621451

research-article2015
EXT0010.1177/0014524615621451The Expository TimesRuston

Article
The Expository Times
1–16
The John Hick Papers: Religious © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0014524615621451
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Thomas William Ruston

University of Birmingham

Abstract
Throughout his retirement, John Hick, the Philosopher of Religious Pluralism, collated a collection
of papers in his home office, which had built up over the course of his career. Until now, the
contents of this collection remained unknown. The collection totals 40 boxes of material and has been
donated by the Hick family to the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham.1 It is a
remarkable collection, which contains a lifetime’s work, including: unpublished manuscripts, journal
articles, lectures, interviews on VHS and DVD, sermons, and diaries which he kept during his work
with the Community Race Relations Committee, and SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious
Education). Of particular interest have been the correspondences Hick has kept with his former
colleagues, interlocutors, critiques as well as other notable figures. Some of these correspondences
include letters written, to use Hick’s own words, in ‘almost undecipherable’2 handwriting from
Norman Kemp Smith, Donald MacKinnon, and Ramu Gandhi. Further letters are from other key
figures in Hick’s life, including: T. E. Jessop, H. H. Farmer, H. H. Price, Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
Peter Heath, and Paul Knitter. There are other letters from some notable figures such as: John A. T.
Robinson, Karen Armstrong, and Desmond Tutu. A few of the letters contain quite a fierce exchange,
noting in particular those between Hick and Antony Flew, Don Cupitt, Charles Hartshorne, and the
then Cardinal Ratzinger. The John Hick Estate and the Spalding Trust have generously funded my
research into the archived papers.

Keywords
John Hick, Correspondences, Religious Pluralism, Cadbury Research Library

Introduction papers, John Hick has bequeathed an unpublished

manuscript called ‘Left-Over Thoughts’.3 In the
The immediate question facing any researcher into first chapter, he has provided some advice on how
this collection is how to communicate their con- to prepare for such an article:
tents concisely? It so happens that in his archived
3 Hick, 1994, Leftover Thoughts, Box 12.
1The catalogue to the archived papers may be found here:
<http://calmview.bham.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.
Catalog&id=XUS136>. Corresponding author:
Thomas William Ruston
2 Hick, 2005: 305. Email: twr355@student.bham.ac.uk

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2 The Expository Times
If you are going to expound and criticise a
scholar, take great care with your exposition.
Make it fair and balanced, so that the scholar
would be able to accept it as an accurate account
of his thought. And quote with 100% accuracy.
Do not be tempted to set up a caricature in order
to have something that is easily demolished. Try
to see the value in a point of view from which
you differ. No thinker who is worth criticising
is likely to be wholly wrong. Make the effort to
discriminate.4
Then, secondly, he advises:
If possible, a paper, should be built around a
central thesis. Be very clear in your own mind
what your central thesis is, and then exclude
material which is not relevant to it.5
In the effort to create an accurate account of
his thought, my central thesis is that Hick will
long be remembered as a creatively distinc-
tive, if not definitive, voice of religious plural-
ism. The archives can help us to piece together
his story of how he came to hold a pluralistic
position. Indeed, it was while he worked at the
University of Birmingham, that Hick encoun-
tered the plethora of faiths that belong to
Birmingham’s cosmopolitan population. It was
through his inter-faith work, in particular with
the Community Race Relations Committee,
that Hick noticed that, although the external
cultural and ritual practices of the faiths may be
different, ‘there was a shared dimension to faith
that allowed people to open their hearts and
minds “upwards” to a higher divine reality’.6
The encounters with the different world faiths
was something of a turning point for Hick, after
which he dedicated his career to wrestling with
the issue of religious pluralism.
In the correspondence, it is clear that both
his critics and supporters alike respected Hick
for his personal integrity and originality. His
arguments are a synthesis of both his aca-
demic work, within the field of philosophy of
4 Hick, 1994, Leftover Thoughts, Box 12.
5 Hick, 1992, Leftover Thoughts, Box 12.
6 Hick, 2005: 160.
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religion, and his personal experience. Such a
union between academic interest and personal
experience lends an implicit integrity to Hick’s
lifetime’s work and makes the collected papers
such a worthy avenue of research, since they
convey Hick’s personal journey. It is a jour-
ney which not only testifies to his stature as a
definitive voice within religious pluralism, but
also witnesses to his extensive work as a phi-
losopher of religion: who contributed towards
the development of the ‘five arguments’ for the
existence of God, and who posited the ‘Ireanean
theodicy’ in Evil and the God of Love (1966).
1. Hick’s Early Beliefs
The archived collection of John Hick’s papers
supports Hick’s own view of a consistent inter-
est in an ineffable ‘transcategorial Real’, and
its relation to human knowledge and belief. An
invaluable artefact from this time takes the form
of a limp red notebook, dated 1940, in which
John Hick began to write down his philosophi-
cal reflections. In his autobiography, Hick
claimed that after reading this notebook, ‘I see
how my intellectual development has been sur-
prisingly consistent apart from the interruption
of the evangelical years’.7 For instance, in this
notebook is a long series of philosophical apho-
risms, which, although written by an eighteen-
year-old Hick, reflect his later thoughts on ‘The
Real’:
Reality is ethical and consists of God, who
cannot be regarded as finite or infinite, or as
having any or no form, or by any other analogy
from the physical universe, but can only be
comprehended ‘mystically’, by reason of the
divine spark in each of us.8
Although the seed of Hick’s religious plural-
ism can be located in his early work, his mature
pluralist thought did not emerge wholesale. One
of the many privileges of researching the col-
lected papers of John Hick is the sense of his
7 Hick, 2005: 33.
8 Hick, Notebook, 1940, Box 7.
Ruston
work never being static but rather indicative of
a lifelong journey, which underwent many shifts
and expansions as he gradually adjusted his
thought to accommodate a pluralistic outlook.
John Hick describes himself as a born phi-
losopher. A born philosopher, according to John
Hick, is someone who has always been interested
in dealing with ‘the big and important issues,
whilst the philosophers who are made often
deal with highly sophisticated trivialities’.9 This
is somewhat typical of Hick’s dry wit, which
can be seen throughout his writings. Despite
being a born philosopher, owing to his Father’s
influence, Hick trained initially to be a solici-
tor, taking lectures at University College, Hull.
However, this did not prevent him from explor-
ing questions pertaining to religion and philoso-
phy in his spare hours, and a few examples can
be found in his notebook, he writes:
Every question of right or wrong, and thus what
we must do under any given circumstance,
ultimately depends on, at our stage of spiritual
evolution, what we conceive to be, universally
or not universally, to be the future of life. For
morality must be based in the time and nature of
the universe; and I think that we can perceive the
purpose or existence of God in no better form
than as it concerns what we ought to do in life.10
Moreover, he writes:
The relation between faith and knowledge is
like a mountain—however high you are on it
gives you a more complete view on life—and the
higher you are the better your view.11
In a manner reminiscent of his later critical
realism, John Hick questioned whether God
was a personal or impersonal reality:
To be personal is to be finite. God is not finite
and therefore not personal. But the personal being
with whom we can get into contact in prayer etc.,
whilst being finite, may yet be larger than the
9 Hick, 2005: 70.
10 Hick, 1940, Red Notebook, Box 7.
11 Hick, 1940, Red Notebook, Box 7.
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3
extent of our consciousness and therefore infinite
in relation to us and our needs.12
In his youth John Hick claimed that he
‘believed in some sort of divine reality,
though not the God of Christian orthodoxy’.13
But Hick’s beliefs were set to change, and he
was soon launched into an academic philo-
sophical career after an intense mystical
experience. He describes this experience
in an article kept in the archived collection
entitled, ‘Four Views on Religious Pluralism’
(1992). According to this article, his mystical
experience occurred
on the top deck of a bus in the middle of
the city of Hull, when I was a law student at
University College, Hull. As everyone will be
very conscious who can themselves remember
such a moment, all descriptions are inadequate.
But it was as though the skies opened up and
light poured down and filled me with a sense
of overflowing joy, in response to an immense
transcendent goodness and love. I remember that
I couldn’t help smiling broadly—smiling back,
as it were, at God—though if any of the other
passengers were looking they must have thought
that I was a lunatic, grinning at nothing.14
This particularly intense and momentary
experience was part of a longer conversion expe-
rience which led him to affirm a belief, in Hick’s
own words, in the ‘New Testament Figure of
Jesus’.15 Hick describes this experience as lead-
ing him to affirm the tenets of a conservative
evangelical orthodoxy. Although the affirma-
tion of evangelicalism was ultimately fleeting,
the experience pressed upon his consciousness
throughout his life. He describes the experience
as, ‘becoming increasingly aware of a higher
truth and great reality pressing in on me and
claiming my recognition and response’.16 The
12 Hick, 1940, Red Notebook, Box 7.
13 Hick, 2005: 33.
14 Hick, 1994, Leftover Thoughts, Box 19.
15 Hick, 1994, Leftover Thoughts, Box 19.
16 Hick, 1994, Leftover Thoughts, Box 19.
4 The Expository Times
experience caused him to consider and pursue
a vocation as a Presbyterian minister and, even
as he moved away from ‘Christian Orthodoxy’,
the experience remained highly significant for
him as a direct encounter of what he called ‘the
ultimate divine Reality’,17 and possibly fed his
lifelong interest in mystical experiences and
parapsychology. Immediately after his conver-
sion experience Hick left Hull and enrolled to
study philosophy at Edinburgh in 1941.
2. Edinburgh and the
Friends’ Ambulance Unit
During his brief evangelical interlude, he became
a member of the Evangelical Student Union in
both Hull, and then in Edinburgh. But the Second
World War interrupted this evangelical interlude,
and his studies. Great Britain had introduced
conscription, and so required its male citizens to
enter into military service. But Hick, long before
the war began, believed himself to be a pacifist,
and decided to join the Friends’ Ambulance Unit.
This was a Quaker organisation that trained up its
volunteers to provide medical assistance in time
of war. Hick wrestled with his conscience on the
subject of pacifism for a long time, and, in the
archives, we can see that his decision to affirm
his pacifism was supported by Herbert Henry
Farmer.18 Between the years 1940–1945, Hick
and Farmer corresponded with each other on the
subject of pacifism. One question with which
Hick struggled was whether pacifism may, by
inaction, be an immoral act. Farmer responded
to this question by stating that pacifism is a form
of witness to a concrete belief in another way of
addressing humanity’s conflicts, it is a Christian
witness, he writes:
Righteousness is not always victorious at once.
The main thing is to witness that there are other
methods besides war for refreshing, in act as
well as word, a final judgement in natural affairs.
17 Hick, 2005: 34.
18Farmer was a Christian theologian who was later to train
Hick for Presbyterian ministry.
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And that the problem is not necessarily annulled
to a supine restless indifference.19
So Hick trained up to be, in effect, a para-
medic and was sent to the Mediterranean. In
the archives we are fortunate to have a copy of
his notebook kept during this time, in which he
made notes on the local plantation as well as
notes on remedial medicine. In addition, there
is a commemorative Bible presented by Bishop
Athanasius Vellas for ‘his labour in service of
the relief of the suffering during the war of the
population of Ipiros.’20 But how did this experi-
ence affect Hick?
In a sermon from the 1990s, he claims that
being so close to warfare brought to his mind
for the first time a consciousness of death as a
reality, albeit not as something that would hap-
pen to himself, he writes:
I had my own 22nd birthday during world war
II on a troop ship, a converted liner called the
Stirling Castle, as a member of a section of the
Friends’ Ambulance Unit, sailing to the middle
east in a convoy that was attacked by U-boats,
as they often were, outside the Straights of
Gilbraltar; and there was a great scurrying
about of the naval escorts and lobbing of depth
charges into the sea as we all stood on to deck
in life jackets. I don’t know how many hundreds
and likely hundreds of thousands of other 22
or so years olds there were in the ships of the
convoy but my guess is that whilst we all knew
intellectually that if one of the ships was sunk
some would be drowned, nevertheless each
one of us assumed that he would personally
survive. Of course there certainly are moments
in wartime, and also in peacetime, when mortal
danger is much more imminent than that and the
young are actually conscious of the impending
reality of death. But in general I would say that
in youth a natural and healthy engagement with
the present moment, and an inability realistically
to imagine death, postpones the inevitable
consciousness of our mortality.21
19 Farmer, March 16th 1942, Letter to Hick, Box 22.
20 See Box 12.
21 Hick, 1990, The Essence of Christianity, Sermon, Box 10.
Ruston
This exposure to the reality of life and death,
as well as his general philosophical inclination,
caused discordance with his earlier affirma-
tion of evangelicalism. When he returned to
Edinburgh to continue his study of philoso-
phy, he felt that he could no longer agree with
the worldview purported by the Evangelical
Student Union. But this is not to state that his
faith disintegrated. On the contrary, during the
war he believed himself to have had a voca-
tion to ordained ministry in the Presbyterian
Church, combined with future academic work
in philosophy. There is a charming letter
between Farmer and Hick about vocation in
the archives. Apparently, there was a delay in
a tribunal’s decision to demobilise Hick from
the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, and Hick wrote
to Farmer about his urgent desire to train for the
ministry. Farmer responded:
I do most deeply sympathise with you in the
situation in which you find yourself, and I
rejoice in, and honour you for, the deep sense
of vocation which you have in respect of your
philosophical studies and their relation to the
work and the witness of the Church at this time.
I am sure that the need to build up a Christian
philosophy is fundamental and urgent, and I
believe that God may well be calling you to a
special part in it. But I cannot quite bring myself
to think that your very understandable reaction
to the Tribunal’s decision is the right one. To
begin with I am not clear that “the practical
situation is now or never” and the Tribunal’s
decision (if it is allowed to stand) is tantamount
to a never to your full philosophical course. But
even if we accept the proposition that it is “now
or never” I cannot escape the feeling that you
ought to accept “the never” if that should prove
necessary. At least I want to put the point to you
for your earnest consideration. I think there is a
danger that when we have a very strong sense
of vocation we want providence to our own
lives far too much. It does not at all follow that
because we have formed a high and honourable
ambition, in terms of service to God, that said
ambition correctly represents, either in general
and still less in detail, God’s will for us. We
have not made a truly Christian adjustment to
a situation merely by formulating what seems
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5
to us to be a Christian plan of action in relation
to it. There must also be a quiet commitment
of the plan, its success or its FAILURE to God.
Otherwise we are in danger of rebelling in God’s
name against what is in fact God’s wise and far-
seeing appointment.22
This wise advice turned out to be somewhat
prophetic, since it was some years before Hick
decided to train for ministry, and he pursued his
philosophical studies by continuing with his
philosophical education.
2.1. The Importance of Kant
for Hick
When Hick returned to Edinburgh University,
he came under the tutelage of Norman Kemp
Smith, under whom he made study of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.23 As we shall see, his
study of Kant’s philosophy was to prove vital
for developing his theory of religious pluralism
later on in his career.
In a series of letters between Hick and an
old friend from Edinburgh called Peter Heath,
we may gain a glimpse into the importance of
Kant for Hick’s philosophical development.
Peter Heath studied philosophy with Hick at
Edinburgh, and became an authority on Kant
at the University of Virginia. In these letters,
Hick expresses how Kant was important for
developing his views on religious pluralism,
and, in other letters, Heath provides a trench-
ant criticism of Hick’s use of Kant in this way.
Hick writes:
I think of Kant as the greatest philosopher of
the western world, though Plato can claim to be
the most influential because he came so early
on. In my own epistemology of religion I have
used Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal distinction
in a way which he would not have sanctioned:
a transcategorical ultimate noumenal reality
of which the phenomenal appearances in
22 Farmer, 22nd November 1945, Letter to Hick, Box 22.
23 Letters between John Hick and Norman Kemp Smith may
be found in Box 23.
6 The Expository Times
terms of different human conceptual systems
(and spiritual practices) are the various God-
figures and non-personal ‘absolutes’ of the
different major religions. This offers a religious
interpretation of religion.24
This letter not only provides a summary of
Hick’s use of Kant to form the foundation of his
religious pluralism, but through the frank and
trenchant criticism that Peter Heath provided
through the correspondence, it is possible to see
how Hick responded to the limitations of his
Kantian epistemology. A pertinent criticism that
Heath offered of Hick’s use of Kant to propa-
gate a universal, though culturally tempered,
human experience of the ineffable ‘Real’ was
that Kant was not particularly interested in the
phenomenon of ‘traditional’ religion:
Till I took to translating him, I never realized
what little use Kant has for traditional revealed
religion. Like Hume before him, he thinks of
it as mainly a clerical conspiracy to deceive
the incredulous. Though often troublesome to
governments, it is tolerated because it is thought
to reinforce morality, though in practice the
morality it teaches is mostly a bad one—the
“servile and mercenary habit” habit of currying
divine favour by ritual observances, which
we then use to compensate for misbehaviour
elsewhere. Though he shows some respect for
the moral precepts of the NT, Kant otherwise
treats Xtianity as a superstitious and degrading
cult, like all the others.25
Peter Heath had a high regard for Hick, both
as an interlocutor and as a friend, and the central
aspect of their friendship seems to be that Heath
did not refrain from challenging Hick to defend
his ideas. It appears that Heath believed Hick to
have an agenda to maintain an ‘ineffable Real’
from a philosophical rather than a simply reli-
gious perspective, in a way which the world’s
religious authorities cannot accept. Such a criti-
cism is conveyed in a letter from Heath to Hick
dated the 5th June, 2001:
24
Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath, Box 22.
25
Heath, 3rd April 2002, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
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From your papers on the ineffable, and the
interesting remarks in your letter, it seems that
you are pretty close to Spinoza’s position, of
unrequited esteem for a deity whose attributes
transcend both human comprehension and the
rules of ordinary logic, and of which, therefore,
nothing significant can be thought or said. The
doctrine—as you show—has a respectable
pedigree, though I can’t imagine it has ever
been popular with the orthodox in any of the
world’s religions. For where does it leave those
religions, if not sunk in fundamental error,
and their practitioners mired in all manners of
observances which (as Spinoza pointed out) are
absurdly unsuited to the situation supposed? Your
Arab friends may argue that the cults lend colour
to an element so rarefied that it wouldn’t be
perceptible without them—but the effect would
be just the same if the bottle were empty. Spinoza
may have been unfairly accused of atheism,
but his opponents were quite right in thinking
him an enemy of religion. And so too with his
followers, the German idealists, who appeared
to be defending religion, while busily engaged
in depriving it of anything tangible to believe in.
Your case for the ineffable may indeed be helpful
in inviting believers of all faiths—but chiefly, I
fear, in an outcry against you!26
Hick wrote in An Interpretation of Religion
(1989) that the world’s religions ‘constitute dif-
ferent ways of experiencing, conceiving and
living in relation to an ultimate divine reality
which transcends all our varied visions of it’.27
This was supported epistemologically through
Hick’s appropriating Kant’s distinction between
the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘noumenal’, wherein
the ‘Real’ has an intrinsic existence in addition
to being experienced through the multifarious
traditions, cultures, rituals, and beliefs which
constitute the world’s religions. But Peter
Heath suggests that Hick merely propagates a
philosophical conception of an ‘ineffable divine
reality’,28 which does not truly appreciate the
internal perspectives and experiences of those
26 Heath, 5th June 2001, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
27 Hick, 1989: 235–236.
28 Heath, 3rd April 2002, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
Ruston
who participate in the world’s religions. Heath
wonders whether Hick ‘fences off the subject
from criticism by sanctifying it in advance’.29
This criticism from Heath is a key question for
any scholar who wishes to research and under-
stand Hick: is his religious pluralism an expres-
sion and recognition of a universal experience
in each religion of a transcendent reality, or
does Hick simply apply a Kantian lens to each
religion?
The letter from Hick to Heath, dated 11th
December 2002, is Hick’s response to Heath’s
criticism. First, he writes that his use of the
nounemal/phenomenal distinction is used, ‘in
a way which he [Kant] would not have sanc-
tioned’,30 in order to provide ‘a religious inter-
pretation of religion’.31 Thus, to defend his
religious pluralism, Hick recognises that, ‘there
has to be (and is) an argument for the rational
permissibility of trusting religious experience
to be responsive as well as projective, a bit
of both—hence the very different forms that
it takes (with a criterion for authenticity sup-
plied)’.32 Hick does not adhere to the notion
that truth exists solely within the discourse of
any one religion. Rather, the truth of religion
is vindicated through the religious experience
of the individual, for Hick, ‘revelation is not
primarily a declaration from an objective divine
being, but is the felt response or the awareness
of the individual to that divine being’.33 It is for
this reason that Hick does not concern himself
too much with the response of various religious
authorities to his religious pluralism, which has,
no doubt, helped him to endure the controversy
his religious pluralism has attracted over the
years. In the letter to Heath, he writes that whilst
his religious pluralism may be unacceptable to
the more ‘orthodox’ believers and the religious
29 Heath, 3rd April 2002, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
30 Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath, Box 23.
31 Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath, Box 23.
32 Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath, Box 23.
33 Sinkinson, 2002: 67.
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7
authorities, it speaks to the experiences of many
individuals within the world faiths:
You are right of course that this is not acceptable
to any of the religions as they stand: each claim
to be the one and only authentic response to
the ‘divine’. There is however a growing move
within the liberal end of Christianity, and to
a lesser extent with Islam and Judaism, to be
open to the idea of religious pluralism, and it is
already familiar within the religions of Indian
origin, and among the Sufis (mystics) of Islam—
the great medieval Sufi, Rumi, said of the
religions, ‘The lamps are different, but the Light
is the same: it comes from beyond.34
3. Religious Experience
and Knowledge (DPhil
and Henry Price)
Kant provided a philosophical framework in
which to interpret a religious believer’s experi-
ence of an ultimate divine reality, but his plu-
ralism relies on the ‘authenticity’ of religious
experience. Hick’s argument for ‘the rational
permissibility of trusting religious experience…
with a criterion for authenticity supplied’35
was formulated whilst Hick was reading for
his DPhil at Oxford, on The Relation Between
Belief and Faith,36 a work that was later revised
and published as Faith and Knowledge (1957).
In this work Hick considers the epistemolog-
ical challenges that arise from considering ‘an
experience which they [i.e., great numbers of
people] describe as “knowing God” or “being
aware of God”…a mode of putative knowl-
edge…which had long been accorded the spe-
cial name of “faith”’.37 Rather than considering
the factual validity of the ontological assertions
put forth by various religious traditions, Hick’s
first major work considers how faith relates to
34 Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath, Box 23.
35 Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath, Box 23.
36 See John Hick’s D.Phil thesis entitled ‘The Relation
Between Belief and Faith’, Oriel College, Oxford, Box 5.
37 Hick, 1957: 1.
8 The Expository Times
‘knowing and believing in general’.38 It is a
philosophical investigation, admittedly from a
predominantly Western Christian perspective,
of faith experienced as a reality by religious
believers. In his thesis, using Hume’s theory of
belief, Hick claimed that religious experience
(like prayer, worship, or reading the Bible in
addition to more extraordinary mystical experi-
ences) is not something distinct from the way
that we know and experience other things. In
the archives, there are letters between Norman
Kemp Smith and Hick, in which Hick discusses
‘Hume’s Theory of Belief’ and whether, accord-
ing to Hume, belief does not lie with a cognitive
empirical act per se, but as an ‘act of senti-
ment’.39 Religious experience is not a separate
way of knowledge, but rather helps to build a
person’s ‘total interpretation of the world’40 and
thus stands alongside, and is integrated with,
the totality of a person’s experiences.
The context in which Hick formulated this
argument is noteworthy. Oxford, in the late
1940s and the early 1950s, was dominated by
the logical positivist school of philosophy. In
essence, they claimed that for something to be
‘true’ it must be proved empirically. Clearly,
such logical positivists would be reticent to
supervise Hick’s dissertation topic, since they
would have dismissed the religious as unempir-
ical. But Hick was fortunate in finding Henry
Price to supervise his doctoral work. Price
was the Wykeham Professor of Logic at New
College, but he did not belong to the logical
positivist school of thought; rather, he pursued
his own philosophical agenda.41
Hick describes Henry Price as ‘the ideal doc-
toral supervisor’,42 but this is something of an
understatement as the two had a mutual bond
38 Hick, 1957: 1.
39Hick, 18th March 1949, Letter to Norman Kemp Smith,
Box 23.
40 Hick, 1957: 1.
41 The letters between Hick and Price are extensive (dating
from 1956–1987) and may be found in Box 22.
42 Hick, 2005: 72.
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and shared a kindred spirit. The letters between
Hick and Price from the archive are dated up
until Price’s eventual death from Alzheimer’s
in 1987. Hick writes that the letters from Price,
despite being written with ‘microscopic hand-
writing’,43 are ‘delightful, containing not only
interesting philosophical discussions but also
whimsical comments drawing on his interest in
Roman times’,44 for instance, Price writes:
I have decided that living in California is rather
like living in North Africa during the reign of
Septimus Severus, when that province was
populous, flourishing and well-irrigated; or
perhaps it is like living there in the reign of
virtuous and amiable Gordian III (I have been
reading the Historia Augusta).45
Hick also writes that Price did not believe
in using a handbrake when driving a car, and
that when parking on a hill, he would try to
secure the car by placing large stones behind
the wheels.
3.1. The Myth of God
Incarnate
A key question to any scholar who wishes to
understand Hick is: How did Hick reconcile his
personal Christian beliefs with his religious plu-
ralism? Indeed, does Hick’s religious pluralism
negate the ‘realism’ of the Incarnation? Again,
the archives provide some crucial insight into
this question.
After Hick left Oxford, he trained for
Presbyterian Ministry at Westminster College
Cambridge, and later served as a minister in
Belford, Northumberland. Hick claimed him-
self, at this stage in his life, to be an orthodox
Christian. He had moved on from his evangeli-
cal stage, and I believe he may be called ‘nomi-
nally Christian’ for the time. He did not take the
Bible’s more miraculous events literally, but he
43 Hick, 2005: 73.
44 Hick, 2005: 73.
45 Price, 11th December 1962, Letter to Hick, Box 22.
Ruston
did see their importance for faith in Christ and
did believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection.
It was with some surprise, then, that, when
Hick was appointed as the Professor of Christian
Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary,
he found himself put on ‘trial for heresy’ by the
United Presbyterian Church in the United States
of America. It was an episode that Hick claimed
belonged to the Middle Ages, rather than 1960s
America, but it is an episode that is useful for a
researcher on Hick. The archives contain a full
disclosure of the documents relating to the case
and, as such, are useful for piecing together the
nature of Hick’s belief in the Incarnation during
the 1960s.46
When Hick took up his Professorship at
Princeton, as a Presbyterian Minister, he was
required to register with the local Presbytery,
in this instance, the Presbytery at New
Brunswick. When Hick made his application,
the Presbytery’s committee interviewed him,
and on this committee was the Rev’d Dr. Clyde
Henry, a conservative Calvinist clergyman. In
the archived papers we have his description of
the events:
In the course of the required examination in
theology, Dr. Hick was asked the customary
question (see the Adopting Act): “Do you have
scruples concerning, or take exception to any of
the doctrines of the Westminster Confession of
Faith?” He replied that he had doubts about the
doctrine of the Virgin Birth,47 and in his formal
statement Dr. Hick said, “I do not assert that it is
impossible, or that it may not be true; and I have
no quarrel with those who do affirm it; but I am
not myself able to affirm it.” On the basis of
46In particular, refer to: Correspondence between John
Hick and the President of Princeton Theological Seminary,
1958–1969, Box 6. File containing letters written to Hick
in response to his refusal to affirm the Virgin Birth of
Christ and the complaint against the Presbytery of New
Brunswick, which was referred to the Judicial Commission
of the Synod, with carbon copy replies written by Hick,
1962, Box 13. Envelope labelled, ‘Aftermath of the Virgin
Birth controversy’ containing correspondence to Hick
1962–1963 with some cuttings from newspapers, Box 13.
47Namely, the Virgin Birth of Christ and not the Doctrine of
the Immaculate Conception.
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9
this admission, the Presbytery (New Brunswick)
voted to receive and enrol him.48
Clyde complained about the decision of the
Presbytery to the Synod New Jersey, and in
Clyde’s words:
The Synod referred the case to its Permanent
Judicial Commission, which sustained the
complaint and reversed the decision of the
Presbytery. Thereupon twelve ministers of
Synod complained of this decision to the
General Assembly. In turn, the Assembly
adopted the preliminary judicial of its
Permanent Judicial Commission, which
annulled the Synod’s decision and declared
that Dr. Hick was properly a member of the
Presbytery of New Brunswick.49
The General Assembly, the highest author-
ity in the Presbyterian Church, was satis-
fied that Hick believed in the Incarnation and
Resurrection of Christ and quashed the com-
plaint. Really the matter was one of procedure;
it was not in the jurisdiction of the synod to pro-
nounce on doctrinal matters. The case drew a
lot of media attention, even being reported in
the New York Times. During the case, Hick pre-
pared and delivered a statement to the Synod
of New Jersey, as a defence of his beliefs. In
this statement, he outlines his precise beliefs
in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the
Virgin Birth. He claims that his beliefs have not
changed since he was ordained:
The simple fact which I wish to convey to you
is that I stand in the same Christian faith as you.
I have preached this faith Sunday by Sunday as
the pastor of a congregation; I have preached
it and taught it ever since I was ordained to the
Presbyterian ministry eight years ago.50
48 Henry, 1962, ‘Some Reflections on the Hick Case’,
Box 13.
49 Henry, 1962, ‘Some Reflections on the Hick Case’,
Box 13.
50 Hick, 1962, ‘A Statement from Rev. John Hick on the
Nature of his Belief’, in ‘Before the Permanent Judicial
Commission of the General Assembly’, Box 13.
10
On the Incarnation, he writes:
And I believe (as I am sure you do) that God
has revealed Himself to mankind through His
long dealings with the Children of Israel, and
above all in Christ, the Word Incarnate; and
that of this the Bible is the inspired record and
interpretation, the ultimate source and norm
behind which or beyond which we cannot go.51
So whilst Hick believed in the Incarnation,
he seems to have taken an agnostic position
on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and his
research on the matter found that it was not an
idea implicit in the New Testament. In his notes
on the doctrine’s origin in Patristic thought, he
came to the conclusion that ‘the Virgin Birth
became a doctrine in response to adoptionism,
and that it is not as central as the doctrine of the
Incarnation.’52 So, in the defence he claims,
Now a word specifically about the Virgin Birth
of our Lord. Left to myself, I do not have
anything to say about this at all and in this, as
the ministers here will know, I am following the
example of the majority of the New Testament
writers; Paul, John, Mark, Peter, James and Jude
all believe in Christ as the Word incarnate, but
none of them mentions the idea of a virgin birth;
and I am content to follow them in this. However
if I am specifically challenged to say about it, I
have to say simply that I do not affirm it; it plays
no part in my personal faith. I do not assert that
it is impossible, or that it may not be true; and I
have no quarrel with those do affirm it; but I am
not myself able to affirm it.53
He seems emphatic on insisting that he believes
in both the Incarnation and the Resurrection. He
writes:
51Hick, 1962, ‘A Statement from Rev. John Hick on the
Nature of his Belief’, in ‘Before the Permanent Judicial
Commission of the General Assembly’, Box 13.
52 Hick, 1961, ‘Notes’, Box 13.
53
Hick, 1962, ‘A Statement from Rev. John Hick on the
Nature of his Belief’, in ‘Before the Permanent Judicial
Commission of the General Assembly’, Box 13.
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The Expository Times
But I am so far from denying the miraculous.
I affirm, and always have affirmed, the greatest
miracle of all, the bodily resurrection of our
Lord. I would never condemn or seek to
unchurch fellow Christians who read the New
Testament evidence from myself, and who affirm
the spiritual presence of the risen Christ rather
than his bodily presence, but for myself I am
convinced that the New Testament as a whole
witnesses to the bodily resurrection of the Lord,
leaving an empty tomb behind.54
3.2. The Copernican
Approach
So although Hick was accused of being a ‘her-
etic’ by some circles, at this time, he claimed that
he was thoroughly orthodox. But Hick’s beliefs
changed when he came to Birmingham in 1967
to take up a Chair as the H. G. Wood Professor
of Theology, teaching the philosophy of religion.
It was whilst in Birmingham that Hick under-
went what he called a ‘Copernican Revolution’.
He came to the realisation that Christianity was
no longer predominant in the UK and that the
other world faiths had a significant presence and
each seemed to live out an authentic response
to the divine. The archives contain several key
documents, including his diary that he kept on the
Community Race Relations Committee,55 and ser-
mons from the 1970s–1980s, in which Hick tried
to reconcile his increasingly pluralistic hypothesis
with his work as a Presbyterian Minister.
The key implication of his Copernican
Revolution was that Hick realised he could no
longer place Christianity above all other reli-
gions and, as a result, changed his belief in the
Incarnation. He claimed that, in the name of
dialogue, and as a matter of truth, the twentieth
century requires another theological reforma-
tion. He wrote in his book, The Myth of God
Incarnate (1977),
54Hick, 1962, ‘A Statement from Rev. John Hick on the
Nature of his Belief’, in ‘Before the Permanent Judicial
Commission of the General Assembly’, Box 13.
55 See Box 3.
Ruston
the need arises from the growing knowledge
of the of Christian origins, and involves a
recognition that Jesus was (as he is presented
in Acts 2:21) ‘a man approved by God’ for a
special role within the divine purpose, and that
the latter conception of him as God incarnate, the
Second Person of the Trinity living a human life,
is a mythological and poetic way of expressing
his significance for us.56
Again the archives are invaluable for provid-
ing an insight into what Hick believed were the
implications of believing the Incarnation to be a
myth. We have a series of letters between John
Hick and John Robinson, of Honest to God
fame and former Bishop of Southwark. In a let-
ter to Robinson, Hick claims that understand-
ing the Incarnation as a myth has a fundamental
implication for a pluralistic position:
I entirely take your point that having categorised
the language of incarnation as ‘mythological’
the question remains whether or not to assert the
universal and exclusive validity of the Christian
myth. In a word, I believe that one cannot;
though I realise here that I shall be parting
company with many.57
Now much of the controversy that ensued
was probably stoked by Hick’s use of the term
‘myth’, a misunderstood word, as Robinson
points out:
Obviously I agree with you that the
‘mythological’ way of understanding the
Incarnation is the valid one—though experience
has taught me to avoid this word like a red rag!58
In a reply, Hick explains that, when he uses
the term ‘myth’, he is not claiming that Jesus
did not exist, or was not human; the term means
that he was not literally God, and that God was
56 Hick, 1977: Praef.
57 Hick, 25th January 1973, Letter to J. A. T. Robinson,
Box 23.
58 Robinson, 15th January 1973, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
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11
present in the person of Jesus to a significant
degree, Hick writes to Robinson:
I like very much your stress upon the genuine
humanity of Christ, as against the kind of
pseudo-humanity which it seems to me that
Stephen Sykes is propounding. But it does seem
to me that when one has insisted upon the utterly
real, individual, unqualified humanness of Jesus,
as a part of the human biological process, one is
debarred from taking the statement that he was
God in a literal sense. It must be understood as
a mythological expression…. You warned me
that the word ‘myth’ tends to act as a red rag to
theological bulls, and it proved to be so at the
meeting of the Society for the Study of Theology
at Lancaster last week. There was a fair amount
of theological aggression, expressing, it seemed
to me, theological fear and alarm. Nevertheless,
the general upshot was, I suspect, to move
opinion a little bit away from the Ptolemaic
towards the Copernican approach.59
4. Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI and the
Pluralist Professor from
Birmingham
Hick’s religious pluralism certainly acted as a
‘red rag’ to His Holiness Pope Emeritus Benedict
XVI, when as Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, he gave an address to
the ‘Presidents of the doctrinal commission of
the Bishops’ conferences of Latin America’60 in
1996. In this address, Pope Benedict wrote that
relativism, of which religious pluralism was a
prime example, ‘has succeeded the more radical
forms of liberation as “the central problem for
the faith at the present time”’.61 Moreover, Pope
Benedict writes:
59 Hick, 10th April 1973, Letter to Robinson, Box 23
60Ratzinger, 31st October 1996, Relativism: The Central
Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS Documentary
Service, Vol. 26: No. 20, Box 27.
61Ratzinger, 31st October 1996, Relativism: The Central
Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS Documentary
Service, Vol. 26: No. 20, Box 27.
12
The so-called pluralist theology of religion has
been developing progressively since the ‘50s.
Nonetheless, only now has it come to the centre
of the Christian conscience. In some ways this
conquest occupies today—with regard to the
force of its problematic aspect and its presence
in the different areas of culture—the place
occupied by the theology of liberation in the
preceding decade as “the central problem for the
faith at the present time.”62
In the address, Pope Benedict identifies that
religious pluralism
is also presented as a position defined positively
by the concepts of tolerance and knowledge
through dialogue and freedom, concepts which
would be limited if the existence of one valid
truth for all were affirmed.63
Thus, for Pope Benedict, religious plural-
ism compromises the objective nature of truth
in favour of nurturing a ‘relativist’ dialogue.
Furthermore, Pope Benedict writes that the
relativistic nature of religious pluralism is a
Western philosophical imposition on the reli-
gions of the world:
On the one hand, relativism is a typical
offshoot of the Western world and its forms of
philosophical thought, while on the other it is
connected with the philosophical and religious
institutions of Asia especially, and surprisingly,
with those of the Indian subcontinent.64
In the talk, John Hick was, in the words
of Paul Knitter in a letter to him, ‘not only
referred to but extensively criticized as “Most
Wanted Relativist”’.65 The criticism which Pope
Benedict expounded is worth quoting in full:
62 Ratzinger, 31st October 1996, Relativism: The Central
Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS Documentary
Service, Vol. 26: No. 20, Box 27.
63
Ratzinger, 31st October 1996, Relativism: The Central
Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS Documentary
Service, Vol. 26: No. 20:, Box 27.
64
Ratzinger, 31st
October 1996, Relativism: The Central
Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS Documentary
Service, Vol. 26: No. 20, Box 27.
65
Knitter, 28th May 1997, Letter to Hick, Box 27.
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The Expository Times
The situation can be clearly seen in one of
its founders and eminent representatives,
the American Presbyterian John Hick. His
philosophical departure point is found in the
Kantian distinction between phenomenon and
noumenon: we can never grasp ultimate truth
in itself, but only its appearance in our way of
perceiving through different ‘lenses’. What we
grasp is not really and properly reality in itself,
but a reflection on our scale.
At first Hick tried to formulate this concept in
a Christ-centered context. After a year’s stay in
India, he transformed it—after what he himself
calls a Copernican turn of thought—into a new
form of theocentricism. The identification of only
one historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, with what
is “real,” the living God, is now relegated as a
relapse into myth. Jesus is consciously relativized
as one religious leader among others. The Absolute
cannot come into history, but only models and
ideal forms that remind us about what can be
never be grasped as such in history. Therefore,
concepts such as church, dogma and sacraments
must lose their unconditional character.66 To make
an absolute of such limited forms of mediation or,
even more, to consider them real encounters with
the universally valid truth of God who reveals
himself would be the same as elevating oneself to
the category of the Absolute, thereby losing the
infiniteness of the totally other God.67
Though Pope Benedict identifies some per-
tinent issues in his critique, he made a series of
factual errors in his exposition. As a result, John
Hick felt misrepresented by this critique of his
thought. In a letter to Hick, Paul Knitter writes:
What is really sad, John, is that he based his
entire criticism of both of us on a book by a
certain Karl-Heniz Menke, Die Enzigkeit Jesu
Christ im Horizont der Sinnfrage. I have never
heard of Menke but was told by people in
Germany that he is what we would call “stuck
in the minor leagues.” I fear that you were as
misrepresented as was I.68
66 Underlined by Hick.
67Ratzinger, 31st October 1996, Relativism: The Central
Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS Documentary
Service, Vol. 26: No. 20, Box 27.
68 Knitter, 28th May 1997, Letter to Hick, Box 27.
Ruston
Hick was not even made aware that Pope
Benedict had decided to critique his thought
until Paul Knitter had sent him a copy of the talk
from the CNS documentary service. Indeed,
reading the talk, we can see that Pope Benedict
does not refer to Hick’s work on the Incarnation,
The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), which cov-
ers the issue of relating the Incarnation to the
World Religions, and cites instead Hick’s work
Evil and the God of Love (1966), which Hick
claims, ‘is on a different subject altogether and
makes no mention of religious pluralism’.69 But
Hick’s major concern was
that the internal evidence reveals that he [Pope
Benedict] has relied on a secondary source
which has provided him with a misleading
version of what I have written…it is surprising
that neither Cardinal Ratzinger nor his assistants
seem to have checked on the reliability of the
informant.70
One such factual inaccuracy was identified
by Fergus Kerr, OP, on Pope Benedict’s identi-
fying Hick as an American Presbyterian:
It may be pedantic to say so, but John Hick is
a Yorkshireman, educated in York, Edinburgh
and Oxford. His academic career has been
evenly divided between the United States and
England. He has retired to Birmingham, the
family home for many years. Some may be
worried by this mistake; others may think that,
if easily checkable facts are wrong, the account
of someone’s still developing ideas may not be
accurate either.71
Pope Benedict’s response to Hick’s reli-
gious pluralism has set the tone and character
of the official position of the Roman Catholic
Church on religious pluralism in general, and
it is unfortunate that such a precedent was set
69
Hick, 1997, A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger on
Religious Pluralism, Box 27.
70
Hick, 1997, A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger on
Religious Pluralism, Box 27.
71 Kerr, 1997, ‘Comment: Ratzinger’s Hick’. New
Blackfriars, 78 (914), pp. 154–5, Box 27.
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13
through inaccurate scholarship. The central
conceptual inaccuracy Pope Benedict made was
to state that Hick compromises the transcendent
reality of God in favour of relativism and that
this needs correcting. As Fergus Kerr identifies:
For sure, he does not regard Christianity as the
definitive historical revelation of God. That does
not mean he denies the possibility of real human
encounter with a transcendent reality…Hick
believes, with Ratzinger, that “in man there is
an inextinguishable yearning for the infinite”…
equally clearly, he regards the varieties of
religion as more or less adequate encounters with
that “ultimate divine reality” which “transcends
the grasp of the human mind”…. If his mature
thought endorses a pluralist understanding of
religion with which an orthodox Christian could
not be happy, it is not because Hick denies
that we can have knowledge of some other
than ourselves which he would describe as
“divine”. On the contrary, he remains stubbornly
“realist” in his insistence on religion as a human
encounter with a world-transcending reality.72
So, rather than compromising the transcend-
ent nature of God through what he would term
‘the Real’, Hick vehemently defends divine
aseity. Indeed, in terms of relating Religious
Pluralism to Roman Catholicism, Hick’s
response to ‘The Latest Vatican Statement on
Christianity and Other Religions’ has had a
greater impact than Pope Benedict’s largely
inaccurate exposition.73 On the pluralist posi-
tion that Hick takes, the Vatican commission
writes:
such contrasting expressions of the noumenon
[i.e., the ultimate reality] in fact end up by
dissolving it, obliterating the meaning of the
mythological truth. Underlying this whole
problematic is also a conception which separates
the Transcendent, the Mystery, the Absolute,
radically from its representations; since the latter
72 Kerr, 1997, ‘Comment: Ratzinger’s Hick’. New
Blackfriars, 78 (914), p. 155, Box 27.
73 Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, Box 30.
14
are all relative, because they are imperfect and
inadequate, they cannot make any exclusive
claims to the questions of truth (12–13).74
As a pluralist, Hick writes that this repre-
sentation of the pluralist position is inaccurate,
since ‘the pluralist position does indeed make
this distinction between the ineffable Godhead
and the humanly defined and experience God
figures’.75 But he questions whether this is prob-
lematic for Catholic theology, since
all the great theologians have affirmed the
ultimate ineffability of God’s eternal self-
existent nature. For example, Gregory of Nyssa
said that God is ‘incapable of being grasped by
any term, or any idea, or any other device of
our apprehension … unthinkable, unutterable,
above all expression in words’ (Against
Eunomius, 1.42), whilst St. Augustine said
that “God transcends even the mind” (De Vera
Religione, 36.67), and St. Thomas that ‘by its
immensity, the divine substance surpasses every
form our intellect reaches’ (S.C.G., 1.14.3).
Pseudo-Dionysius, the most influential of the
Christian mystics, wrote concerning God, the
‘transcendent One,’ ‘it is not soul or mind, nor
does it possess imagination, conviction, speech
or understanding … it cannot be spoken of and
it cannot be grasped by understanding …’ (The
Mystical Theology, 105D).76
In my analysis, such an apophatic approach
to God is congruent with a pluralism that holds
that God is known, in the words of Thomas
Aquinas, ‘in the knower according to the mode
of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q.1, art 2). As John
Hick writes, ‘and in relation to God the mode of
the knower differs among the religious cultures
of the earth’.77
74Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 4, Box 30.
75Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 4, Box 30.
76Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 5, Box 30.
77Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 5, Box 30.
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The Expository Times
Moreover, the central issue for Catholicism is
not the supposed relativistic nature of religious
pluralism, but the impact that religious plural-
ism has on the Doctrine of the Incarnation, the
role of the ‘universal salvific mediation of Jesus
Christ’.78
In the archives is a printed copy of the
‘Notification on the book Toward a Christian
Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis Books:
Maryknoll, New York 1997) by Father Jacques
Dupuis, SJ’.79 The notification makes the pro-
nouncement that, ‘it must be firmly believed
that Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man,
crucified and risen is the sole and universal
mediator of salvation for all humanity’.80 Hick
writes that religious pluralism is unacceptable
to the Catholic Theologian because
of a conviction that Jesus was God Incarnate
(i.e. God the Son, second person of the Holy
Trinity, incarnate). For if Jesus was God, and if
he founded a new religion, then that religion is
the only one to have been founded directly by
God and must therefore be uniquely superior to
all others.81
Hick writes, though, that a Catholic theolo-
gian willing to engage in dialogue with religious
pluralism would need to take up an inclusivist
position:
That is to say, salvation is through Christ alone,
but is nevertheless not confined to Christians.
“There is not a Logos which is not Jesus Christ,
nor is there a Spirit that is not the Spirit of
78Copy of ‘Notification on the book Toward a Christian
Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis Books: Maryknoll,
New York, 1997) by Father Dupuis, SJ’, in Perry Schmidt-
Leukel, 2nd March 2001, email to Hick, Box 27.
79Copy of ‘Notification on the book Toward a Christian
Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis Books: Maryknoll,
New York, 1997) by Father Dupuis, SJ’, in Perry Schmidt-
Leukel, 2nd March 2001, email to Hick, Box 27.
80Copy of ‘Notification on the book Toward a Christian
Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis Books: Maryknoll,
New York, 1997) by Father Dupuis, SJ’, in Perry Schmidt-
Leukel, 2nd March 2001, email to Hick, Box 27.
81Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 8, Box 30.
Ruston
Christ”. But the possibility of salvation within
other religions remains as a lesser blessing,
incomplete until the eschaton.82
But Hick’s response to this inclusivist posi-
tion remains that which he outlined in The
Myth of God Incarnate (1977). He turns to his
research on ‘New Testament Scholarship’,83
which, in his view, ‘strongly suggests that Jesus
himself would have regarded as blasphemous
the idea that he was God incarnate’.84 In Hick’s
view, the Incarnation is not to be regarded as
historical, but as mythological, and thus the
Catholics cannot maintain the view that, ‘they
alone have the final and absolute truth, whilst
their dialogue partners only have less elements
of truth’.85
5. 1990s Sermon: The
Essence of Christianity
So, if Hick believed that the doctrine of Jesus
as the Incarnate Son is a myth, what did he
think were the implications of this claim for
the Church? We have a sermon dated 1990,
preached at Carrs Lane Church, Birmingham.
This fact in itself is quite interesting: even after
writing his magnum opus, The Interpretation of
Religion (1989), in which he fully explicated his
religious pluralism, Hick did not abandon his
ministry. In this sermon, he posed this question:
if these constructions of the theologians are
in the end optional human theories, what are
we left with? We are left with Jesus, and the
transforming impact which he and his message
have made and are still making and will continue
to make upon human beings. Jesus and his
82
Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 9, Box 30.
83Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 8, Box 30.
84Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 8, Box 30.
85Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, p. 9, Box 30.
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15
message are available to everyone. You do not
have to receive them only within a set of human
metaphysical theories. Anyone can respond in
their own lives to Jesus’ gospel. It is the gospel
that God is real and that God is love; that we are
living them even now in God’s presence; and
that we can turn to God in love and trust, and
experience God’s grace in our lives.86
It is an orthodox theological belief that God
is revealed as Father through his relation with
the Son. But, in this sermon, John Hick claims
that people of all religions have the right and
claim to call God the Father, and even Mother,
with the recognition that both terms are images
for that which is ultimately beyond. Hick writes:
The image or picture of God as Father is a very
powerful, very widespread and very ancient one.
We find it frequently in the OT—for example,
in the 103rd psalm that was read a few minutes
ago. ‘As a father pities his children, so the Lord
pities those who fear him.’ But it is not confined
to the biblical tradition. We also find it among
the surrounding peoples in the ancient near east.
For example, a hymn from Ur of the Chaldees
begins, ‘merciful, gracious father, in whose hand
the life of the whole land lies.’ (Jeremias, p.91).
Nor is it only in the Semitic traditions that God
is known as Father. Further east, in India, the
Bhagavad Gita, which for more than 2000 years
has been the basic religious scripture of most of
the Indian people, speaks of God as ‘the father
of the world; (11.43) and ‘friend of all being’
(5.29) and says that God is to his worshipper ‘as
a father to his son.’ (11.44). And there are indeed
very many other examples in the wider religious
life of humanity of this image of God as father.87
6. What is the Legacy
of John Hick and the
Archives?
Finally, what is the legacy of John Hick and his
archives? The archives testify to John Hick’s
remarkable journey, from a youth in the Friends’
86 Hick, 1990, Sermon: Essence of Christianity, Box 8
87 Hick, 1990, Sermon: Essence of Christianity, Box 8
16
Ambulance Unit, to becoming a Presbyterian
Minister and a world-famous philosopher of
religion, to finally advocating a unique form of
religious pluralism. There is so much more that
the archives have to reveal, and they will for
many years remain an unsurpassed resource for
any researcher on John Hick.
Hick’s distinctiveness is as someone from
the English-speaking analytical philosophical
tradition, who attempted to form a globalised
perspective on the phenomenon of religion
beyond an anthropological or social scientific
study. He propagated a religious philosophy of
pluralism based upon the humanly tempered
experience of a transcendent and ineffable
divine reality that he termed The Real.88
To be sure, his religious pluralism was not
without controversy, since he attracted extensive
criticism amongst more ‘orthodox’ ecclesiasti-
cal authorities, famously from Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI, which makes Hick’s project of
religious pluralism historically notable. But as
Churches continue to grapple with their positions
on interfaith encounters Hick’s work cannot be
ignored, since his pluralism comes to the fore.
Whether one takes an exclusivist, inclusivist, or
pluralistic approach, John Hick’s work will, for
many years, present a stimulating challenge.
Works Cited:
Collection US136—John Hick Papers. Cadbury
Research Library, University of Birmingham:
<http://calmview.bham.ac.uk/Record.aspx?
src=CalmView.Catalog&id=XUS136>.
H. H. Farmer, 22nd November 1945, Letter to Hick,
Box 22.
C. Henry, 1962, ‘Some Reflections on the Hick
Case’, Box 13.
Hick, Notebook, 1940, Box 7.
Hick, 18th March 1949, Letter to Norman Kemp
Smith, Box 23.
Hick, 1950, D.Phil. thesis entitled ‘The Rela-
tion Between Belief and Faith’, Oriel College,
Oxford, Box 5.
Hick, 1958–1969, Correspondence between John
Hick and the President of Princeton Theological
Seminary, Box 6.
88 Hick, 1989: 252.
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The Expository Times
Hick, 1961, ‘Notes’, Box 13.
Hick, 1962, ‘A Statement from Rev. John Hick on
the Nature of his Belief’, in ‘Before the Perma-
nent Judicial Commission of the General Assem-
bly’, Box 13.
Hick, 25th January 1973, Letter to J. A. T. Robinson,
Box 23.
Hick, 10th April 1973, Letter to Robinson, Box 23.
Hick, 1977, The Myth of God Incarnate. London:
SCM Press.
Hick, 1989, An Interpretation of Religion: Human
Responses to The Transcendent. London: Yale
University Press.
Hick, 1990, Sermon: Essence of Christianity, Box 8.
Hick, 1994, Leftover Thoughts, Box 19.
F. Kerr, 1997, ‘Comment: Ratzinger’s Hick’. New
Blackfriars, 78(914), pp. 154–5, Box 27.
Hick, 1997, A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger on
Religious Pluralism, Box 27.
Hick, 1998, The Latest Statement on Christianity and
Other Religions, Box 30.
Hick, 11th December 2002, Letter to Peter Heath,
Box 23.
Hick, 2005, An Autobiography, Oxford: One World
Publications.
1962. Letters written to Hick in response to his
refusal to affirm the virgin birth of Christ and the
complaint against the Presbytery of New Bruns-
wick which was referred to the Judicial Com-
mission of the Synod, with carbon copy replies
written by Hick, Box 13.
P. Heath, 5th June 2001, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
P. Heath, 3rd April 2002, Letter to Hick, Box 23.
P. Knitter, 28th May 1997, Letter to Hick, Box 27.
H. H. Price, 11th December 1962, Letter to Hick,
Box 22.
J. Ratzinger, 31st October 1996, Relativism: The
Central Problem for Faith Today. Origins: CNS
Documentary Service, Vol. 26: No. 20, Box 27.
J. A. T. Robinson, 15th January 1973, Letter to Hick,
Box 23.
P. Schmidt-Leukel, 2nd March 2001, ‘Notification on
the book Toward a Christian Theology of Reli-
gious Pluralism (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New
York, 1997) by Father Dupuis, SJ’. Email to
Hick, Box 27.
C. Sinkinson, 2001, The Universe of Faiths: a criti-
cal study of John Hick’s Religious Pluralism.
Carlisle: Paternoster Press.