James W. Fowler
American scholar of religion
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Through Developmental psychology and Piaget's theory of cognitive development
Life and career
Fowler was born in Reidsville, North Carolina, on October 12, 1940, the son of a Methodist minister. In 1977, Fowler was appointed Associate Professor of Theology and Human Development at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. He was later named Charles Howard Candler Professor of Theology and Human Development. He died on October 16, 2015.
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Stages of faith
He is best known for his book Stages of Faith (1981), in which he sought to develop the idea of a developmental process in "human faith".
These stages of faith development were along the lines of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
In the book, Fowler describes 6 stages of development as shown in the table below:
Empirical research
Fowler's model has inspired a considerable body of empirical research on faith development, although little of such research was ever conducted by Fowler himself. A useful tool here has been Gary Leak's Faith Development Scale, or FDS, which has been subject to factor analysis by Leak. In 2003, Timothy Paul Jones developed the Fowlerian Stage-Development Survey (FSDS) and argued that Fowler’s stages of faith do not correlate positively with evangelicals' self-perceived faith development. For further discussion of empirical assessments of faith development, see Developmental approaches to religion.