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chapter_two.docxChapter Two
THE EARLY STAGE OF JOHN HICK’S PLURALISM
Our discussion of pluralism centers on the work of John Hick, who is generally acknowledged to be the best-known and most influential proponent of pluralism today.
Other writers have analyzed the development of Hick’s thought over the past forty years, 1 so I will focus on the two major stages in the evolution of his pluralism. This chapter will examine the earlier stage of his thinking, extending roughly from 1970 to 1980; chapter 3 will explore the changes his thinking has undergone since 1980. It is important to see that Hick’s pluralism did not suddenly appear in a mature, fully developed form. It first took root and then grew, sometimes fitfully, as Hick tried first one thing and then another to make his evolving view of pluralism work. Tracing some of these steps can be instructive.
The second stage of Hick’s pluralism marked a major break with elements of his earlier position. In fact, the reason that Hick developed his second stage was because his first attempt at pluralism was, to my mind, a dismal failure. 2 Understanding the mistakes of the first stage will make it easier for us to reach a judgment about the value of stage two.
JOHN HICK’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
During the early 1970s John Hick regarded his approach to world religions as so radical that he began to describe it as a Copernican Revolution in religion. As Hick saw things, Christian exclusivism is analogous to the old, outdated Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Claudius Ptolemy, an astronomer and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, from around A.D. 100 to 170, taught what is called the geocentric theory of the solar system and pictured the sun and the planets as revolving around the earth. Ptolemy’s view was challenged by the heliocentric, or sun-centered, theory proposed by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543). For several hundred years now, it has become almost a cliché that scholars who have a dramatically new idea to propose describe it as a “Copernican Revolution.”
However, Hick was doing more than just suggesting that his theory was revolutionary. He found in the Copernican Revolution an appropriate metaphor for his own new understanding of the relation between the major religions of the world. That is, Hick’s proposal in comparative religions was patterned after the transformation from a Ptolemaic model to a Copernican model in cosmology. 3
Hick sees Christian exclusivism as analogous to the outdated Ptolemaic model of the solar system. He defined Ptolemaic theology as a system “whose fixed point is the principle that outside the church, or outside Christianity, there is no salvation.” 4 Unfortunately, when worded in this way, Hick’s definition suggests significant bias against Christianity, because exclusivism can be found in many religions.
Hick’s self-described Copernican alternative to Ptolemaic theology involved the removal of Christianity from any exalted or exclusive place at the center of the world’s religions. Just as Copernicus replaced the earth-centered paradigm with a sun-centered model, so Hick proposed to replace the historic Christian view that Jesus Christ is the center of the religious world with the claim that God is the center. The historic Christian position that there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ must now be abandoned, according to Hick. His substitute sees all the world religions rotating around God, not Jesus.
The Notion of Epicycles
Many students of astronomy are surprised to learn how well the old Ptolemaic model worked in explaining the apparent motion of the planets. The reason for its success depended on the skill of Ptolemaic astronomers in designing what are called epicycles. An epicycle was an orbit on an orbit, such as the orbit of the moon around the earth, which in turn is orbiting around the sun. There were times when the Ptolemaic astronomers could only explain certain motions of heavenly bodies by postulating orbits on orbits on orbits, as seen in the following diagram.
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For several years after Copernicus proposed his competing model of the solar system, Ptolemaic astronomers continued to do a better job of explaining and predicting the movement of the planets. Eventually, astronomers recognized that the successes of the Ptolemaic model were due to a mistake in Copernicus’s thinking. Copernicus believed the planetary orbits were circles. After Johannes Kepler showed convincingly that planetary orbits are elliptical, the power of the Copernican system to explain the solar system became evident.
Ever since, the epicycles of the old Ptolemaic theory have served as an example of arbitrary and contrived theorizing, not based on evidence, adopted solely to enhance the plausibility of the theory. While the repeated addition of more and more epicycles made it possible to preserve the Ptolemaic system a bit longer, the whole enterprise became increasingly cumbersome and complex. The Copernican model was eventually adopted because it was simpler and less cumbersome.
According to John Hick, the religious analogue of Ptolemaic astronomy is any view that places Christianity at the center of the world’s religions. Hick denigrates attempts (whether by exclusivists or inclusivists) to protect Christianity from the challenge of the world’s religions by comparing them to the epicycles of the Ptolemaic system. That is, the efforts of exclusivists and inclusivists to defend their positions are examples of contrived, arbitrary, and artificial measures. Their efforts are not prompted by an honest attempt to conform theory to evidence, but are merely tinkering with one’s model so as to continue delaying its inevitable demise.
Why Was Hick’s “Revolution” Necessary?
Although we will look more closely later at Hick’s reasons for his self-described “revolution,” a brief look at some of them now will be helpful for understanding what Hick was thinking in the early 1970s. One reason was Hick’s growing awareness of saintly and holy people in non-Christian religions. 5 As one observer explains, Hick’s encounters with devout and moral non-Christians led him to think it was no longer possible to “argue that Christianity or Christ is the sole means of salvation since it is evident that many outside Christianity, and outside the influence of the historical Jesus, are in fact saved.” 6
But does encountering pious, devout, and even saintly non-Christians prove the truth of pluralism? As we will see, certain assumptions underlie Hick’s response to these encounters. One of these is Hick’s dubious claim that the apparently contradictory truth-claims found in different religions are not what they seem.
During the first stage in the development of his pluralism, Hick also appealed to the notion of an all-loving God. He believed that the existence of an all-loving God required the rejection of any “Ptolemaic” version of Christianity; by this he rejected any form of Christian exclusivism. The more Hick thought about it, the more convinced he became that a loving God would not exclude anyone from his salvation.
Ironically, Hick himself provided the major reason why this line of thinking had to be rejected. Hick recognized that pluralism could not succeed if any specific knowledge about God is possible. Suppose we knew, for example, that personal monotheism is true. We could then know that polytheism and pantheism are false. But if we know that pantheism is false, then we can hardly continue to view pantheistic systems as paths to God that function on an equal footing with theism. And so we find Hick conceding that God as he (or whatever) really is, is unknowable.
But when Hick then appeals to the love of God as the ground of one of his convictions, he is clearly contradicting himself. A loving God is a supreme being with known properties. As soon as we can legitimately ascribe any properties to God, problems arise for the pluralist, specifically because that God with those attributes (such as love) will conflict with the gods of other religious systems who do not possess those attributes or that set of properties.
Hick has been criticized for attempting to have it both ways. On the one hand, he promoted a pluralistic, non-Christian approach to the world religions while, on the other hand, all his talk about a loving, personal God sounded a lot like Christianity. If, as Hick insists, no one can have any knowledge about God, then no one can know that the Supreme Being is a loving God. But if we cannot know this, then we can hardly use information that we cannot know—that God is love—as the basis of an attack on exclusivism. It took Hick quite a while to see why he could not continue to appeal to divine love in his arguments for pluralism.
Hick also argued that religious beliefs are typically a result of geographic and cultural conditioning. Someone born in Dallas, Texas, is most likely going to be a Christian. Guess what that person would be if born in Sri Lanka, Mecca, Tokyo, Tehran, or New Delhi? A just and loving God would hardly punish people for what is basically an accident of birth. But again we see how difficult it is for Hick to avoid this essentially self-defeating line of thinking. The argument falters unless he can free his appeal to geographic and cultural conditioning from references to divine love.
These reasons cited by Hick as support for the first stage of his pluralism are only mentioned in passing now, but it is not too soon for the reader to begin thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of Hick’s early arguments.
Summary
John Hick reached a point in his life where he rejected Christian exclusivism, a position he compared to the old Ptolemaic theory of the universe. He ridiculed any effort to rescue a Christ-centered system (either exclusivist or inclusivist) as an epicycle, that is, a purely arbitrary move that only revealed the desperation of the old-time view of Christian superiority.
Hick’s own alternative to a Christ-centered view of religion was his so-called Copernican Revolution. This amounted to a proposal to remove Jesus Christ and Christianity from the center among the world’s religions and replace them with “God.” Hick was convinced that his new pluralism would be more tolerant than Christianity and would allow other religions to achieve an equal standing with the Christian faith.
PROBLEMS WITH HICK’S FIRST STAGE
Hick’s movement away from important aspects of his early pluralism was hardly an accident. He changed his position on some issues because it became clear he had to. An examination of Hick’s reasons for changing his mind provides some interesting insights regarding both Hick and his pluralism.
We noticed how Hick’s Copernican Revolution had removed Jesus from any central place in relation to the world’s religions and replaced him with an all-loving God. Hick failed to appreciate that many non-Christian religionists would regard his appeal to an all-loving God as an insult or, even worse from Hick’s standpoint, as a new kind of exclusivism. These people saw clearly how Hick was still operating under the influence of a “narrow” Judeo-Christian type of thinking. To be all-loving, the God operating at the center of Hick’s system would have to be a personal God. But many religious systems express belief in a nonpersonal Supreme Principle; others neither affirm nor deny the existence of a personal God.
Hick ascribed not only personality to his God, but also biblical attributes such as love. This created a dilemma. If the “God” of his new theocentric approach to religion were personal, then Hick would appear guilty of excluding nonpersonalistic views of God (pantheism). But if, by contrast, he opted for a nonpersonal God at the center, then he would be excluding religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that understand God as personal. Since one of his objectives was tolerance as opposed to “closed-minded Christians,” it did not work to appear intolerant toward anyone.
All this was embarrassing for another reason. It suggests that Hick knew in advance what he wanted his conclusions to be and was simply cutting the cloth to fit the customer. Was not Hick simply churning out his own arbitrary, ad hoc epicycles? He who had set himself up as the radical revolutionary rejecting such evils as exclusivism, intolerance, and epicyclic imaginings appeared to be guilty of those very sins. Clearly he had to do something.
Hick set about to extricate himself from the dilemma. First, he tried arguing that God was both personal and impersonal, as though this would make his system large enough to include theists, pantheists, and everyone else he wanted. But a little reflection showed how unsatisfactory that move was. The world contains some square objects and some round objects, but it does not and cannot contain objects that are round and square at the same time. Likewise, reality might contain a personal God or an impersonal god, but it is logically impossible for God to be both personal and impersonal at the same time. 7
Hick’s Unknowable God
In the midst of this, Hick was also denying that human beings could know God. God, he wrote, “exceeds all human thought.” 8 At the time, in 1973, denying the knowability of God had assumed the status of an initiatory rite into the mysteries of neo-liberal theology. 9 So it is unclear whether Hick’s adoption of theological agnosticism was anything more than a less-than-thoughtful surrender to the liberal zeitgeist. Eventually, however, the unknowability of God would prove to be a key step in his attempt to rescue his Copernican Revolution from all kinds of difficulties.
What Hick failed to see, however, is that his affirming God’s unknowability only created new problems. Let us reflect a bit. Hick tells us that God is unknowable. But in making this claim, Hick reveals at least two things that he knows about God. For one thing, he seems to know that there is a God. Second, to claim that God is unknowable is already to know something very significant about God. If God really were unknowable, then we should be unable to know that he is unknowable.
Hick faced another difficulty. There are two reasons why God might be unknowable. First, his (or its) nature has not been revealed to us. In this case, people could only worship an unknown “God” in ignorance (Acts 17:23). That is not very reassuring. Second, perhaps God has no attributes, but in this case, Hinduism. Theologian D. Forrester has concluded that Hick’s ideas would be acceptable only to followers of the Vedanta strain of Hinduism. 10 But if this were so, Hick’s early theory would have had the ironic consequence of replacing Christian exclusivism with the view of a particular Hindu sect. So Hick’s thought did not quite constitute a revolution. He would only have replaced one alleged Ptolemaic position with one of his own.
In one of his most recent books Hick states that “the Buddhist concept of sunyata in one of its developments, namely as the anti-concept excluding all concepts, provides a good symbol for the Real [that is, God in itself].” 11
Philosopher Doug Geivett thinks there is more to these hints that Hick is really the advocate of a variant of Eastern religious thought. He writes:
As it turns out, Hick’s affinity with the Eastern thread of religious history is partly constituted by his religious pluralism. Historically, pluralism is antagonistic to the core principles of Christianity. But syncretism and pluralism have been prominent features of Eastern thought for centuries. Conceptually, it is clear that Hick is much more at home with Eastern models of religious reality than with the tradition into which he was, as he says, born. (Hick’s own example just goes to show how potentially irrelevant it is to the final outcome of one’s faith, especially in the contemporary world, where one is born or how one is brought up.) 12
Geivett, Forrester, and others who have drawn attention to this often-overlooked aspect of Hick’s thought have identified a serious problem. In a later chapter we will encounter Hick’s challenge to what he calls “the myth of Christian uniqueness.” We have encountered in the last section of this chapter a different myth, something we could call “the myth of Hick’s neutrality.”
CONCLUSION
