Table Of ContentPROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
By the same author
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE
EVIL AND THE GOD OF LOVE
ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
GOD AND THE UNIVERSE OF FAITHS
DEATH AND ETERNAL LIFE
GOD HAS MANY NAMES
FAITH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS (editor)
THE MANY-FACED ARGUMENT (editor with
A. C. McGill)
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
THE SECOND CHRISTIANITY
WHY BELIEVE IN GOD? (with Michael Goulder)
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (editor)
CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY READINGS IN
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (editor)
TRUTH AND DIALOGUE (editor)
THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE (editor)
CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER RELIGIONS (editor with
Brian H ebblethwaite)
PROBLEMS OF
RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
John Hick
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-333-39487-8 ISBN 978-1-349-17975-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17975-6
©John Hick 1985
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1985
All rights reselVed. For information, write:
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY lOOlO
Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd.
First published in the United States of America in 1985
ISBN 978-0-312-65154-1
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hick,John.
Problems of religious pluralism
Includes index.
I. Religious pluralism - Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Religion - Philosophy - Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Title.
BL85.H45 1985 291.1'72 85-2505
ISBN 978-0-312-65154-1
To friends who are prophets of religious pluralism
within their several traditions
Masao Abe within Buddhism,
Hasan Askari within Islam,
Ramchandra Gandhi within Hinduism,
Kushdeva Singh within Sikhism,
Wilfred Cantwell Smith within Christianity,
and Leo Trepp within Judaism
Contents
Preface
lX
Three Controversies
2 Seeing-as and Religious Experience 16
3 A Philosophy of Religious Pluralism 28
4 Religious Pluralism and Absolute Claims 46
5 On Grading Religions 67
6 On Conflicting Religious Truth-Claims 88
7 In Defence of Religious Pluralism 96
8 Eschatological Verification Reconsidered 110
9 Present and Future Life 129
Index 146
Vll
Preface
Western philosophy of religion has until very recently operated
almost entirely within the horizons of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition. Religious problems have meant the problems of
monotheism: how to prove, probabilify, or otherwise show it to be
reasonable to believe in, the existence of God; how to meet the
challenges posed to theism from modern linguistic philosophy
and from modern science; how to respond in theistic terms to the
ancient problem of evil; and so on. And the solutions proposed
have accordingly been relevant only within a monotheistic
universe of discourse.
This work should and will of course continue, and interesting
new developments will from time to time occur. But the larger and
more radical development is the expansion of the subject into an
intercultural discipline. For the philosophy of religion is in
principle the philosophy of all forms of religion and not only of
that which one either participates in or has reacted against. And
so the post-World War II explosion of information about the
history and phenomenology of religions has begun to tempt or
challenge philosophers of religion to look at their subject in the
context of the religious life and beliefs of the human race as a
whole.
As one philosopher's first steps in this new world of thought the
papers in this book are exploratory and tentative. The opening
chapter has a different character from the rest in that it is
autobiographical, describing three controversies encountered on
the way towards a global perspective. No one should inflict
personal stories on anyone who does not wish to hear them, and
this chapter is entirely optional; nothing will be lost from the later
more philosophical discussions by skipping this opening piece.
On the other hand a philosopher is a human being, living through
the history of his or her time, and it may be of interest to some to
see another small example of the way in which life influences and
is influenced by thought.
lX
x Preface
The second chapter, 'Seeing-as and Religious Experience',
begins to develop in the direction of religious pluralism a theme
that I have explored before in purely Judaeo-Christian terms,
namely the application of Wittgenstein's concept of seeing-as to
the analysis of religious experience and faith. Chapter 3, 'A
Philosophy of Religious Pluralism', moves to a general interpreta
tion, from a religious point of view, of the plurality of the great
religious traditions. This chapter was contributed to a volume in
honour of one of the leaders of thought in this area, Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, recently retired from Harvard University.
Chapter 4, 'Religious Pluralism and Absolute Claims', which
includes some discussion of the distinctively Christian problem of
Christology, was contributed to a series of colloquia on cultural
pluralism and religious belief held by the Boston University
Institute for Philosophy and Religion in 1981. This series is only
one of a number of academic conferences in recent years devoted
to aspects of religious pluralism in the United States, where the
subject is at present receiving more attention than in Europe.
'On Grading Religions' (Chapter 5) engages with one of the
major problems of religious pluralism, and the next two chapters,
'On Conflicting Religious Truth-Claims' and 'In Defence of
Religious Pluralism', are responses to critics of this and other
articles. May I say again that I am extremely grateful to those
who from time to time engage in constructive debate with me. I
have learned much from them and expect to learn more in the
future.
Chapter 8, 'Eschatological Verification Reconsidered', takes a
theme on which I have written before and begins to detach it from
a purely Christian setting; and the last chapter? 'Present and
Future Life', likewise seeks to open out the question of human
destiny as a global issue.
These chapters are preliminary to a more comprehensive and
systematic volume which will appear in a few years time. It is
hoped that any critical responses that the present book may be
fortunate enough to elicit will help in the writing of the larger
work.
Department if Religion JOHN HICK
Claremont Graduate School
Claremont, California
1 Three Controversies*
This august body has asked me to take my turn in providing an
autobiographical evening, and I am dutifully doing so. And when
I consider what, ifa nything, may have been of theological interest
in my life I find that it can only be the controversies, which have
(thus far) been principally three in number. It may surprise you
that one whom you have, I trust, found to be of a mild and
inoffensive disposition should ever have been involved in any
controversies, and should even have come to be seen by some as
dangerously radical and extreme. I suppose that this has been
made possible by an inner conflict between instinct and intellect.
By instinct I am conservative, cautious, timid and credulous. But
my intellect has nevertheless led me to various conclusions which
do not fit well with such a temperament; and it is these
conclusions that have got me into trouble. Left to itself my
essentially conservative nature would probably have enabled me
to be a thoroughly respectable theologian and churchman,
upholding every current consensus. Indeed I started well enough,
and kept to the straight and narrow path for a number of years.
But eventually the mind showed a certain wilful propensity to
philosophy, and to the asking of questions, together with an
unsociable habit of noticing flaws in arguments and inconsisten
cies in accepted belief-systems and, to make matters worse, an
obsessive respect for facts. All this, alas, has almost entirely
undermined my erstwhile respectability and has led to the
incidents I am about to relate.
The first controversy was basically absurd, happening as it did
in the middle of the twentieth instead of the nineteenth century,
although we now find that more than twenty years later the same
anachronistic criticisms are directed in England against David
Jenkins, Bishop of Durham. I moved in 1959 from Cornell
University to Princeton Theological Seminary, and thought it
• A paper delivered to the Pacific Coast Theological Society at Berkeley,
California, in 1983.
