the basis of james w. fowler's understanding of faith in the research of wilfred cantwell...

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THE BASIS OF JAMES W.FOWLER'S UNDERSTANDING OFFAITH IN THE RESEARCH OFWILFRED CANTWELL SMITH:AN EXAMINATION FROM ANEVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVETimothy Paul Jones aa First Baptist Church of Rolling HillsPublished online: 17 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Timothy Paul Jones (2004) THE BASIS OF JAMES W. FOWLER'SUNDERSTANDING OF FAITH IN THE RESEARCH OF WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH:AN EXAMINATION FROM AN EVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVE, Religious Education:The official journal of the Religious Education Association, 99:4, 345-357, DOI:10.1080/00344080490513171

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THE BASIS OF JAMES W. FOWLER’S UNDERSTANDINGOF FAITH IN THE RESEARCH OF WILFRED CANTWELL

SMITH: AN EXAMINATION FROM ANEVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVE

Timothy Paul JonesFirst Baptist Church of Rolling Hills

Abstract

This article focuses on the influence of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’spresentation of the nature of faith on James W. Fowler’s faith-development paradigm. Smith contended that, in the pre-modernera, terms translated by the English words “faith” and “believe” de-noted a personal allegiance that did not require assent to any ob-jective assertions. Two difficulties with Smith’s research are high-lighted: 1) In the premodern era, the terms translated as “faith”and “believe” denoted both personal allegiance and objective as-sent. 2) Although “faith” and “believe” primarily indicated personalallegiance in the premodern era, the primacy of personal allegiancewithin faith does not preclude the presence or the necessity of ob-jective assent. The author suggests that, although Christian faithand Fowlerian stage-development are two distinct phenomena, thereality to which Fowler referred as “faith” describes the psychicalcontext for Christian faith. The article concludes by reflecting on theimplications of this concept, suggesting that Christian faith emergesfrom Fowlerian stage-development, but that the content and devel-opment of both phenomena remain essentially distinct.

For two decades, the structural-developmental model of faith pro-posed by James W. Fowler has remained the dominant paradigm forfaith-development studies. Despite the dominance of Fowler’s theory,Christian educators, especially among evangelicals, have repeatedlyquestioned the compatibility of Fowler’s understanding of faith withChristian faith. These critiques have typically fallen into one of twobroad categories (Downs 1995, 82)—1) studies related to the relation-ship between content and structure in Christian faith, or 2) studiesrelated to the relationship between Fowler’s understanding of faith asa universal developmental structure and a Christian understanding offaith as a divine gift. (For examples, see Avery 1992; Dykstra 1986b;Ford-Grabowsky 1986; Simmonds 1986.)

Religious Education Copyright C© The Religious Education AssociationVol. 99 No. 4 Fall 2004 ISSN: 0034–4087 print

DOI: 10.1080/00344080490513171

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346 THE BASIS OF FOWLER’S UNDERSTANDING OF FAITH

Relatively little research, however, has focused on the underlyingtheological bases of Fowler’s understanding of faith. Studies that havedealt with the underlying sources have typically centered on Fowler’sderivation of his understanding of faith from H. Richard Niebuhr, PaulTillich, and classical Protestant liberalism. What has been frequentlyoverlooked is the profound influence of Wilfred Cantwell Smith onFowler’s understanding of faith. (For exceptions, see Downing 1985;Jones 2003; Moran 1982)

This article summarizes the basis of Fowler’s understanding offaith in the research of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, identifies two key dif-ficulties in Smith’s research, and seeks to re-examine the amendabilityof Fowler’s research for evangelical educators in light of these difficul-ties. Based on an analysis of the qualitative bases of Fowler’s presen-tation of faith, this article contends that Fowlerian stage-developmentand Christian faith-development are fundamentally dissimilar phe-nomena. Nevertheless, evangelical educators should neither dismissnor ignore the phenomenon to which Fowler and Smith referred as“faith.” It is possible that, although Christian faith and Fowlerianstage-development emerge and evolve separately, Fowlerian stage-development provides the psychical context for Christian faith.

THE BASIS OF JAMES W. FOWLER’S UNDERSTANDINGOF FAITH

In the research of James W. Fowler, “faith” has been defined asfollows:

. . . a disposition of the total self to the total environment in which a trustand loyalty are invested in a center or centers of value and power which giveorder and coherence to the force-field of life, which support and sustain(or qualify and relativize) our mundane and everyday commitments andtrusts, combining to give orientation, courage, meaning, and hope to ourlives, and, to unite us into communities of shared interpretation, loyalty, andtrust. (Fowler 1980, 137)

. . . the person’s or group’s way of responding to transcendent value andpower as perceived and grasped through forms of the cumulative tradition.(Fowler 1981, 9; Fowler 1990a, 394)

. . . the process of constitutive-knowing underlying a person’s compositionand maintenance of a comprehensive frame of meaning, generated froma person’s attachments or commitments to centers of supraordinate value

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TIMOTHY PAUL JONES 347

which have power to unify his or her experiences of the world, therebyendowing the relationships, contexts, and patterns of everyday life withsignificance. (Fowler 1986a, 25–26; see also Bruning and Stokes 1982, 32)

Because Fowler’s intent is to describe an overarching develop-mental pattern that is common to all forms of faith, the content ofFowlerian faith is neither objective nor particular. The content of faith,as presented in Fowler’s structural-developmental paradigm, consistsof persons’ centers of value, images of power, and the paradigmaticnarratives by which they integrate the manifold elements of their lives(Fowler 1982, 202; Fowler 1991, 100–102). Faith is a way of know-ing that does not require assent to specific knowledge (Fowler 1981,11; Fowler 1992a, 11; see also Downs 1995, 76; Fowler 1986b, 278;Niebuhr 1961, 93–102).

Although influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich,Fowler’s exclusion of assent to specific content from the essential na-ture of faith appears to have arisen primarily from his reliance on theresearch of religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith. According toFowler,

Smith is one of the very few students in the history of religion who has thelinguistic competence to study most of the major religious traditions in thelanguages of their primary sources. For nearly two decades he has devotedhimself to, among other things, the task of researching and interpretingthe contribution each of the central world religious traditions makes to ourunderstanding of faith. As his student, and then later as his colleague atHarvard, I have been enriched and encouraged in my own investigations offaith by his work and person. (Fowler 1981, 9; cf. Downing 1985, 40–41, 47;Fowler 1991, 16; Moran 1982)

In The Meaning and End of Religion (1963) and Faith and Belief:The Difference Between Them (1979, 1998), Wilfred Cantwell Smithargued that to believe or to have faith had meant, in the premodernworld, to regard another person with “a certain ultimate loyalty” andto set one’s heart on a relationship with that person (Smith 1998, 108).The essence of this faith was personal engagement that did not demandagreement to any assertions (Smith 1998, 5–6).

Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the meaningof “believes” and “belief” (and, to a lesser extent, “faith”) shifted—according to Smith—from an expression of personal loyalty to theacceptance of certain facts as true. By the late 19th century, only theword “faith” had retained any fragments of the premodern implica-tion of an ultimate, personal loyalty that requires no assent to specific

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assertions (Smith 1998, 144–45). According to Smith, “the modernworld has to rediscover . . . what it means to have faith, to be faithful,to care, to trust, to cherish, to be loyal, to commit oneself: to rediscoverwhat ‘believe’ used to mean” (Smith 1998, 117, emphasis in original).

In an attempt to recover the premodern meaning of faith, Smithdistinguished sharply between “faith” and “belief.” Smith defined “be-lief” as personal assent to and confidence in the veracity and valid-ity of specific assertions. Smith reserved “faith” to describe what heunderstood to be the premodern definition of “faith” and “belief”—personal loyalty that required no intellectual assent (Smith 1963,180–202; Smith 1998, 12, 61, 77, 118; see also Fowler 1981, 11–13).

Smith derived primary proof for his observations from Protocat-echesis, a 4th-century baptismal rite attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem(Smith 1998, 70–78, 247). The crux of this baptismal rite was, Smithclaimed, not assent to specific assertions about God. It was, instead,“authenticity of purpose: a [person’s] genuine intent to move from theold life to the new, [a] determination to turn from ‘the world’ to Christ”(Smith 1998, 73).

[The word credo] is a compound from cor, cordis, ‘heart’ . . . plus -do, ‘put,place, set,’ also ‘give’. . . . There would seem little question but that as acrucial term used at a crucial moment in a crucial liturgical act of per-sonal engagement—namely Christian baptism—credo came close to its rootmeaning of ‘I set my heart on’. . . . [The] concern is about passing from . . . aninvolvement in one order to a committed involvement in another. It is notat all a question of moving from non-belief to belief. (Smith 1998, 76)

Wilfred Cantwell Smith did not deny the presence or the ne-cessity of confident assent to specific assertions within the reality towhich he referred as “faith.” Faith is, Smith claimed, “secondary to,derivative from, [and] answerable to, transcendent reality and truth”(Smith 1998, 125). From Smith’s perspective, however, the core be-lief that comprises the content of faith is not assent to any corpus ofassertions—it is, instead, allegiance to truth as a transcendent princi-ple (Smith 1998, 167–68). Because the content of this faith is neitherobjective nor specific, Smith could state that

there is no reason, in the modern world, why in principle an intelligentand informed Jew or Muslim and an intelligent and informed Christian,and indeed an intelligent and informed and sensitive atheistic humanist,. . . should have different beliefs. Yet also there is no reason why they shouldnot continue to live in terms of their differing symbols. (Smith 1998, 171)

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Fowler, drawing from Smith’s research as well as the work of GeorgeLindbeck, referred to this concept as a “cultural-linguistic” under-standing of faith (Fowler 1990a, 396; Fowler 1992b, 22).

The primary difference between faith as understood by evangelicalChristian educators and the reality to which Smith and Fowler referas “faith” is the necessity of assent to specific content within the actof faith. From the perspective of many evangelicals, the ChristianScriptures seem to imply that, should an individual compromise ordeny certain assertions regarding God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ,the resultant confession is something other than Christian faith (see,e.g., 1 John 4:3, 15; 5:1–5; 2 John 1:7). According to Smith’s research,however, the idea that faith could require assent to specific content is amodern notion that would have been alien to pre-modern Christians.In fact, according to Smith, the terms translated “faith,” “belief,” and“believe” in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and in the early Christiancreeds could not connote the acceptance of certain assertions as trueat the times when these documents were written (Smith 1998, 247;cf. Fowler 1981, 11–12). “Contrary to modern impressions,” Smithcontended, “the classical creeds of the Church include no propositionalstatements. . . . Believing is not what in those centuries Baptism and theCreeds were about” (Smith 1998, 77).

DIFFICULTIES IN SMITH’S ANALYSIS OF THE NATUREOF FAITH

The first difficulty in Smith’s analysis of “faith” has to do with selec-tive readings of biblical and patristic documents. The second concernsthe implication that the primacy of personal allegiance within faithexcludes the necessity of assent to specific content.

Selective Readings of Biblical and Patristic Documents

According to Smith, whether an individual assented to objectiveclaims was, for premodern people, never “a matter of final humandestiny” (Smith 1998, 159). It is, therefore, “a mistranslation to ren-der any word in the Christian scriptures by the English terms ‘be-lief,’ ‘believe,’ those concepts not being found in the Bible” (Smith1998, 247). Building on Smith’s claims, Fowler has written, “For theancient Jew or Christian to have said, ‘I believe there is a God,’ or ‘Ibelieve God exists,’ would have been a strange circumlocution. The

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being or existence of God was taken for granted and, therefore, not anissue” (Fowler 1981, 12; but cf. Heb 11:6).

What Smith and Fowler appear to have asserted in these pas-sages is that the terms translated “faith,” “belief,” and “believe” inthe Judeo-Christian Scriptures denoted personal allegiance (“I be-lieve [have faith] in”), but not assent to specific assertions (“I believe[have faith] that”). Smith made similar claims with reference to pa-tristic authors and to the medieval theologians (Smith 1998, 71–91).

Such claims, however, require highly selective readings of theScriptures and of the theologians of the early church. In Smith’s pri-mary works, the key terms for “faith” in the Christian Scriptures andin the writings of the postapostolic church leaders—pisteuein and itscognates—are never fully analyzed in their historical contexts. (Smith’sanalysis of Christian faith in Faith and Belief: The Difference BetweenThem begins not with the Christian Scriptures but with the writingsof Cyril of Jerusalem, more than two centuries after the completion ofthe Christian Scriptures.)

A careful analysis of the functions of pisteuein in the apostolicwritings reveals that the faith of the earliest Christians was not only amatter of having faith in a person but also a matter of believing thatcertain assertions were true—believing that God exists, that God cre-ated the cosmos, that God raised Jesus from the dead, that Jesus wasthe divine Messiah (Rom 10:9; 1 Thess 4:14; Heb 11:1–6; 1 John 5:1–5). In the Greek Septuagint, the Bible of the earliest Christians, pis-teuein repeatedly implied the acceptance of specific historical andontological assertions (see, e.g., Gen 45:26; Exod 4:5, 8–9; 1 Kgs 10:7;Job 9:16; 15:22; Ps 26:13). The 2nd-century church leader, Clementof Alexandria expanded on these assumptions regarding faith: “ForClement . . . faith [was] that which is taught by God, through Christ,in a written revelation” (Bassett 1990, 339; see also Clement 1857,1:7:38; 1:20:98; 2:2:8; 8:3:7).

This understanding of faith was also present in the Greek pa-tristic writings. In a crucial passage from his catechetical writings,Cyril of Jerusalem—the theologian from whom Smith derived primaryproof for his theses—explained what he meant when he used the word“faith.” (I have translated all quotations from Greek and Latin authorsfrom the primary source materials. Although Cyril originally wrote inGreek, his writings circulated in Greek and Latin. Key phrases andreferences from both languages have, therefore, been inserted intothe translation that follows.)

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The term “faith” is, according to speaking, one word, yet it has two meanings:One kind of faith concerns doctrine [Greek, dogmatikon; Latin, dogmata].It involves the soul’s rising to and accepting some particular point [Greek,sungkatathesis, “assent to something credible,” Clement 1857, 2:12], and itis profitable for the soul. . . . For if you will have faith that [Latin, crediderisquod] Jesus Christ is the Lord and that God raised him from the dead, youwill be saved and will be transported into paradise by the same one whobrought the thief into paradise. . . .

The other kind of faith, . . . given by the Holy Spirit as a special favor,is not only doctrinal but it also [Greek, ou dogmatike monon estin alla kai]produces effects beyond any human capacity. . . . Whenever anyone speaksin faith, having faith that it will come to pass [Latin, credens ita futurum],without doubting in his heart, he receives that grace. . . .

In learning and professing faith, acquire and maintain only that whichis now delivered to you by the church and which is built up strongly from allthe Scriptures. Since all cannot read the Scriptures, . . . so that the soul maynot perish because of ignorance, we hand down all of the doctrine of faith ina few lines [Greek, to pan dogmates pisteos perilambanomen, a reference toan early form of the Apostles’ Creed]. . . . Be careful, family-members! Holdtightly to the things-that-have-been-handed-down which you now receive!(Cyril 1857, 5:10–13)

Despite Smith’s claims to the contrary, the functions of credere andpisteuein in this passage suggest that Cyril’s understanding of faithincluded assent to specific, objective claims.

Classical Greek authors—including Homer, Plato, and Xeno-phon—employed pisteuein and its cognates to describe the trustwor-thiness of the statements in a treaty. Later Greek authors, such asPlutarch and Plotinus, used pisteuein when discussing the existenceor nonexistence of the pagan deities (Stuhlmueller 1990, 105). Again,pisteuein implied assent to objective claims.

In the Latin patristic writings, credere carried much the samemeaning that pisteuein carried in the Christian Scriptures and in Greekliterature. For Cyprian of Carthage, to believe in (“credere en”) Godwas to believe that (“credere quod”) it was God who had appointedthe church’s leaders (Cyprian [n.d.], “Epistle LXVIII”). According toOrigen of Alexandria, sound doctrines (“dogmata”) were essential toChristian faith (Bassett 1990, 339).

Eusebius Hieronymus (Jerome) used forms of credere in his LatinVulgate to indicate assent to objective claims. In the Vulgate renderingof Genesis 21:7, credere simultaneously suggests belief in a person andassent to an objective claim: “Who, hearing this, would have believedAbraham that [crederet Abraham quod] Sarah would nurse a son?”In the book of Job, the protagonist cries, “If I invoked him and he

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answered me, I do not believe that [non credo quod] he would listento my voice” (Job 9:16). (See also, e.g., Deuteronomy 2:11; Psalm 26[27]:13; Luke 1:20; 1 Thessalonians 4:14; and, Hebrews 11:6.) Again,the terms translated by the English words “have faith” and “believe”could and did imply the acceptance of certain facts as true.

In the Middle Ages, credere still implied the acceptance of asser-tions concerning specific, historical events. Thomas Aquinas wrote,

Some urge: Cannot we believe different doctrines and yet hold the sameunderlying reality? Faith, they say, assents to a thing, not to a propositionabout it. . . . Yet they are in error, for the assent of faith operates only througha judgment of reason. . . . When I profess, “I believe in the resurrection,” yourightly take me to be committed to an assertion about a past historical event.(Aquinas [2000], snp3023.html#10454)

Considering the functions of pisteuein and credere in the ChristianScriptures and in the writings of orthodox theologians, Smith’s claimthat “it is a mistranslation to render any word in the Christian scripturesby the English terms ‘belief,’ ‘believe”’ (Smith 1998, 247) appears to betenuous at best. The usages of pisteuein and credere in the ChristianScriptures and among the theologians of the church lend no credenceto Smith’s conclusion that the usages of pisteuein and credere entailedno assent to specific assertions. Perhaps James W. Fowler was hintingat this dimension of Christian faith when he conceded the presenceof “an angular, inconvenient, but tough and resiliently integral truthat the heart of orthodox Christian faith” (Fowler 1986b, 296; see alsoFowler 1992b, 20–21).

Exclusion of Objective Assent from Faith

Smith was correct that, in the premodern world, pisteuein andcredere functioned primarily as descriptors of relational loyalty. Whatthis research questions is Smith’s assertion that, because “faith” pri-marily described personal allegiance, to have faith among the earliestChristians was “not at all a question of moving from non-belief tobelief” (Smith 1998, 76; cf. Tillich 1957, 124; Tillich 1963, 131). Ac-cording to the evidence presented here, for premodern Christians,“believe,” “belief,” and “faith” simultaneously implied personal loyaltyand assent to objective facts. What occurred in the early modern erawas not, therefore, a shift from personal loyalty to objective assent (asSmith claimed), but a reduction of faith to objective assent.

From an evangelical perspective, if contemporary Christians are torecover the premodern meaning of faith, it will not be by reducing the

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content of faith to Smith’s amorphous principles of “assent to truth,whatever it may be” and “the closest approximation to the truth ofwhich one’s mind is capable” (Smith 1998, 167–71). It will be by rec-ognizing Christian faith as simultaneously consisting of two inseparableaspects—assent to specific assertions concerning God (credere quod)and personal allegiance to the consummate selfrevelation of God in Je-sus Christ (credere en). Contrary to Smith’s apparent assumption, theprimacy of credere en does not exclude the presence or the necessityof credere quod.

THE FUNCTION OF FOWLER’S STAGES INEVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

These concluding paragraphs address the question, “If an evan-gelical understanding of faith requires affirmation of specific content,whereas Smith’s and Fowler’s understanding of faith represents a fun-damentally different phenomenon,to what degree is it possible to uti-lize Fowler’s research in evangelical Christian education?” Before pre-senting a response, I would like to suggest two crucial criteria thatshould characterize a balanced, evangelical response to the question:

First, an adequate response would recognize that Christian faith,as understood by evangelical Christians, and the developmental pro-cess described by Fowler and Smith are two fundamentally differentphenomena. It is, therefore, impossible to “offer an amended ver-sion” (Downs 1995, 84) of Fowlerian stage-development that accu-rately characterizes Christian faith-development without either com-promising an evangelical understanding of faith or compromising theinternal coherence of Fowler’s research.

Second, an adequate response would also recognize that, simplybecause the phenomenon described by Fowler and Smith is not Chris-tian faith, it does not necessarily follow that Fowler’s research hasno relevance for evangelical Christian educators. Although Fowler’sstructural-developmental paradigm does not address Christian faith,the paradigm may address other developmental phenomena that fallwithin the scope of evangelical Christian education.

Fowlerian Stage-Development as the Context of Faith

Building on these two criteria, I propose the following hypothe-ses regarding the relationship between Fowlerian stage-development

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and Christian faith: First, Fowlerian stage-development has its owncontent, which is necessary for the emergence of Christian faith butwhich is not descriptive of the development of Christian faith perse. Second, the phenomenon to which Smith and Fowler referred as“faith” describes the psychical context within which Christian faithoccurs and develops.

The core content of Fowlerian stage-development appears to meto be openness to that which is “other”—both to the relative othernessof fellow humans and to the ultimate otherness of the transcendentrealm. It is the development of this openness that Fowler’s stagesso admirably describe. Christian faith emerges from this openness tothat which is “other”; however, because Christian faith requires notonly an openness to Ultimate Reality but also a confession that Ul-timate Reality is encountered uniquely and consummately in JesusChrist, Christian faith has its own developmental structure, formedby its distinctive content. (It is worth considering whether this phe-nomenon might be true not only of Christianity but also of any content-requisite faith—e.g., branches of Judaism and Islam that emphasizeboth personal commitment and assent to specific content.) I suggestthat Christian faith develops in four levels, each of which builds on andincludes the previous levels—1) fides divina (the divine origin of faith),2) fides actualis (the individual’s choice to embrace both the contentand the commitment of Christian faith), 3) fides formata caritate (faithwith love as its source and motive), and 4) fides formata cruciatu (faithformed by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ).

If the hypotheses I have presented are correct, Fowlerian stage-development does provide the context within which the Christian ex-plores, expands, and evaluates his or her sense of God’s transcendentpresence and of his or her increasing connectedness to the transcen-dent realm through Jesus Christ and to fellow believers through theHoly Spirit. Nevertheless, although Christian faith emerges from anddevelops parallel to Fowlerian “faith,” Fowlerian stage-developmentis not descriptive of Christian faith-development. Rather, Fowlerianstage-development describes the broader psychical context by whichChristian faith is affected but from which Christian faith-developmentremains distinguishable.

Imago Dei and Imago Christi

Viewed in this way, Christian faith-development expresses the par-ticularity of Christian faith and focuses on the transformative effect

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of the imago Christi, the origin of which is external (Rom 8:29; 2Cor 3:18), while Fowlerian stage-development relates to the univer-sality of the human religious experience, to the individual’s emerginginternal awareness of the imago Dei.

The imago Dei, as used here, represents the innate disposition bywhich human beings are uniquely capable of entering into relation-ships with others (see, e.g., Grenz 1994, 218–33). Although disfiguredand distorted, the imago Dei is inherent in every individual, dependentonly on the individual’s humanness and expressed through the subjec-tive yet universal experience of relationships with others. Similarly, thereality to which Fowler referred as “faith” is a universal phenomenon,primarily concerned with the individual’s subjective experience andapperception of that which is “other,” both of other human beings andof the otherness of truth as a transcendent principle (Fowler 1981,33; Smith 1998, 167–71). It is from this perspective that Fowlerianstage-development may be said to relate closely to the imago Dei.

In contrast, the imago Christi is a unique feature of Christian ex-istence, dependent on the free act of God in Jesus Christ by whichChristian faith is formed. The content of the imago Christi is, there-fore, the gracious external act, simultaneously objective and subjective,of God in Jesus Christ (see, e.g., Barth 1962, 1:740–47). This “graciousexternal act” represents not only the consummate presence of God inJesus Christ but also the subjectivization of this presence in individualsthrough the life of Christian faith. It is from this perspective that Chris-tian faith may be said to relate closely to the imago Christi. Becausethe twofold cause of Christian faith is an external action of God thatis not innate and a personal subjectivization that is not universal, nei-ther the form nor the content of Christian faith may be identified withFowlerian stage-development. At the same time, because this exter-nal act is the act of the one who is ultimately transcendent—who is“Wholly Other” (Kierkegaard 1941, 207)—it may be said that the con-tent of Fowlerian stage-development provides the context for Christianfaith.

A Revised Agenda for Evangelical Faith-Development Studies

Based on the preceding analysis of the qualitative bases of Fowler’spresentation of faith, Fowlerian stage-development may neither beequated with Christian faith-development nor amended to corre-spond to Christian faith-development. At the same time, evangeli-cal Christian educators must not dismiss the phenomenon to which

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Fowler and Smith referred as “faith.” Christian faith-developmentdoes not—indeed, cannot—occur in a psychical vacuum; Fowlerianstage-development describes the psychical context that precludes sucha vacuum.

If these postulates are correct, perhaps evangelical faith-development theorists should consider a revision of the current ten-dency of seeking either to adapt Fowler’s stages for evangelical usageor to replace Fowler’s stages with a developmental model that moreclearly reflects the contours of Christian faith. Perhaps the agendashould be, instead, to recognize the distinctive developmental featuresof each phenomenon and to articulate more clearly the relationshipbetween them.

Timothy Paul Jones is pastor of First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills, a pro-gressive Southern Baptist congregation on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma.E-mail: [email protected]

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