John (Harwood) Hick - Hick's Most Widely Known Ideas, Major works, Additional Selected Works

Theologian and philosopher of religion, born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, N England, UK. He studied at Edinburgh University, and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of England in 1953. After a long teaching career in the USA and Cambridge, he held professorships in Birmingham (1967–82) and at Claremont Graduate School, CA (1979–92, now emeritus). He has produced several standard textbooks and anthologies in the philosophy of religion, and has questioned the status of Christianity among the world religions in such works as God and the Universe of Faiths (1973) and The Myth of God Incarnate (1977). Later works include Problems of Religious Pluralism (1985) and The Rainbow of Faiths (1995).

Professor Hick has written hundreds of books and papers on his research subjects.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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 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. 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.

Some of John Hick's recent articles and talks are downloadable from his official website.