CONJUNCTIVE FAITH: A CRITIQUE AND ANALYSIS FROM AN EVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVE

Can evangelical Christian faith content fit into Conjunctive Faith structure? This question is prompted by James W. Fowler's book Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning which proposes six stages of faith development, Conjunctive Faith being faith Stage 5. Fowler suggests that faith is a human en-deavor and deals with how a person believes (structure) rather than what a person believes (content), and that this faith develops in six invariant, sequential, and universal stages Evangelicals do not take issue with Fowler until faith Stage 5, Conjunctive Faith, which suggests that the person at this stage of development will hold doctrinal truth claims (content) to be relative. Taken at face value then, faith Stage 5 would exclude evangelical participation in the higher faith stages since the absolute nature of cardinal doctrines would, by definition, be called into question. Yet, many other features of Conjunctive Faith commend themselves to the evangelical. Summary rejection of faith Stage 5 would therefore be inappropriate. In order to test the acceptability of Conjunctive Faith to evangelicals it was decided to compare evangelical iii content to faith Stage 5 structure. This was accomplished first by examining the literature upon which Stages of Faith is based. Fowler builds his theory primarily on the work of six individuals. Philosophical moorings for Stages of Faith are found in the writings of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich. Fowler derived his methodological foundations from the psycho-social develop-ment theory of Erik Erikson, and the structural-developmen-tal theories of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Once the structure of Conjunctive Faith had been defined, then an evangelical content was described using the writings of four leading evangelical theologians: L. S