Fowler defines faith development as a sequence of stages by which persons shape their relatedness to a transcendent center or centers of value. These stages indicate that there is an underlying system of transformation by which the self is constituted as it responds to questions of ultimate meaning. His 1981 publication Stages of faith, is by many considered the standard work about faith development. In Faith development and pastoral care he stays with the same stages as presented 5 years earlier but he links them to stages of “ego development”. The stages of development of ‘self’ which he describes are based on the work of Robert Egan (1982).
Fowler concludes that the seven stages of faith are hierarchical, that persons have to progress from one to the other. The first stages are a process of finding self and establishing one’s own identity. The latter stages describe the situations in which the person learns to give from himself and not view the world as a me-centred place. Fowler’s attention for detail makes his work suitable for reflection on the characteristics of children and adolescents. It appears, though, that he himself does not want to get too much into recommendations for methodology.
Fowler’s work is very academic and at times hard to understand. On the other hand, he is very thourough is providing evidence to support his conclusions. Fowler’s hierarchy is much more complecated and academic than Westerhoff’s. Yet, they are good complements to each other. The premeses based on which the hierarchies have been developed are quite different.

Summary:

Assumptions (convictions):
1. Human beings are genetically potentiated for partnership with God. We have as part of our creatively biological heritage the generative deep structural tendencies that make possible our development as partners with one another and with God. St. Augustine: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”
2. To have a potential to, does not necessarily mean that the potential will be realized. It can be destroyed, corrupted, misdirected.
3. We develop in the context of community. Faith is awakened and formed in the presence of relationships, language, ritual and symbol.

Selfhood and Faith:
To be a self is a matter of becoming aware of self as self, and this means in relation to, and with the help of, the responses of others. A major concern of the research of faith development is with understanding of the development of the capacities by which we construct self-other, self-self, self-God relations.
To call faith a disposition is to acknowledge that it involves both emotions and a kind of knowing or cognition. Faith is a construing of the conditions of existence. It attempts to make sense of our mundane everyday experiences in light of some accounting for the ultimate conditions of existence.
Faith involves 3 important kinds of construing:
1. a patterned knowledge (which we sometimes call a belief)
2. a patterned valuing (which we sometimes call commitment or devotion)
3. a patterned construction of meaning - usually in the form of an underlying narrative or story.

The seven stages of selfhood and faith:

1. Primal Faith
- prelanguage disposition of trust and loyalty toward the environment of these who provide milk, warmth, and security. This is to offset anxiety that results from threats of separation and negation that occur in the course of infantile development.

1a. Incorporative Self.
- Infant does not distinguish between self and environment, between self and those giving care.
- Infant incorporates all subjects and all experiences.

2. Intuitive - Projective Faith.
- starting with onset of language use emerges a style of meaning-making.
- emotional and perceptual ordering of experience
- look at events from the perspectives of their own security
- little understanding of cause and effect relations
- reconstruct events in episodic fashion
- do not distinguish fantasy from factuality
- constructions of faith are drawn to symbols and images of visible power and size
- appreciation for stories that represent the powers of good and evil unambiguously
- tries to link symbols and images of representation of deity with, either, feeling of terror and guilt or, love, ecstasy and unity with God.

2a. Impulsive Self.
- child does not have impulses but is impulses.
- desire for excessive love from one parent at exclusion of the other parent: need parenting culture that contradicts this desire and thereby protects the child from being emotionally devoured/swallowed by the temporarily favoured parent

3. Mythic - Literal Faith (6 - 8)
- cause and effect relations are understood.
- distinguishes between fantasy and factuality.
- can take another point of view.
- understanding the meaning of reality is concrete, literal and one-dimensional.
- strongly oriented to narratives and stories as the principal means of constructing and sharing meaning.
- narrative structures provide a central way of establishing identity, through the learning of the stories of the groups/communities to which one belongs.
- cannot reflect on self as a personality so they share by telling stories of their experiences.
- cannot analyze the stories and experiences for overarching meanings.
- focus on justice, equality and fairness.
- God is seen as a stern, powerful but just parent or ruler. He rewards people that do right, he punishes people that do wrong.
- lacks ability to understand own territory: its own dispositions, source of wishes, motives, pattern of personality.

3a. Imperial Self
- self is embedded in its needs, wishes, interests.
- self does not examine those needs, wishes, interests.
- sees world, self and others only through the structure of one’s needs, wishes and interests: they filter the perceptions of reality. Consequently they are manipulative *
- needs family and school where this imperial sense can be kept in check by loving restraints that will help develop as greater reflection/consideration of the deeper sources and patterns of motivation and personality in self and others.

4. Synthetic - Conventional Faith (11 - 13)
- persons tend to construct environment in terms of the personal:
God knows us better than we know ourselves.
God is our friend, companion; he sustains our selfhood.
- the self is constituted by its relationships and roles: “I am my relationships; I am my roles.”
- ambivalence between resentment of this dependence and dependence on others to sustain their identity and faith
- central yearning: inclusion as a form of intimacy (inclusion in selfhood and faith).

4a. Interpersonal Self
- abstract thinking
- ability to manipulate concepts
- capacity for mutual interpersonal perspective taking:
the ability to begin seeing self as others see it.
“I see you seeing me:
I see the me I think you see.”
the process of trying to construct a self image that reconciles what one feels oneself to be and what a significant other mirrors back - ie identity crisis. (Erik Erickson)
recognition that we are all mirrors to help others in their identity construction process
- reconstruction of the meaning of past events.
- projection of self into possible futures.
- development of new meaning of own’ story’.
- begins to synthesize into a workable unity a sense of identity based on the range of images of self provided by those who matter, as well as the sense of self derived from internal feelings and reflections on the self’s present, past and future.
- must include values, beliefs and elegancies that support and confirm it of its sense of identity.
- conventional because the person is in the process of conforming to shared understandings (of self) and commitments and loyalties.
- personality is of great importance/concern.
- worth is heavily keyed to the approval and affirmation of significant others.
- values, commitments and relationships are central to identity and worth.

5. Individuative - Reflective Faith (14 - 20)
- begin to critically examine the previous stage’s tacit system of beliefs, values, and commitments.
- takes a third person perspective by which the person critically reflects on self and significant adults in order to help self develop newer, more independant relationships.
- relinquishing the reliance on the authority of others is a difficult emotional process. It involves risk-taking and conflict. It causes feelings of guilt over “breaking faith” with our betters.
- takes distance from the community of shared values, beliefs and life patterns to the extent that it will allow us to claim a new authority over our own life.
- creeds, symbols and stories from religious tradition are subject to analysis.
- a process of taking control of meaning
- conflict between growing self-authorship and awareness of own dependence of things beyond its control.
- conflict between overconfident self and the desire for inspiration and guidance.

5a. Institutional Self
- self must struggle with the question of identity and worth apart from its previously defining relationships.
- must begin to take personal responsibility for goals and values.
- the institutional self feels in charge of its own many aspects; it no longer has to act out or try out different roles.
- give up definitions of ourselves derived from the roles we play for new definitions based on who we believe we are.
-the process of defining own identity also desire a defining of one’s heritage of beliefs, values and symbols.
- claiming oneself as the author of one’s own life.
- over confident in self-dependence and self-ownership.

6. Conjunctive Faith ( midlife)
- learning to have peace with “coincidences of opposites”. There are apparent paradoxes in the faith which cannot be brought together eg: God’s immanence and His transcendence, God’s sovereignty over history and His incarnation and crucifixion. Compare: in physics the conflicting theories of packets of light vs waves of light; both needed to understand how light works.
- no longer a confident clarity about the boundaries of faith and self; instead an epistomological humility.
- characterized by a willingness to learn more and understand better.
- faith is more receptive; it can balance initiative and control with waiting and seeking.
- it desires to become part of a larger movement of spirit of being.
- faith has a strength that allows for open minded examinations; it does not fear mutual dialogue. It is confident that dialogue can strengthen the faith, not erode it.
- a principled openness to the challenging truths of those who are religious or ideological “strangers”.
- develops a deepened quality of spirituality which hungers for a way to the otherness in self, God and fellow humans.

6a. Inter-Individual Self.
- the self can hold together various tensions of experience without fear of threat to self.
- the self comes to terms with its “young” past and its “old” future.
- self recognizes own constructive as well as destructive characteristics
- a heightened sense of interdependence and solidarity
- concern to connect with persons and classes different from self.

7. Universalizing Faith
- moves beyond the tension between inclusiveness and transformation of their visions.
- the self is drawn beyond itself into a new quality of participation and grounding in God.
- the self is no longer the prime reference point from which the knowing and valuing of faith is carried out.
- persons are drawn toward an identification with God in which the bases of identity, knowing, and valuing are transformed.
- there is a kind of identification with God’s way of knowing and valuing other creatures.
- whoever was first seen as an enemy now come to be seen transformingly as God’s children who must be loved radically and redemptively.
- this kind of valuing gives rise to non-violent opposition to injustices and outpouring of self to correct social conditions.
- to power of emptying self.
- these Christians are colonists who live as if God’s commonwealth of love and justice were already reality among us.
- in quiet and public ways live as if the Kingdom of God were already realized among us.

7a. God-Grounded Self
- selfhood that transfers the burden of self-integration and self-justification radically to God, and therefore has a new quality of freedom with self and others.
- self moves beyond usual forms of defensiveness and exhibits an openness based on groundedness in being, love and regard for God.
- self has a yearning that all of creation should be complete and that all of God’s creatures should be one.
 

p. 75 A process of decentration of self through the subsequent stages: gradually the circle of “those who count” in the meaning of faith and selfhood expands, until it extends well beyond the bounds of special class, nation, race, ideological affinity and religious tradition.
 
 

Fowler defines faith development as a sequence of stages by which persons shape their relatedness to a transcendent center of value. These stages indicate that there is an underlying system of transformation by which the self is constituted as it responds to questions of ultimate meaning.
This manual lays out a step by step process for the application of an appropriate research instrument. It describes how to conduct a faith development interview. It suggests a coding and scoring system and guides the analyses of the faith development interview results.
The central purpose of the manual is to facilitate faith development research. The research instrument is based on the framework provided by Fowler in his stages of faith. Questions in each the the relevant fields are provided along with directions for the interview procedure and subsequent processing of the responses.
The attention to detail in setting up this manual may be both its strength and its weakness. If one were to follow the suggested procedures exactly the manual may prove to be very helpful. If adaptations need to be made because of a different emphases of research, this model may well be too confining and restrictive. Certainly the practical way in which the theory of stages of faith has been applied in the development of a research instrument is a good model to follow.