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Transformation in Faith and Morals
By Craig R. Dykstra

IT IS sometimes the case that one scriptural text can crystalize a fundamental theme in human experience and Christian theology. Such is the case with Romans 12:2: "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." This is not the place to exegete this central and powerful verse, but it can be said that transformation is central to the Christian life-both in faith and in morals.

The theme of transformation in Christian theology is older than Augustine, and it plays a pivotal role in the theologies of every Christian thinker in the lineage from Calvin and Luther through H. R. Niebuhr and Jürgen Moltmann. Aquinas and his descendants were hardly oblivious to it. Christian faith is profoundly interested in fundamental human change. How do people become what they were not? In what ways and at what levels do human beings change? What are the factors involved? What do these changes mean?

The social sciences are also interested in transformation. Key questions for psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history revolve around how individuals, groups, societies, and cultures move from one state or condition to another. What are the continuities and discontinuities of cultural, institutional, and human structures and processes that make transformation possible and, perhaps, even predictable? Such questions are at the heart of the investigations of such diverse thinkers as Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Stauss, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Carl Jung, George Herbert Mead, and Talcott Parsons.

Transformation is also central to the practical ministries of the church. Preachers preach so that lives may be changed, not just to let off steam or inform people of facts and ideas. The educational ministry of the church is a transformational ministry which hopes that people will be different in some way. Social ministries are carried out in order that social conditions may be altered and improved. Transformation is a basic practical concern in all areas of Christian ministry.

Craig R. Dykstra is Associate Professor of Christian Education at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he has contributed to the discussion of moral development through his book, Vision and Character: A Christian Educator's Alternative to Kohlberg (Paulist Press, 1981).

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I

In the fall of 1981, three important new books were published by Harper & Row, dealing with human transformation from different points of view. All three are interdisciplinary, dealing with this theme philosophically, theologically, psychologically, and practically. Each asks, in its own way, what human transformation involves, what it looks like when it happens, and what some of the implications are for practitioners of transformation.

The first work published is Lawrence Kohlberg's The Philosophy of Moral Development.¹ His key concern is the moral transformation of individuals, although he also discusses moral evolution at the social level. Kohlberg's work is not theologically grounded, but his thinking has had a profound impact on people concerned with moral development and moral education in the church. James Fowler is a theologian who has learned much from Kohlberg, and he has modeled his thinking about "faith development" after Kohlberg's basic paradigm. Fowler's book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning,² is the second book in the trio. Fowler describes the patterns and processes by which human faith is transformed, and he argues in a way analogous to Kohlberg that this happens by moving through a series of six stages.

James E. Loder is the author of the third book, The Transforming Moment.³ Like Fowler, Loder is also interested in transformations in human faith. But instead of arguing for a general series of stages through which all persons move, Loder focuses on what he calls ''convectional experiences"-life-changing events, often sudden, through which ways of knowing, believing, feeling, and acting are radically altered. Among the three, Loder is the most interested in the dynamics of Christian transformation. He wants to discern how Christ through the Holy Spirit transforms the human spirit. Fowler is interested in the more general dynamics of human transformation among the world's religions. Kohlberg discusses the relationship of morality and religion, but concludes that moral transformation need not have a religious, much less a Christian, dimension.

Kohlberg, Fowler, and Loder are held together by more than a common publisher. Fowler was Kohlberg's colleague at Harvard. He makes considerable reference to Kohlberg's theory of moral development in the book and approaches developmental issues in a similar way. Kohlberg, in turn, is well aware of Fowler's work and discusses it in a chapter on the relation between morality and religion. He finds that his own moral stages are basically parallel with Fowler's faith stages. Fowler and Loder are likewise well aware of each other's work. Their

¹ Harper & Row, 1981. 441 pp. $21.95.
² Harper & Row, 1981. 332 pp. $14.95.
³ Harper & Row, 1981. 229 pp. $12.95.

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approaches and conclusions are often quite different, but they share so many common concerns that they are important conversation partners. Their discussions have been going on privately for some time, and more recently they have discussed each other's work in public forums. And Loder is well aware of Kohlberg's work and has made a rather thorough study of it. The common interest in human transformation plus the rather substantial cross-fertilization among these three thinkers make reading these three works together an illuminating experience.

II

What is human transformation from the perspectives of these three thinkers? For all three, human transformation is fundamentally concerned with basic changes in our ways of knowing. Kohlberg and Fowler begin their discussions by proposing that there are six basic patterns by which our thinking and knowing are structured. Each pattern has its own "logic," and each logic filters and understands experience in its own way. Both Kohlberg and Fowler label these patterns of thinking and knowing as "stages." They use this term because they find them to be discrete and hierarchical. They are discrete because people tend to use one pattern to the exclusion of others. They are hierarchical for two reasons. First, people progress in step-wise fashion from one stage to the next through an orderly sequence as they mature. In fact, for both Kohlberg and Fowler maturity means using "higher" patterns of thinking rather than lower patterns. Both Fowler and Kohlberg claim that people do not skip stages; they move through them one at a time and in the same order. Second, the stages are hierarchical because the latter stages are better than the earlier. The higher patterns can deal with greater complexity and resolve conflicts and tensions that earlier patterns are not able to resolve. Transformation for both these thinkers means moving progressively toward higher, more adequate patterns of thinking and knowing.

Kohlberg and Fowler look at different aspects of human experience as they chart out their stages of development. Kohlberg's primary concern is moral development. Therefore, he studies the kinds of thinking that people engage in as they try to resolve moral conflicts. For Kohlberg, this usually means conflicts concerning respective rights and duties. For example, he finds that the earliest pattern of thinking about such situations is limited to considerations about punishment and obedience. What is your duty? Whatever you'll get punished for if you don't do it. What is it your right to do? Whatever you won't get punished for if you get caught doing it. For Kohlberg, it does not matter what the content of a person's thinking is-for example, whether a child thinks it is wrong or right to steal a cookie from a cookie jar. What matters is the reasons a person uses in determining what is right or wrong-in this case, reasons centering on punishment and obedience.

Kohlberg's point is that as we mature we begin to use more complex reasoning to make our decisions. We give up thinking about punishment

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and reward and begin to think mainly in terms of what a "good" person would do (stage 3) or what society expects of us as expressed in its rules, laws, and authorities (stage 4). When we are still more mature, even these considerations lose their centrality. Then we begin to think in terms of what a good society would expect if it were really good (not what it does expect since some of its rules may be very wrong-headed). Finally, at stage 6, a person thinks in terms of logically comprehensive, consistent, and universal moral principles. To be morally mature means, for Kohlberg, to think consistently and naturally using the patterns of thinking described in the higher stages. The transformation process takes us from our early childhood concerns about whether or not we will be spanked to the concerns of the noblest moral heroes who will sacrifice their own lives for what is right and true.

III

Fowler's scheme is similar. His concern, however, is not moral judgment (although that is an aspect of it), but human faith. In defining what he means by human faith, Fowler depends very heavily on Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr whom, he says, think of "faith as a way of seeing the world. Faith for them is a kind of knowing, a constructing of the world in light of certain disclosures of the character of reality as a whole that are taken as decisive. Different faiths are alternate modes of being in the world that arise out of contrasting ways of composing the ultimate conditions of existence" (p. 98). "Faith," he says, "is imagination as it composes a felt image of an ultimate environment" (p. 33). This image is constructed out of relationships of trust and loyalty developed in human interaction in the context of shared fidelities to "transcending centers of value and power that constitute [our] lives' meanings" (p. 16). "Faith," as Fowler is using the term, does not refer to a specific set of beliefs or a particular religious tradition. For Fowler, faith is the human activity of composing meaningful worlds in which to live out of the fabric of day-to-day experience with other human beings, institutions, values, and visions.

Like Kohlberg, Fowler claims to have isolated six fundamental patterns in which this "world-construing" activity takes place. Each pattern has seven fundamental aspects which are synthesized into a faith perspective. These aspects are a form of logic (Piaget), patterns of perspective-taking (Selman), a form of moral judgment (Kohlberg), boundaries of social awareness, a basic locus of authority, a form of world coherence, and a pattern of symbolic functioning. His stages have strange sounding names. The first is "intuitive-projective." This earliest form of faith is one in which children intuit meaning and order in the universe by projecting their fantasies on the cosmos. They use the examples, stories, moods, and actions of those nearest and dearest to them (usually parents) as grist for their imaginative mills. As children grow older, however, the chaotic and fantasy-filled worlds gain some order, become more literally understood, and become more attached to

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institutions and groups of which we are a part (stage 2-"mythic-literal").

Stage 3, "synthetic-conventional," is usually the faith pattern of early adolescence, and Fowler says that many people never move beyond this stage in adulthood. It is the stage which synthesizes a basic outlook out of diverse influences in order to provide a basis for one's own identity and place in society. Its construction depends heavily on the influence of others. It is, as Fowler says, "a 'conformist' stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective" (pp. 172f.). Greater maturity of faith, gained through further transformations, leads us away from the group mind to a kind of personally tested and personally owned perspective. The first step is through "individuative-reflective faith" (stage 4) in which the primary task is to stand against the given. It often begins in late adolescence and comes into full flower in early adulthood. If the transformation of faith continues, its patterns will change once again, usually around middle adulthood.

In stage 5, which Fowler calls "conjunctive faith," our faith-knowing is not just a reflection of a group of which we are a part or an individual stance. Rather, it is a way of framing our ultimate concerns and overarching cosmic images out of relationship and dialogue. "In dialogical knowing, the known is invited to speak its own word in its own langauge. In dialogical knowing, the multiplex structure of the world is invited to disclose itself. In a mutual 'speaking' and 'hearing,' knower and known converse in an I-Thou relationship" (p. 185). Stage 5 is, for Fowler, a very mature pattern of faith-knowing-and fairly rare. But there is still one stage that is more mature and even rarer. It is the form of faith of those "saints" who "have a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us" (p. 201). He calls it "universalizing faith" because "their community is universal in extent. Particularities are cherished because they are vessels of the universal, and thereby valuable apart from any utilitarian considerations. Life is both loved and held to loosely. Such persons are ready for fellowship with persons at any of the other stages and from any other faith tradition" (p. 201).

Fowler believes that these different patterns of faith-knowing are not peculiar to any one religious tradition. They may be found in all, and they may even be found in "non-religious" people. No religious tradition is universal. But, for Fowler, the activity of faith-knowing is. Everyone is involved in the activity of trying to give some kind of meaning to and make some kind of sense of themselves, their world, and their ultimate environment. Faith-knowing is the name he gives to this common human effort. Transformation in faith takes place when old and less adequate ways of doing this are replaced with more mature patterns of faith-knowing.

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For both Kohlberg and Fowler, transformation takes place through a process called "stage- transition." Fowler has little to say about how this takes place, and Kohlberg is not terribly detailed in his account (at least in this book). But the basic idea is that stage- transition takes place when one's present pattern of knowing cannot adequately deal with conflicts engendered in experience by its own limited ways of thinking. If you are a five-year-old wondering whether to steal from the cookie jar for your best friend while knowing that your friend will beat you up if you don't and that your mother will spank you if you do, the punishment-obedience pattern of thinking doesn't help too much. In such conflict situations, Kohlberg claims, one looks for a better way of thinking through the issue. Since we go through stages one at a time, we cannot even understand what it would mean to think two stages higher. But we can understand one stage higher if our own stage is inadequate. And if we are exposed to higher patterns of thinking at times like that, we will begin to experiment with them, integrate them, and use them ourselves.

IV

It is at the point of the transformation process that Loder is much more explicit and detailed than the others. Loder's concern is to chart the grammar or logic of the process of transformation. This logic, he says, "is rooted in and permeates every aspect of human development as the pattern that governs the stage transition process" (p. 128). He goes on to add that "because most of life and growth is carried on not at stages but between stages, the stage transition process is the most prominent part of human development, although it is studied, perhaps, the least" (p. 129). Furthermore, according to Loder, the process of transformation must not be limited to developmental stage transitions. That is only one form of transformation which also takes place in scientific discovery, in esthetic creation and perception, in psychological therapy, in sociopolitical revitalization, and above all in spiritual recreation.

Loder agrees with Kohlberg and Fowler that transformation begins in conflict, but there are more movements in the process than these two identify. Conflict initiates the knowing response, but this is followed by an "interlude for scanning." During this interlude a search takes place (both consciously and unconsciously) for possible solutions and for deeper understandings of the problem. It is "the step of waiting, wondering, following hunches, and exhausting the possibilities" (p. 32). This period may be long or brief. Sooner or later it is followed by, almost intruded upon by, a "constructive act of the imagination; an insight, intuition, or vision appears on the border between the conscious and the unconscious, usually with convincing force, and conveys in a form readily available to consciousness, the essence of the resolution" (p. 32). This act of the imagination is the key to the whole process. It is the imagination which provides a new way of seeing and a new way of knowing. By means of the imagination, both the knower and the

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knower's world are transformed. The resolution has two immediate effects. First, the energy bound up in sustaining the conflict is released. One feels freed and unburdened. Second, the knower is opened to self and to the world. The knower feels in deeper, more intimate, more lucid contact with both self and environment. The final movement in the sequence of transformation is interpretation. One interprets the conflict in the light of its resolution, and vice versa. And one interprets one's whole discovery in some public form to others.

By focusing on the process of transformation rather than the stages of one or another of the dimensions of human development, Loder is led in very different directions from Kohlberg or Fowler. The contrast with Fowler is especially intriguing since both are concerned with faith. Loder is not so much interested in the way this transformation creates new patterns of "faith-knowing" as he is in the way the transformation process is itself transformed in encounter with Christ.

In order to explore this issue, Loder first charts out four dimensions in which human existence is experienced. The first two are the dimensions of "the lived world" and "the self." The lived world is that universe of meaning which is both given to us by our environment and constructed by us in interaction with the environment much in the way Fowler describes. The self has to do with the way we can be active in re-composing the world. The lived world shapes the self and the self shapes the lived world in constant mutual interaction, but neither is fully determined by the other, as Fowler's investigations, again, show. So far, Fowler and Loder are in agreement. But Loder insists that we live not in just two dimensions, but in four. There is not simply the social and personal construction of reality, but the invasion of that reality by two other dimensions: the void and the Holy. The void, says Loder, is "the possibility of annihilation, the potential and eventually inevitable absence of one's being … implicit in existence from birth and explicit in death" (p. 67). But the void is not the end, according to Loder. Revealed at the bottom of nothingness, and overcoming it, is the Holy. There is nothing in the lived world or the self that can overcome the void. But, says Loder, "the reason we do not cease to live is the deep sense that we are not merely three-dimensional creatures" (p. 84). "When serenity comes up out of anxiety, joy out of depression, hope out of hopelessness; when goodness is returned for evil, forgiveness replaces retaliation, and courage triumphs over fear, then we recognize the movement of something beyond the personality and mental health. Such profound manifestations of the human spirit are the faces of the fourth dimension, which I have called the Holy" (p. 88).

V

Neither the void nor the Holy can be controlled or constructed by the self in the lived world. Here lies an implicit critique of Kohlberg and especially Fowler. Kohlberg believes that morality lies in only two dimensions, in conflicts between persons who live in the same basic

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worlds. But this is too limiting. Morality deals not only with people's claims in the lived world, but also with the ways in which they face death and are empowered in life. Kohlberg knows this, and even tries to deal with it explicitly in a chapter on "Moral Development and the Theory of Tragedy." But his two-dimensional approach ends up flattening the tragic dimensions of human existence rather than illuminating them.

The implicit critique of Fowler is even more serious since his theme is human faith. By defining faith largely in terms of the self's patterns of life-world construction, Fowler fails to take into account the autonomy of both the void and the Holy. Annihilation becomes a reality to be covered over, and God seems to be little more than a projection of the powers of our imagination.

Loder, though never explicitly criticizing Fowler, will have none of that. He argues that conflicts that lead to profound spiritual transformation and ultimately bring us to fundamental conviction in faith are conflicts in four dimensions through which we are brought face to face both with death and God. Loder gives many examples of such convictional experiences including some from his own experience, from clients in therapy, from biography and autobiography, and from the Scriptures. One of the consistent elements of such four-dimensional conflicts is the way transformation is transformed. Ordinary human transformation is an activity of the self. But convictional transformation is a result of the transforming activity of the Holy Spirit. Loder refers to Luther's discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit at this point, and summarizes it by saying:

To have the Gospel come to us with meaning is to be thrown into a conflict of immense proportions. The Spirit of Holiness makes us sinners, the enlightenment makes us blind, dimensions of the Holy call into play the threats of evil, annihilation, and damnation. The self and all its "worlds" are exposed as alienated from each other and within themselves. This is the intention of the Spirit in Luther: to convict through conflict and then to overcome that conflict through the Word of the Gospel…. in this, "eros is crucified," the human spirit is exposed in its brokenness and restored only as a gift of that same sovereign Spirit. The destiny of this regenerative work is a sanctifying unity with Christ in worship and in his ongoing redemption of the world…. The logic of transformation remains constant, but Spiritus Creator radically transforms the origin and destiny of transformation in the human personality. As I have said, in ordinary experience transformation begins and ends with the development of the personality's creative or adaptational capacities, or, in simple terms, begins and ends with the human ego. But in theological context it is a pattern that begins with Christ's initiative borne in on the personality by his Spirit and brought through conflict into faith and worship (pp. 115-16).

In recent discussions, Fowler has been deeply appreciative of Loder's point of view. He is not willing to allow God to remain simply the result of the self's capacity to construct a cosmos. In the present book, Fowler argues that another kind of transformation, different from stage-transition, is also crucial in the dynamics of faith. He refers to conversion which he defines as "a significant recentering of one's previous conscious or unconscious images of value and power, and the

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conscious adoption of a new set of master stories in the commitment to reshape one's life in a new community of interpretation and action" (p. 282). Fowler is also willing to grant that such conversions may take place precisely as a result of the kinds of convictional experiences Loder describes. But, he says, this does not render faith development obsolete and faith stages unreal or unimportant. He articulates a series of possible relationships between the two kinds of transformations in which each may affect the other (pp. 285-86). This may not be enough for Loder, but he does not deny the power or significance of Fowler's scheme.

VI

The conversations on transformation in faith are continuing between Fowler and Loder, and others are getting into the discussion. The relation between faith and morality is being looked at again in the light of these discussions. The present time is an exciting and stimulating one. Interdisciplinary studies in philosophy, theology, and the social sciences are being carried out at a very high level around the theme of human transformation, and the practical work of ministry will be advanced because of it. Transformation is a central theme of Christian life, as to both faith and morals. New explorations of its meaning and dynamics are shedding light on our condition and our tasks.