John Hick

Faith and knowledge

Inevitably, reading is one of the requirements to be undergone. To improve the performance and quality, someone needs to have something new every day. It will suggest you to have more inspirations, then. However, the needs of inspirations will make you searching for some sources. Even from the other people experience, internet, and many books. Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

The Non-absoluteness of Christianity

Ernst Troeltsch’s famous book The Absoluteness of Christianity (1901) focused on what has always been from the point of view of the Christian church the central issue in its relationship to other streams of religious life. Until fairly recently it was a virtually universal Christian assumption, an implicit dogma with almost credal status, that Christ/the Christian gospel/Christianity is ‘absolute’, ‘unique’, ‘final’, ‘normative’, ‘ultimate’ - decisively superior to all other saviours, gospels, religions. Troeltsch’s own intellectual journey illustrates how this implicit dogma has now come under serious question. In the lecture that he wrote for delivery at Oxford in 1923 (he died before delivering it), he criticised his own earlier position and opted for the very different view that Christianity is ‘absolute’ for Christians, and the other world faiths are likewise ‘absolute’ for their own adherents.1 Clearly the ‘relative absoluteness’ of his 1923 paper is very different in its implications from the unqualified absoluteness of his 1901 book.

A Personal Note

I became a Christian by conversion whilst a first year law student. The converting power was the New Testament picture of Jesus Christ. During a period of several days of intense inner turmoil the Christ-centred world of meaning, previously dead to me, became overwhelmingly alive as both awesomely demanding and irresistibly attractive, and I entered into it with great joy and excitement. And as is so often the case in youthful conversions, the Christian friends who encouraged and supported me were more or less fundamentalist in their beliefs, so that the set of ideas which I received as part of my initial Christian package was Calvinist orthodoxy of an extremely conservative kind.

Jesus and the world religions

If we start from where we are, as Christians of our own day, we begin amidst the confusion and uncertainty which assail us when we try to speak about Jesus, the historical individual who lived in Galilee in the first third of the first century of the Christian era. For New Testament scholarship has shown how fragmentary and ambiguous are the data available to us as we try to look back across nineteen and a half centuries, and at the same time how large and how variable is the contribution of the imagination to our ‘pictures’ of Jesus. In one sense it is true to say that he has been worshipped by millions; and yet in another sense, in terms of subjective ‘intentionality’, a number of different beings, describable in partly similar and partly different ways, have been worshipped under the name of Jesus or under the title of Christ. Some have pictured him as a stern law-giver and implacable judge, and others as a figure of inexhaustible gracious tenderness; some as a divine psychologist probing and healing the recesses of the individual spirt, and others as a prophet demanding social righteousness and seeking justice for the poor and the oppressed; some as a supernatural being, all-powerful and all-knowing, haloed in glorious light, and others as an authentically human figure living within the cultural framework of his time; and he has been pictured both as a pacifist and as a Zealot, as a figure of serene majesty and as a ‘man for others’ who suffered human agonies, sharing the pains and sorrows of our mortal lot… And each of these different ‘pictures’ can appeal to some element among the various strands of New Testament tradition.

Exclusivism versus pluralism in religion: a response to Kevin Meeker

I argue that Meeker is mistaken in two crucial respects. First, contrary to both myself and Plantinga, he treats exclusivism as a theory about the relation between the religions, and then claims that it is superior to the pluralist theory. But he does not say what his exclusivist theory is. Second, he bases his claim of a fundamental self-contradiction in my pluralist position on a view which I disavow, namely that altruism is the core of religion. He omits the central idea of a profound reorientation in response to the Real, of which altruism is a manifestation.

The new frontier of religion and science

The new frontier of religion and science : , The new frontier of religion and science : , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

Religious Pluralism and Absolute Claims

The topic that I am going to pursue under this title is that of the absolute claims made by one religion over against others. Such a claim might be concerned with knowing and teaching the truth or with offering the final good of salvation/liberation. I suggest that in fact the truth-claim and the salvation-claim cohere closely together and should be treated as a single package. The valuable contents of this package, the goods conveyed, consist in salvation or liberation; and the packaging and labelling, with the identifying of the sender and the directing of the package to the recipient, are provided by the doctrine. Thus doctrines are secondary, and yet essential to the vital matter of receiving salvation, somewhat as packaging and labelling are secondary and yet essential to transmitting the contents of a parcel.

Eschatological Verification Reconsidered

The world in which we find ourselves is religiously ambiguous. It is possible for different people (as also for the same person at different times) to experience it both religiously and non-religiously; and to hold beliefs which arise from and feed into each of these ways of experiencing. A religious person may report that in moments of prayer he or she is conscious of existing in the unseen presence of God, and is aware — sometimes at least — that his/her whole life and the entire history of the world is taking place within the ambience of the divine purpose. But on the other hand the majority of people in our modern world do not participate in that form of experience and are instead conscious of their own and others’ lives as purely natural phenomena, so that their own experience leads them at least implicitly to reject the idea of a transcendent divine presence and purpose. If they are philosophically minded, they may well think that the believer’s talk is the expression of what Richard Hare has called a blik, a way of feeling and thinking about the world which expresses itself in pseudo-assertions, pseudo because they are neither verifiable nor falsifiable and are therefore factually empty.’ The religious person speaks of God as a living reality in whose presence we are, and of a divine purpose which gives ultimate meaning to our lives.

Sceptics and Believers

The Conference discussions revolved, in some four or five different orbits, around the question of the reality or existence of God. The conception of God in use throughout the Conference was that of the biblical and Christian tradition. Those of the philosophers who were sceptical concerning the existence of such a Being posed a question to the religious believers. They asked them to indicate how, or in what sense, they could hold it to be reasonable or rational to believe that God exists. The sceptics were not seeking to impose any controversial or arbitrarily narrow definition of reasonableness. They were not, for example, demanding a demonstrative proof of the existence of God; and indeed it is worth noting that the familiar theistic arguments played practically no part in the discussions. The sceptics were not demanding that religious belief be justified under some canon of rationality that is peculiarly their own, but wished to learn what kind and degree of rationality a believer claims for his belief, and how he professes to justify the claim.

God as Necessary Being

‘Necessary being’ is one of the terms by means of which Christian thought has sought to define the difference between God and man. The notion of necessary being, applied to God and withheld from man, indicates that God and man differ not merely in the characteristics which they possess but, more fundamentally, in their modes of being, or in the fact that they exist in different senses of the word ‘exist’.