I spoke last week to a woman who was greatly distressed
because her church was making a slight change in a common liturgical formula.
When the celebrant says, “The Lord be with you,” the people respond, “And also
with you.” Her church is planning to change the response to, “And with your
spirit.”
“What gives them the right to do that?” she demanded. In her
eyes, the pastor was arbitrarily altering what God had ordained. I tried to
explain that the exchange was not in the Bible and that both versions were
acceptable to God, but I’m not sure she understood. She was stuck in an early,
immature stage of faith, like children who will not allow their parents to skip
a page or alter a line in their favorite Dr. Seuss book.
Or consider the teen who is afraid to go to a certain
college because the teaching there might be unsettling to her faith. In such a
case, one might appropriately ask, “Which is more important, the doctrines you
believe or the truth?” However, that may be the wrong question. Perhaps what seems
most important in her crazy, unsettled world is the security of anchoring her
heart in an unchanging, unchallenged system of belief.
These sorts of encounters lead to a broader question: What
does psychological development have to do with faith? Various attempts have
been made to link the two. A friend has asked me to comment on the theological
soundness of James Fowler’s work on stages of faith development and Scott
Peck’s stages of spiritual development. Hence, this blog post. For a chart
summarizing their views click on the link—Fowler/Peck
chart.
I am not an expert in developmental psychology, but I find
it relatively easy to think of people whose spiritual development bears a
resemblance to the stages described by Fowler and Peck. For example, I have
seen people questioning their faith in their early twenties (as they suggest)
and either abandoning it, or coming to a deeper, more personal experience of Christ.
At the level of observation and description, the work of
psychologists like Fowler and Peck can be very helpful. We do see people
progressing through or sometimes stuck in various stages of spiritual
development. However, I see several major limitations to the whole project.
The first is that
the end-point of spiritual development is defined without respect to ultimate
truth. A person may be a spiritually mature Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon or
Baptist. This is unacceptable for those who hold to a biblical worldview. For
us the pattern for maturity (both individually and corporately) is conformity
to the character of Christ (Ephesians 4:13-16).
A second limitation
of psychological descriptions of faith or conversion is that they inevitably
end up in what the late British Christian neurophysicist Donald M. MacKay liked
to call the “nothing buttery” syndrome. Love, morality, appreciation of beauty
and all our joys and sorrows are “nothing but” a physiological response within
our brains to certain external stimuli. Conversion is “nothing but” a radical
change of attitude and viewpoint resulting from certain psychological stresses.[1]
In a similar vein, a fascinating sermon by C. S. Lewis discusses
how the higher, richer aspects of human life are transposed into the lower,
poorer realms of physiology and descriptive psychology.[2]
If the richer system is to be
represented in the poorer at all, this can only be by giving each element in
the poorer system more than one meaning. . . . If you are to translate from a
language which has a large vocabulary into a language that has a small
vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense.
. . . If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an
orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must
also represent violins in another.[3]
So a psychologist might describe the conversion of Malcom X to
Islam using the same terms as he would use to describe conversion from political
apathy to fervent activism in the Tea Party. Again, the same language might
describe conversion from atheism to Christ. Psychological tools and language
are not rich enough to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in spiritual terms.
That is a limitation, not a fault, in the psychological method. It only becomes
a fault if the psychologist assumes that his description is complete
delineation of what is happening in the lives of his subjects.
Let us now return to our original
question, about Spirit and Nature, God and Man. Our problem was that in what
claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur:
and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other elements were
present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than the natural (as no one
who believes in its existence would deny) then this is exactly what we should
expect. And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really
derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary
extension of the natural, is also exactly what we should expect; for, as we
have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium
would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can
by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find
anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology can never find anything in
thought except twichings of grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic
who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his
conclusion is the only one possible.
Everything
is different when you approach the Transposition from above, as we all do in
the case of emotion and sensation or of the three-dimensional world and pictures,
and as the spiritual man does in the case we are considering.[4]
A third limitation relates
to ways in which Christians might use psychological descriptions of how faith matures.
I see positive contributions and a need for caution.
Contributions. Observing the normal progression of
faith can help pastors and parents in several ways. First, it may keep us from
expecting more maturity than is realistic for most children and for most early
teens. Immature faith can still be genuine faith. Second, when we observe
someone who is stuck at an immature level of faith, we may be better equipped
gently to guide that person toward greater maturity. Third, we need to realize
that some people do not have the mental or emotional capacity to progress as
far or as fast as others. They may truly love and trust the Lord, but never move
on to the kind of confidence that will enable them to respond calmly and kindly
to people who challenge their faith. They may always resort a flight or fight
reaction that is born out of fear and insecurity.
Cautions.
The greatest danger for parents and pastors is probably the temptation to think
we can protect our children from apostasy by using psychological insights and
methods. Psychological techniques cannot transform group conformity that is
common among our teens to confident, independent faith in their twenties. No
one grows from the family of Adam into the family of God. Each one must be born
into it. Neither can psychological methods of altering behavior produce the
fruit of the Spirit. Fowler and Peck may help us see what is going on in the
lives of those under our care, but as always the true “weapons of our warfare
are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses”
(2 Corinthinas 10:4).
[1]
For a helpful response to this kind of reductionism, see Donald M. MacKay, “Man
As a Mechanism,” in Christianity in a
Mechanistic Universe, edited by Donald M. MacKay (Chicago: Inter-Varsity
Press, 1965).
[2]
C. S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in Srewtape
Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (Collins: London, 1965).
[3]
Ibid., 80-81.
[4]
Ibid., 85.
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