I'm going to finish up the thoughts from my first blog entry. In the first one, I related how a perceptive guy on another forum in 2009 had pegged me as being at Stage 4 of James Fowler's Stages of Faith. I said I thought by now I might now be at Stage 5 or thereabouts.
I've alluded to the points I'll make here in several threads on the White Horse Theology forum, and they seemed to generate little or no interest. This is understandable. The vast majority of believers are comfy at Stage 3 and aren't really interested in hearing about anything different. (Or pehaps I'm simply boring to them, a possibility I freely acknowledge.)
Stage 3 is aptly described as follows at the site I linked in the first blog entry:
A “conformist” stage, very sensitive to other people’s expectations; authority is located externally; beliefs and values may be strongly held, but are not subjected to critical scrutiny; symbols are not separable from what they symbolize.
These are the mainstream Christians. They may be Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or any other species. They are the folks who discuss and debate Bible verses, doctrines and denominations on Christian internet forums. They are content with their conformist Christianity. They may have landed where they have mostly for social or cultural reasons or they may hold deep convictions, but they aren't really interested in anything other than the Christianity they have been taught. The various branches, denominations and churches love this sort of Christian and have a vested interest in maintaining and encouraging the status quo.
Stage 4 – the O'Darby of 2009 – is summarized thusly:
The tacit system of the previous stage comes under critical scrutiny. Responsibility for making decisions about one’s goals and values, previously invested in others, is now taken into oneself. A demythologizing stage; symbols are translated into conceptual meanings.
Much fuller discussions of each stage are at the site I linked. As the link points out, the evolution from Stage 3 to Stage 4 involves both a critical examination of one's "conformist" belief system and "an interruption of one’s reliance on external authority." External authorities are given due consideration, but their teachings "will be submitted to an internal panel of experts who reserve the right to choose and who are prepared to take responsibility for their choices." (It does sometimes feel as though I have a little panel of experts, all of whom look just like me, inside my head!)
This is exactly where I was at in 2009: Questioning all mainstream dogma and doctrine and trying to decide for myself what I was capable of believing. For someone who has spent a childhood and young adulthood immersed in Stage 3 – as I thankfully had not – the evolution to Stage 4 can be disorienting and even frightening. For me, it was liberating.
Then we have Stages 5 and 6.
Stage 6 – "universalizing" faith – is rarely achieved. According to Fowler, those at Stage 6 have "a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us." Well, that does sort of sound like Brother O'Darby, does it not, but we won't push the issue. My feeling is that those at Stage 6 have probably experienced something like Cosmic Consciousness as described by Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke in his 1905 classic Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. You can read it for free here if you're so inclined (which, if you're at Stage 3, you aren't!): https://djm.cc/library/Cosmic_Consciousness_edited02.pdf. Some experience catapults these rare birds them from Stage 5 to 6.
Back to Stage 5 – "conjunctive" faith – which is more realistically attainable:
Conjunctive faith moves beyond the critical approach, not by retreating into the pre-critical mode of Stage 3, but by moving further into a post-critical mode. The critical skills are maintained, but the individual understands that they will not be transformed by that which is under their control. The critical tools of Stage 4 are trusted only “as tools to avoid self-deception and to order truths encountered in other ways."
An individual at Stage 4 is content to equate “self” with their own conscious awareness of self, but at Stage 5 they will come to terms with their unconscious—“the unconscious personal, social and species or archetypal elements that are partly determinative of our actions and responses. Stage 5 comes to terms with the fact that the conscious ego is not master in its own house.”
Finally, Stage 5 recognizes that the symbols, doctrines, myths, etc., of their tradition are incomplete and partial. They are inevitable conditioned by the circumstances out of which they emerged. Therefore, many individuals at this stage will look beyond their own tradition:
Conjunctive faith is ready for significant encounters with other traditions than its own, expecting that truth has disclosed and will disclose itself in those traditions in ways that may complement or correct its own.
Not exactly a clear or helpful definition, I realize, so here is what I mean by Stage 5 in more concrete terms:
As I reached what I now see as the end of Stage 4, I had an idiosyncratic personal Christianity that more-or-less made sense to me and that I was more-or-less capable of believing. There were bodies of evidence, such as that for reincarnation, that didn't fit neatly and thus were held "off to the side" as "possibilities." But it was a fairly coherent theology that touched most of the bases.
And yet, I had a visceral, intuitive sense that "This isn't ontologically real. It's too small, too obviously manmade, to be ontologically real." The sense of "too small" was pervasive. The God it posited was too small, his plans and purposes too small, his wrath and anger way too small.
Now in my doddering seventies, I had – without any experience of Cosmic Consciousness – a strong sense of what those who have experienced Cosmic Consciousness describe: Ultimate Reality is loving, playful, humorous. "Wrath" just isn't part of it. Somehow, Everything makes sense, Everything is the way it's supposed to be. All life – right down to the weeds and mosquitoes - is sacred, part of some cosmic mystery called Life that we don't fully understand. What we call Evil is, if not entirely illusory, useful and ultimately necessary. The purpose of earthly existence, for us, is spiritual knowledge and growth that can only be achieved in the physical dimension. The purpose for the Ultimate Reality is simply expressing and enjoying its own creativity.
Something like that, anyway. Something Bigger and More Inclusive.
One of my personal heroes – Charles Earnest Essert, an absolute nobody who had an experience of Cosmic Consciousness and wrote the little-known 134-page classic Secret Splendor, published in 1973 – described his initiation into Stage 6 (he didn't use that term since Fowler's book wasn't published until 1981) as leaving behind the rationalistic, dualistic ("this" vs. "that") mode of consciousness that serves us so well in daily life in favor of an intuitive approach to Ultimate Reality. Even "down here" at Stage 5, I recognize that this is correct.
Stage 3 and especially Stage 4 are characterized by rationalistic, dualistic thinking in spades. We gather facts and ideas. We compare and contrast them. We reach convictions on the basis of what we deem the best evidence and inferences.
Eternity, infinity and Ultimate Reality, Essert says, are not susceptible to this approach. They, and the apprehension of them, are beyond dualistic thinking. Infinity and eternity are not apprehended by contrasting "this" with "that." They must be approached through intuition.
This is why my Stage 5 intutive beliefs are difficult to put into words. Words are part and parcel of rationalistic, dualistic thinking. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal name."
So how does my Stage 5 mindset (perhaps I flatter myself and am really at Stage 4.27 or even 3.89!) square with being a Christian? Well, I think I could function as a Stage 3 fundie if I fully understood what I was doing – i.e., not being a Stage 3 fundie in the sense of "This is ontologically True and what you must believe to be saved," but rather "This is the environment that most satisfies my religious inclinations and in which I am most comfortable, recognizing and accepting that it's just symbolic of an Ultimate Reality none of us can begin to grasp."
I am, of course, not a Stage 3 fundie. My religious beliefs are quite far from that. But I do accept that Jesus and his message – as I understand them – express truths about the reality I inhabit that are not expressed, or not expressed as well, by other religions. I have basically the same beliefs I had at the end of Stage 4 after a long, diligent and hopefully rational quest, except now they have the Stage 5 overlay of recognizing that they and all religious beliefs are symbolic, ways of thinking and talking about transcendent Ultimate Reality, rather than expressions of ontological reality.
I don't, of course, know that the most literal sort of fundamentalist Christianity isn't an accurate description of Ultimate Reality and that anyone who thinks otherwise is indeed destined for eternal fiery torment. I can't know that. I can only say that my informed intuition tells me this can't possibly be true.
One thing is for sure: Spiritual maturity as represented by Fowler's Stages 4, 5 and 6 always – always – culminates in a more open, flexible, inclusive, non-dogmatic sort of religion that accepts mystery, ambiguity, uncertainty and doubt. No one ever evolves to Stage 4, 5 or 6 and ends up a more dogmatic, doctrinaire sort of believer. It just doesn't work that way.
I would add that while my evolution from Stage 3 to Stage 4 was the product of conscious choice and action, the evolution to Stage 5 was not at all this way. It was nothing I "worked at" or had as a goal. It simply occurred without me consciously recognizing it except in retrospect, surely because it was occurring at the visceral, intutive level. It didn't occur in a flash of insight of the sort Bucke and Essert describe but was a gradual awakening over a period of at least a few years.
After all that, it seems almost sacrilegious even to touch upon what I think the ontology of Ultimate Reality might be. However, before being banned at Christianity Board I did write a blog entry called "A Possibly Useful Way of Thinking About the Nature of God." It's a model - not my own idea, by any means - that does mesh nicely with my Stage 5 beliefs as described above (and with almost any theology from fundamentalism to Cosmic Consciousness, it seems to me). FWIW:
A Possibly Useful Way of Thinking About the Nature of God
Idealism as a model of God and His creation.
www.christianityboard.com
) to further articulate my thinking – if only for my own benefit...
