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Revision as of 22:37, 7 October 2006 by Thomasmeeks (talk | contribs) (→''Evil and the God of Love'', 1966, rev. ed., 1978)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Professor John Hick (born 1922) is an important and influential philosopher of religion and theologian. In philosophical theology, he has made major contributions to theodicy, eschatology, and christology, while in the philosophy of religion he has had great influence on epistemology of religion and religious pluralism.
His various academic positions include Emeritus Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the Claremont Graduate University, California; Emeritus H.G. Wood Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham; and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham. He is also the Vice-President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and Vice-President of The World Congress of Faiths.
Professor Hick has written hundreds of books and papers on his research subjects. His books have been translated, between them, into 16 other languages. He is probably the only philosopher of religion to have produced a landmark book in each decade of the second half of the 20th century (see "Major works," below), each of which prompted numerous spirited responses by other scholars.
Hick delivered the 1986-7 Gifford lectures and in 1991 was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Religion.
Hick's Most Widely Known Ideas
John Hick is best known today for his advocacy of religious pluralism. Previously a traditional evangelical, he was pushed towards pluralism by the problem of reconciling God’s love with the facts of cultural and religious diversity, and also by his earlier work in the epistemology of religion, wherein he determined that religious knowledge is no different from the rest of human knowledge in respect of its being thoroughly perspectival.
Hick aligns himself with those who maintain that religious belief is, in large part, a product of culture. Hick has taught that if Jesus truly was God incarnate, and if it is only by his death that humans can be saved, then one must conclude that it is only through Christian faith that anyone can be saved. This view accords with Christians of the exclusivist pursuasion, long the dominant position within Christendom, who argue that although other religions might contain truth, salvation is provided only in Jesus Christ. Hick protests that since much of the human race is raised in regions where the name of Jesus and the Christian gospel are not heard, it would then follow that the large majority of the human race remains unsaved. A second position, that of inclusivism, maintains that the core beliefs of Christianity are true, but argues for a more positive view of other religions. An inclusivist maintains that God has revealed Himself definitively in Jesus Christ and that Jesus is somehow central to God's provision of salvation for humankind; but inclusivism also allows that God's salvation is available through non-Christian religions, provided one is truly seeking truth and follows whatever light God gives. Neither of these positions is acceptable to Hick, since in either position, there will still be many who will remain unsaved, whether that is because of not hearing the gospel at all, or for resisting God's truth revealed in whatever form or manner. The Christ-centeredness of either of these positions is, for Hick, still too narrow a view to represent his perception of a God of love. Hick's solution is to hold out a third way: that of pluralism, rejecting the suggestion that Jesus is unique, or that the Christian faith is in any way superior to other religious traditions. Hick's response is to view religious truth as relative to cultures and to individuals. For him, different religions are appropriate, if culturally conditioned, responses to 'the Real'.
While Hick is a staunch defender of religious faith against atheism, his works are frequently attacked by Christian thinkers, including the current Pope, for his rejection of the traditional doctrine of Hell, and for his insistence that the doctrine of Jesus' being "God Incarnate" must be taken metaphorically and not literally.
Major works
Faith and Knowledge, 1957
Prior to the publiciation of this book, most theologians defined faith as an act of the will, wherein one chooses to believe in certain propositions despite lacking adequate proof of them. Hick calls this the "voluntarist" notion of faith, and against it he proposed an epistemological conception of faith. On Hick's construal, faith is a total interpreration (or reinterpretation) of one's ongoing experience. For example, Old Testament prophets experienced a painful war as the just retribution of God on their people for their past indulgences. Hick analyzes this along the lines of Kant's theory of distinguishing our individual perceptions from the "apperceiving" of certain overarching qualities, and of Wittgenstein's concept of all perception as an interpretive "Seeing-As". The prophet did not just decide one day to accept the idea that the war was divine retribution, but rather, he actually *experienced* it that way, as it was happening. Thus faith (regardless whether it be mistaken or not) is a cognitive act, rather than an act of the will. While many of Hick's peers have criticized his use of Kant and Wittgenstein in this book, most of them nonetheless have let go of a voluntarist conception of faith in favor of something that comes closer to Hick's conception (with a noteworthy exception being D. Z. Phillips).
Evil and the God of Love, 1966, rev. ed., 1978
This is Hick's major work on theodicy (that is, an explanation of why God would allow there to be evil and suffering in the world). Its primary contribution is to distinguish an Irenaean theodicy from an Augustinian one and to argue strongly for the former over the latter. An Augustinian theodicy (the more widely adopted and familiar theodicy of St. Augustine) assigns blame for the human suffering to sin and holds such blame to be an adequate justification of God's allowing human suffering to persist. An Irenaean theodicy (first expounded by St. Irenaeus) sees the evil of humanity as foreseeable by an all-knowing God, who therefore could not have created the conditions for its possibility unless all evil would eventually be utilized for a larger good -- such as challenging persons in the course of their soul-making process to face the consequences of sin and thereby develop, over time, a more robust set of virtues. The upshot of the Irenaean theodicy is that God is not "off the hook" for human evil, but must find a way to use it as an instrument for good, within a process that ultimately will redeem all humanity. Thus, in drawing out the ramifications of the Irenaean theodicy, Hick is led to a form of universalism -- holding that in Christian faith and hope all humanity will ultimately be saved (1978, p. 345).
This argument challenges the traditional notion of an everlasting Hell. Hick denies that such an notion can safely be ascribed to Jesus because of:
- New Testament ambiguity relating to eternity (αιωνιος) and uncertainty as to Aramaic resources for expressing the notion
- evidence of Jewish apocalyptic themes intruding into the Gospel tradition
- its inconsistency with the Jesus's broader message of God's sovereign love.
Instead, Hick appeals to a Biblical notion of sorrow, grace, and sanctification after death, akin to the Catholic teaching on purgatorial experience. (pp. 346-49)
In a kind of follow-up, one of Hick's own former students, Stephen Davis, argues for Hell as simply a place for some souls to separate themselves voluntarily from God permanently. This kinder, gentler Hell seems to cohere with Hick's argument and thus escape Hick's criticism. Nonetheless, Davis agrees with Hick's motto that there can be "no theodicy without eschatology," meaning that the only way to reconcile an all-loving, all-powerful God with the existence of evil in our world is to suppose that a post-mortem period will redeem any evil and suffering we would have previously experienced.
Note: this book is soon to be re-issued with a new preface by Robert and Marilyn Adams.
Death and Eternal Life, 1976
Since Hick had concluded in Evil and the God of Love (above) that there is no theodicy without eschatology, it is natural that his next major work would seek to prove that certain escatological requirements are satisfiable. This means that life after death, though not provable, is nonetheless a possibility that a rational person could accept. Hick's most famous arguments include his pointing out, against the Freudian idea that the afterlife originated as "wishful thinking," that historical records indicate to the contrary that the afterlife was dreaded by primitive man, and not thought of in positive terms until much later. Another bit of evidence presented by Hick is the finding by Soviet scientists, during their attempts to refute mediumship in the early 20th century, of such compelling cases that they had to resort to holding telepathy to be true, in order to construct an alternative explanation for the medium's ability to discover hard-to-guess facts concerning the deceased. While Hick found this and other examples to fall far short of proving the afterlife, he nonetheless concluded there was enough support to render the belief reasonable. Thus, the theodicy started in Hick's previous work was completed (in respect of its eschatological requirements) only with this volume.
An Interpretation of Religion, 1989, rev. ed., 2004
Picking up again on his epistemological notion of faith as "Experiencing-As", Hick propounds the view that the various major religions of the world are all equally valid ways of experiencing the ultimate transcendent Reality in variant forms, be it God, the Tao, the Dharma-Kaya, etc. Often considered Hick's magnum opus, this work became an instant classic in religious pluralism, and drew immediate criticism from those whom Hick calls inclusivists and exclusivists. The inclusivists believe that some other religions should be seen as partly included in the overall scheme of salvation that is more perfectly represented by their own religion; exclusivists believe that salvation (or liberation) cannot be had in any religious tradition besides their own.
Hick argues that exclusivism is irreconcilable with an all-loving God who would have surely sent his message in some form, over the long course of past history, to all major cultures, each in its own manner and form. He then argues that inclusivism is a half-hearted move toward pluralism. Saying one's faith can partly include the truths of another is arbitrary, in that, if true, then it could just as well be said that the other faith partly includes the truths of one's own. Once one accepts inclusivism but acknowledges that, logically, any inclusivism must be bi-directional, then one has finally arrived at Hick's pluralist position, that multiple faiths are equally valid. This conclusion drew him the dubious distinction of being negatively criticized by (at the time) Cardinal Ratzinger, who is today the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, it was chiefly on the strength of this book that Hick was awarded the coveted Grawemeyer Award.
The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 1993
A few years prior to this book, Hick had edited an anthology entitled The Myth of God Incarnate, which included contributions from a wide variety of scholars, ranging from biblical exegetes and church historians to philosophers and theologians. The point of that book had been to dispel the notion that Jesus literally was God incarnate. The controversy that immediately erupted upon its publication went far beyond what the book's contributors had generally expected, and contributed in no small way to Hick's being excluded from joining the Presbytery of San Gabriel, California in the Presbyterian Church of the U.S., despite several of his fellow scholars (and Presbyterians) coming to his defense. Since the book had been an anthology to which Hick made just a partial contribution, his position was, when addressed by his critics, often oversimplified or confused with that of others. Therefore, it seems fitting that Hick would finally publish a book-length work of his own on the subject, to further develop and clarify his christology.
In The Methaphor of God Incarnate, Hick argues that the idea of Jesus being unequivocally both God and man falls to several parallel objections: (1) on the face of it, humans and God have opposite characteristics (such as having the possibility of sinning vs. lacking that possibility) that in 2000 years, have not been shown to be reconcilable unequivocally; (2) meanwhile the idea that Jesus was literally God has been used to justify the alleged superiority of Christianity to all other faiths, which has only worsened the extent of religious conflict between people around the globe; (3) while non-Christian religions appear to have more or less the same efficacy in producing profound mystics and saints (consider the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi) as Christianity does, Christianity has been associated with terrible crimes and indulgences. Therefore, it does not appear that Christianity exhibits the superior qualities which one would expect of having been the only faith founded by God in person; rather it seems more tenable that Christianity is, like all the other major faiths, a valuable yet fallible tradition, inspired by a profound mystic, prophet and saint (Jesus) who metaphorically was called the Son of God, and only later was elevated mistakenly from a metaphorical Son of God to a metaphysical God the Son.
Additional Selected Works
- Philosophy of Religion, 1963
- Arguments for the Existence of God, 1970
- God and the Universe of Faiths,1973
- God Has Many Names, 1980
- The Rainbow of Faiths,1995
- John Hick: An Autobiography, 2003
- The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm, 2004
- The New Frontier of Religion and Science, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, Nov 2006
Additional Biographical Source: John Hick. "Climbing the Foothills of Understanding." Pp. 76-97 in The Craft of Religious Studies, edited by Jon R. Stone. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Some of John Hick's recent articles and talks are downloadable from his official website.
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