LCD trip) and begins bouncing around among Christian communities, some more faithful and filled with grace than others. At the time of the interview (1978), she is 28 with a child, recently separated from her husband, and still firm in her faith. My story follows a similar, but (at least outwardly) tamer, arc.
This is helpful: To be remind that, like Mary, I am a pilgrim. Many people are. My two boys are. They will no doubt struggle with the issues of identity, trust and independence that Fowler lays out, and I will help shape how they do that.
Fowler rates Mary a three, on a scale from one to six, for his “faith stages” of spiritual maturity. Here is where my sympathies break from the book. The faith stages chart is, to me, a predictable psychological model of increased appreciation for complexity and broadening of perspective. I’m all for recognizing complexity and expanding my horizons; I just don’t think it works as a religion. True religion is a person’s relationship with his heavenly father; it's hard to map out the course of a child-father relationship in six steps.
My real bone to pick with the book is in what Fowler describes as form versus content. In short, this is a tension he sets up between in what you have faith (Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, etc.) and how you live out your faith (prayer, alms giving, meditation, etc.). For most of the book Fowler wants to set aside the question of “what” and focus on the “how.” He claims true progress runs along the lines of maturing in how you practice a faith – from childish fantasy to fundamentalist literalism to a wise appreciation of symbol and ritual. Towards the end of the book he begins to grapple with the content -- the particularity -- of faith (he did, after all, get some training in theology). However, he comes up way short. The best he can do is:
The issue is finally not whether we and our companions are on this globe become Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Confusionists or Christians, as important as that issue is. The real question is, will there be faith on the earth and will it be good faith—faith sufficiently inclusive so as to counter and transcend the destructive henotheistic idolatries of national, ethnic, racial and religious identifications and to bind us as a human community in convenantal trust and loyalty to each other and to the Ground of our Being?
To me now, this statement so obviously lacks intellectual integrity as to be boring. However, that wasn’t always the case. In college, I joined a group called the Self Knowledge Symposium, which espoused a philosophy along the lines of Fowler’s (“process over content”), only more Eastern/Gnostic in its goal of an all encompassing enlightenment experience (Fowler presents a blander Deist theology centered on an amorphous, impersonal Ground of Being). My conversion from this brand of Gnosticism to Christ could be material for another post, but I’ll summarize here the intellectual insight that accompanied it. The assertion that particular faiths – Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, etc. – rest on top of a deeper more ultimate structure of faith stages is itself a faith, a particular one. It is not a benign observation. It stands in conflict with, for example, the Christian claim that Jesus is the one true Lord of the universe in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Pointing out the conflict (and there are many) does not immediately settle who is right -- the question of truth. But it does unmask the falsehood that one can smugly stand on neutral ground and point out “faith stages” of the world’s religions.
To illustrate my disagreement with Fowler, I’m going to rank the two of us on his stages of faith scale. They go from one (infantile) to six (saintly). Fowler never says it, but it’s clear he fancies himself a five. This is the proper rank for a professor. He understands the great complexity of the world and yet is able to navigate wisely through it. However, he is not a six because this is reserved for men of greater action – Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc. (An engineer would be a four, with his logical mind, and a religious fundamentalist a three because of his literal interpretation of scripture.) I will give myself a one. That’s because the faith I admire most in the book is that of a boy call Freddy. He is Fowler’s interview subject who is used to illustrate the first faith stage. Freddy is described as “an alert six-year-old from a Catholic family.” Here is how Freddy articulates his faith.
Interviewer: What happens when you die?
Freddy: I don’t know. Never been up in heaven before, only when I was a baby.
Interviewer: When you were a baby you were in heaven?
Freddy: Yeah.
Interviewer: How do you know that?
Freddy: Well ‘cause I felt the cold.
Interviewer: It’s cold in heaven?
Freddy: Yeah, no, I think it’s warm, real warm.
Interviewer: Where is heaven?
Freddy: Uh, high, high, high up in the sky.
Interviewer: What’s it look like?
Freddy: Uh, high mountains, so I know about heaven.
Interviewer: Who is in heaven?
Freddy: God.
Interviewer: Just God? Is he by himself?
Freddy: No.
Interviewer: Who else is there?
Freddy: There’s, there’s the shepherds—the shepherd man—I mean the wise men that are dead.
Interviewer: Is there anyone else in heaven?
Freddy: Baby—no, not baby Jesus.
Interviewer: No?
Freddy: ‘Ca—yeah, baby Jesus is God.
Interviewer: He is?
Freddy: Yeah.
Interviewer: Okay. Is anybody else in heaven?
Freddy: There’s Mary. Saint Joe—that’s all I know.
May God give us the faith of Freddy.
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