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Evaluate John Hick's defence of his position in his book, TheRainbow of Faiths

This paper will evaluate John Hick's defence of his positionin his book The Rainbow of Faiths (Hick, J. 1995). Beginning with abrief historical and theological background to the debate the paper will thenreview Hick's book and assess whether or not Hicks is successful in his defenceof his version of religious pluralism which holds that:

..thegreat world religions constitute very different but so far as we can tell moreor less equally valid ways of conceiving, experiencing, and responding in lifeto the ultimate reality with which religion is concerned (Hick, 1995:149).

Background

The debate about the nature and existence of God, andmost specifically for Christianity, of the person Christ arose out of the 18^thcentury debates over reason and religion. Natural theology and its argumentsfor the existence of God had tended to ignore Christ. With Kant and laterSchleiermacher, language about God became closely related to language aboutChrist-even though there was the tendency to make Jesus a mere example of themoral and religious life. With Barth however, Christ is put at the centre oftheology. In Barth's theology it is only in the Incarnation that we haveknowledge of God in his transcendence. Subsequent late nineteenth and earlytwentieth developments, particularly the emergence of the comparative study ofreligion, demonstrated a fundamental problem between Barth's vision of Christ,and the competing claims of other religious traditions. Barth referred todialogue between Christianity and other religions as akin to howling withwolves (King, 1995). In spite of Barth's complaint scholars' rising interest inthe nature of other religions led to the first Parliament of World Religions inChicago in 1893. The Parliament has since been described as an effort inChristian Universalism there were however, interesting developments from this,not least the recognition that there was a need for dialogue between theexponents of Christianity and those of other faiths. Eventually this developedinto what is now called inter-faith dialogue, and into theologies of worldreligions. Both D'Costa (1986) and Race (1985) maintain that there are threebasic positions in religious dialogue, and in world religions' theologies.These typologies were originally developed in the work of Race (1983) anddefended against critics by De Costa (1986) these are, exclusivist, inclusivistand pluralist.

• Eclusivism: In this position there is only one true religion, all other religions are false or misguided.
• Inclusivism: This is the view which holds that while all religions may have a part of the truth only the supreme religion (Christianity) has the whole truth.
• Pluralism: maintains that all and any of the religions have partial versions of the truth and the one Universal Spirit.

What has to be noted here is that all three of thesepositions are Christian views of dialogue with other religions, and one wonderswhat views they might hold on this, particularly when other religions have nosay in the formulation of such theologies.. As Clooney (1989) questions,

Can other religions have a role in the development ofa Christian theology of religions and the dialogue of religions? (Clooney, 1989:201).

Hick and the Rainbow of Faiths

John Hick saw that it would be very difficult topreserve a Christ centered faith when it came to the encounter with other worldreligions. Thus in his earlier work he maintained that what was needed was aCopernican revolution in Christianity whereby it ceased to be Christ centeredand God was restored to the centre. This common centre, he argued, would formthe basis of a theology of world religions (Hick, 1977). Hick prefaces TheRainbow of Faiths with reference to (at the time of writing 1995) thedeepening theological crisis of Christianity at the end of the twentiethcentury. This crisis is evident in the intellectual problem that the existenceof diverse faiths presents and that, Hick maintains, is evident as both atheological and a philosophical problem. His major concern is with one aspectof the crisis and that is the response of the various religious traditions tothe Divine, the Ultimate, or what Hick calls the Real.

The book was developed from the author's AuburnLectures given at Union Theological Seminary in April 1994. Hick frames thedefence of his position as a dialogue with two partners they are a philosopher,whom he calls Phil, and a theologian called Grace. The parts of Hick's dialoguepartners Phil and Grace were adopted by two PhD students during the Auburnlectures.

Hick uses the rainbow in the title as ametaphor for the way in which the divine light of God is reflected in the raysof the world's faith traditions. His very choice of title and his explanationof it in the preface is, arguably, representative of his pluralist position. Inreferring to his choice of a dialogue for framing the intellectual problem thathe maintains is evident in theology and philosophy Hick states:

The aim of theological and philosophical dialogue is not necessarilyto come to an agreement-though this of course is much to be desired, andsometimes happens-but to locate the differences more precisely, and to see whatthe pros and cons of a question are (Hick:1995:2).

Hick argues that although the question ofpluralism is a controversial one for the churches, who, he maintains, veer fromconservative orthodoxy to liberal relativism, his aim nevertheless is toconvince his dialogue partners and his readers that a plural approach ispermissible within a Christian framework and that it is attracting the interestto an increasing number of people, both Christian and non-Christian. On theappropriateness of a theology of world religions Hick contends that:

theology is a growing and developing organism, so that anappropriate theological framework for today and tomorrow may well differ fromwhat was appropriate a thousand years ago or indeed, as the pace of culturalchange has increased, a hundred years ago, or even a generation ago (Hick:1995:12).

Hick discusses what he sees as thefallacy of Christian moral supremacy, which sees Christianity as the onlyreligion that was founded by God and that those who espouse Christianity have acloser relationship with God than do others, because the fruits of being aChristian are said to be evident in a Christian's life. Hick questions whetherthis can be supported and established empirically or whether it is an a prioriclaim, or a matter of first and pre-existing principle. He speaks of themulti-faith nature of contemporary society and how Britain in particular hasseen a change to its religious landscape since the Second World War and themigration of many former commonwealth citizens. He goes on to say that theappearance of numbers of different places of worship, and the fact that thenewcomers are our neighbours has engendered the realization that people fromother faiths are not so different from ourselves. He cites St. Paul's list ofthe fruits of the spirit as equally evident in the lives of those outside thetradition as they are within it. !n biblical theology, Christians are supposedto be recognizable by the fact that their lives evidence the fruits of thespirit, because these fruits, Hick contends, are also evident in the lives ofnon-Christians. How is it possible, he asks, to demonstrate that the fruits ofChristian life are superior to the fruits of any other life. In view of this heargues that:

The bearing of this upon a Christian theology of religions is thatthe lack of observable moral superiority is at variance with our traditionaltheology I am led to conclude that this theology is in need of revision. Forsurely its function is to make sense of the facts, not to be a device forsystematically ignoring or contradicting them(Hick, 1995:15-16).

After looking at the problem from thepoint of view of Christian moral supremacy Hick then goes on to look at thingsfrom the point of view of soteriology (salvation history). It is central toChristian theology that God's forgiveness and acceptance of humanity iscontingent on the Atonement, the death of Jesus on the cross and his subsequentresurrection. If this is the case, then Hick argues:

it is a tautology that Christianity alone knows and teaches thesaving truth that we must take Jesus as our Lord and saviour, plead his atoningdeath, and enter into the church as the community of the redeemed, in which thefruits of the Spirit abound (Hick, 1995:16).

This of course, Hick contends, iscontradictory because he has already demonstrated that the fruits of the spiritare present in faith traditions other than Christianity, and also innon-religious people. Although here it may be argued that he has not so muchdemonstrated the fact that these fruits can be seen in the lives of people ofother faiths (because he names not one specific incidence) as asserted it, thatis not to say that the view of Christian moral supremacy that Hick criticizesis any the less an assertion if one does not subscribe to it. Hick maintainsthat it is the fruits that are important and uses scripture to back up hisclaim that Jesus was more interested in how men and women lived their livesthan in theological propositions. He then goes on to postulate that we look atsalvation as a change in human beings-a change which can be identified-whenit can be identified-by its moral fruits (1995:17). This he sees as centralto all the world's faiths, the transformation of human life, a movement fromself-centredness to a grounding in God, or what Hick chooses to call, theReal (1995:18). Whether this grounding could, or should be applied toBuddhism would depend on which Buddhist path one was referring to.

Adherents of all religions, Hickmaintains, have their lives transformed by this turning towards the real. Heasserts that all the world religions are not really philosophies or theologiesbut ways of salvation and liberation. While Hick may be right in what he says,this is certainly an assumption that might be criticized by some people in theJudao-Christian and Muslim faiths, who might see their religion as orientedtowards glorifying God rather than salvation/liberation. What Hick calls thehybrid term salvation/liberation, is, he states the central concern of allreligious traditions. Hick then goes on to speak of typologies of worldreligion theologies, he refers to the exclusive, inclusive and pluralistpositions mentioned earlier. In relation to exclusivity where salvation isconfined to Christians. De Costa (1986) who also rejects exclusivism, says ofit that its fundamental claim is:

that other religions are marked by humankind's fundamentalsinfulness and are therefore erroneous, and that Christ (or Christianity)offers the only valid path (De Costa, 1986:52).

In his own rebuttal of exclusivism, Hickrefers specifically to the Roman Catholic Church which used to hold that therewas no salvation outside of the church of Rome, a position that was rejected atthe Second Vatican Council. The view that salvation is confined to Christiansis still however the view of a large number of fundamentalist Protestants. Hicksays of this:

if we mean by salvation, actual salvific change in women andmen, then it is, as I have been reminding us, an observable fact that this hasnot been restricted either to any section of Christianity or to Christianity asa whole. Given this very concrete conception of salvation/liberation thenChristian exclusivism is not a live option (Hicks, 1995:19-20).

Nowadays, the Catholic church, and themajority of Protestants would (so Hick maintains) hold to an inclusivistviewpoint. This however, can take a variety of forms, the inclusivism oftheologians such as De Costa (1986) and Race (1985) is one that:

on the one hand..accepts the spiritual power and depth manifest(in other faiths)..on the other hand it rejects them as not being sufficientfor salvation apart from Christ, for Christ alone is saviour (Race,1985:38).

As Hick notes, there are a number ofdifferent variations on the inclusivist position and De Costa take the view ofthe Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner. People of other faiths can beincluded in Christian salvation under Rahner's concept of 'anonymous Christian.' Hick also refers to thesalvation/liberation model of inclusivism as found in Panniker's (1981) work(the argument is that the transformation evident in the lives of people ofother faiths means that they follow Christ but may not realize it) Hick argues that this is nottruly a Christian inclusivism, rather, he maintains, this version is closer tohis own notion of pluralism.

However Kung (1991) argues againstinclusivist theologies of world religions, thus he contends that:

what looks like toleration in practice proves to be a kind ofconquest through embrace, a matter of allowing validity through domestication,an integration through a loss of identity (Kung, 1991: 81).

One wonders whether Hick might also beaccused of this since while he dismisses it as a Christian inclusivism andargues that it is closer to his own version of pluralism, could he not also becriticized for minimizing the identities of the world's religious traditions? This,it might be argued, is a perfectly valid question, particularly as Hick thengoes on to refer to the widely differing truth claims and concepts of God ofthe various faith traditions in terms of maps of the world,

.if one type of map is accurate the others must be inaccurate.If they are properly made, they are all accurate-and yet in another sense theyare all inaccurate, in that they all inevitably distort (Hick, 1995:27).

I would arguethat this is an unfortunate analogy as it appears as though, if we took toomuch note of what Hick is saying here then we might be just as likely to wonderwhether any religion has any use at all! Certainly De Costa (1986) whenreferring to Hicks earlier work, maintains that Hick's attempt to rid thereligions of exclusive truth claims may well mean that there is nothing left ofreligion.

Hick's position is that all of the worldreligions are grounded in the same reality::

the Ultimate ineffable Reality is capable of being authenticallyexperienced in terms of different sets of human concepts, as Jaweh, as the HolyTrinity, as Allah.occurring at the interface between the Real and ourdiffering religious mentalities and cultures (Hick, 1995:23).

Hick uses Kant's distinction between thenoumena (what something is in itself) and the phenomena (our perception of it)thus, while Hick would have us believe in transformation by the real, the real,at least in the terms Hick presents it, is not really accessible to humanbeings. That is to say (as Hick does) that what is ineffable is beyond humanconceptualization.Which takes us back to Anselm and the ontological argument that God is that ofwhich nothing greater can be conceived. Thus neither individuals nor thereligions themselves can claim to have knowledge of what the Real is. Hick hasargued in The Philosophy of Religion (1990) that:

the different religions are different streams of religiousexperience, each having started at a different point within human history andeach having formed its own conceptual self-consciousness within a differentcultural milieu (Hick 1990:114).

Hick relies on Phillips (1965) notion ofexpressivism in that what religious believers experience of the Real that cannotbe known or conceptualized by human beings. is expressed in their lives. Hickmaintains that while Phillips is a non-realist (the denial of an objectiveultimate reality) he himself claims to be a realist but it could be argued thathe undermines this claim by adopting an expressivist approach. This I wouldargue points to a contradiction in Hick's work. This internal contradictionconcerning his claim to adopt a realist position is also evident in his earlierwork The Myth of God Incarnate (1977) where he criticises the earlycommunity and the later early church for taking the statements regarding Jesus'divinity as objective truth. While it has to be acknowledged that this islogically problematic, as Wittgenstein's work has shown most religious languageis of that nature, and so can only be understood in the context in which it isused. It has to be said that the most obvious weakness of Hick's position isthat it is internally contradictory.

Conclusion

What motivates a pluralist theology ofreligions is what Hick defines as a deep respect for the human family(1995:118). Numerous commentators, however, have questioned the view of acommon human history, recognizing that such a view stems from the ideology ofthe Enlightenment and the mindset that accompanied colonial imperialism.Feminist commentators in particular have highlighted how the discourses of theEnlightenment, that claimed to speak for all, actually oppressed at least halfthe human race by assuming a common historical experience. Such discoursesfeminists contend violate the most basic right, that of the human person to be'other' than the norm. It is this assumption of commonality that I would argueposes a serious threat to Hick's position. Hick dismisses the idea thatdifferences of opinion over the Real or Ultimate Reality might exist asnegligible but because he is not in dialogue here with adherents of other faithtraditions this has to be regarded as an assumption. While Hick puts up a gooddefence in his book, I do not think that it is sufficient. In trying toestablish a way of dealing with conflicting and exclusive truth claims henegates them all in his refusal to accept their differences. His proposal of acommon ground i.e. the 'Real'might have been more convincing had he dialoguedwith theologians and philosophers from faith traditions other thanChrisitianity.

Bibliography

D'Costa, G. 1986 Theology andReligious Pluralism Blackwell, Oxford

D'Costa, G. 1996 The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions Religious Studies 32, June 1996

Hick, J 1990 Philosophy of Religion(4^th Edition), Prentice Hall.

Hick, J 1995 The Rainbow of FaithsLondon, SCM

Hick, J.1977 The Myth of God IncarnateSCM Press, London

http://www.faithnet.org.uk/A2%20Subjects/Philosophyofreligion/language.htm

King, U (ed.) 1995 Religion and Gender Oxford,Blackwell

Kung, H. 1991 Global Responsibility NewYork, Crossroads

Phillips, D Z (1965) The Concept of Prayer, Routledge,Kegan and Paul, London

Race, A.1985 Christians and ReligiousPluralism:Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions New York, Orbis

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