Jay led the discussion. He prefaced it with a reminder that god’s word is not difficult to understand and that there may be dangers in over-analyzing it. In Matthew 11:25, Jesus said: “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” God’s word is simple. It comes from the inner light inside all of us, and requires no intellect to understand.
Jay then re-iterated the description of the stages of faith as discussed last week. He reminded us that there is nothing judgmental about the stages, that salvation does not depend upon stage of faith.
Jay: I would like to compare the stages of faith to the “rigor and relevance framework” educators use to take students from lower to higher stages of learning, from rote memorization of knowledge, to application of knowledge, to analysis of knowledge.
Source: http://www.leadered.com/images/frameworkDetails.gif
Each quadrant is important. The student must be moved through each in turn. Although you cannot start the student out in quadrant D, quadrant D is nevertheless the ultimate goal. The quadrants mesh quite closely with the stages of faith in some key respects. The student is driven successfully through the quadrants as the teacher gradually increases the levels of rigor and relevance in the subject being taught.
What influences drive us through the various stages of faith? We have covered some of them in our discussions: Prayer, man’s will/god’s will, and community and its Pseudo/Chaos/Emptiness/True stages. How do they influence us, how do they drive us from one stage to another? Are there other influencers?
Harry: I have been through stages 2 and 3, and sometimes 4 and even 1, then went back to 2 for the sake of my children who, I thought, would benefit from being brought up in my SDA church community. It was the safe choice. But I can’t help questioning things; not so much in search of “the Truth” as to find out why some things make no sense. Questioning is what has driven me back through the stages to where I am now. It is a natural process.
David: In both education and faith, teacher and text (scripture) are influential, are drivers, by design. But they can influence negatively, not always positively. We are fortunate in having Don as our teacher; he has had a positive influence on the faith of all of us. But that is just our good fortune; perhaps more often than not, there is no teacher.
In education, the quality—the rigor and relevance—of the textbook can also have a positive or negative impact on learning and understanding a subject and moving the student through. Scripture is the textbook of faith. Scripture has great positive influence in moving people into stage 2, yet (as in my case) can have equally great negative impact in driving them away from it!
Jay: The tools of traditional education, such as the textbook, were good at keeping people in quadrant A. They were not intended to develop higher-order thinking, and they were more academic than applied. But in the past five years, there has been a dramatic change. Not so much in the area of rigor, which has not increased very much, but relevance has increased greatly. The bible as textbook can also seem very traditional, but much depends upon how it is interpreted: A limited single interpretation—the traditional approach by the various denominations—makes the bible a good tool for keeping people at stage 2. In this class, we accept and discuss multiple interpretations, which in fact makes it a richer source of Truth. But it is messy. Our natural human tendency is to seek order and certainty, and a bible that can be interpreted multiple (sometimes conflicting) ways destroys order and creates uncertainty.
As a school principle, I look at the tools teachers bring to the classroom. The teacher him- or herself is a major influence in moving students through the quadrants, of course, but I am interested in seeing their tools and strategies, so see if they are geared to that purpose. Similarly, here I am interested in the tools and strategies that can influence our progress through the stages of faith. Is prayer such a tool?
Kiran: Besides the teacher and the textbook, one’s immediate community—one’s fellow students—also influence one’s progress in education. In India, classes are ranked by test results, so the top quartile go to class A, the second quartile to class B, and so on. It has been observed that when a new student joins a school in mid-term, s/he will generally quickly adapt to the progress level of whatever class s/he is assigned to. A student assigned to the top class A will tend to achieve class A test results, and so on.
In stage 2, I hesitated to voice my doubts and questions, thinking they would be answered in due course if I just stuck to the program. When I go out to work with homeless people (an application of my Christian faith) I doubt my own credentials to be able to help them.
Jay: So community is one thing that influences one’s stage of faith, and applying one’s faith to help others is another.
Kiran: A third is of course the parents of a child, but their influence tends to wane as a child becomes a teenager who will tend to want to move beyond the parental stage of faith.
Robin: As a parent myself, with an understanding of the stages of faith, it would please me to see my children progress to a more mature level of faith than I myself occupy.
As one progresses through the stages, we stop treating god as Santa Claus, either because we are disappointed in his failure to answer our prayers, or because we come to realize that he is not Santa Claus at all. In the latter case, we then seek to understand god and his will better.
Jay: In education, to move students successfully through quadrants A to D requires a change in the way we teach. Robin seems to be saying that changing the way we pray also helps us move successfully through the stages of faith. That raises an interesting question: Does a transition to a new stage of faith (influenced by factors such as a better teacher) change the way we pray? Or does a change in the way we pray take us to a different stage of faith? I tend to favor the former explanation, but the educator in me makes me wonder if there is a way to teach people how to pray in such a way that they will achieve a more mature stage of faith.
Harry: People in stage 2 would not accept the premise Don and Jay have proposed, that judgment/salvation is independent of one’s stage of faith, but it seems true to me. Perhaps one reason people do not progress from stage to stage is because god already exists in their hearts, and that is all that is needed for faith.
When I was in stage 2 I prayed and it felt good. Now I have transitioned, prayer does nothing for me. The acquisition of knowledge can help one transition if one is not frightened of the knowledge, if one feels liberated by it; or it can deter one from transitioning if one is frightened of the knowledge.
David: It seems to me that Harry prays much more than he realizes, as do all of us who have transitioned beyond stage 2. It is just a different way of praying: Instead of formal, stylized, prayer, it is simply to seek enlightenment, it is questioning spiritual issues in our hearts and minds. Surely, by definition, to seek enlightenment is to pray. We may think we are having a conversation with ourselves, but are we not really talking to our deeper, inner, selves—our inner light, god—for guidance and enlightenment?
Kiran: Being in transition between stages 2 and 3 was difficult for me, until Alice pointed out that there is a force—love—that unifies the stages, that makes it possible for people in different stages to relate to and influence one another.
Harry: Stage 1 is clearly a bad place to be, shiftless and self-centered. In stage 2, one has some structure and belief to hold onto. In stage 3 one comes to view god as a universal god present in all religions and all people. In stage 4, one uses stage 2 to continue to seek, and to bestow, enlightenment. There may be a stage 5, as Alice has suggested, which is a stage in which one simply loves and accepts everybody.
Alice: It’s not up to me to transition, it’s in God’s hands—it’s his will, not ours. I can’t see how there can be a textbook that leads us through the steps of transition. As a young girl, I used to despise the simple faith of the old women in my neighborhood in the land where I was born, but today I see that faith as supreme, as the faith Jesus wants us to have. These women may not have gone to church, or if they ever did, they stumbled over its rituals. They may not have studied the bible. But their faith was sublime in its ignorance of these things. If I were to try to witness to them, how could I even reach their minds?
It’s hard to wrap our minds around this subject unless we look deep inside ourselves and observe our own journey. It is no good looking outside. God is the teacher. We are his students, and he is leading us through the quadrants. His students are not even aware of his plan, of what he is doing to achieve that. The student’s only responsibility is to listen to the teacher and do as s/he is told. But his patience is such that he does not push us—he waits for us to be ready. Only then does he transition us, and we begin to apply our new insight in new ways. We know we have transitioned when things that previously did not make sense suddenly do make sense, when we see things in our relationships and in our environment that we did not see before.
I conclude that I know nothing, I have no say in my progress, I am insignificant. That liberates me!
Jay: We’ll continue to discuss these influences on the stages of faith, next week, when Don should be back.
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