You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Religious pluralism is the most radical of the three positions in the theology of religions. It holds that no single religion has a monopoly on truth or salvation — that the great world faiths are, broadly, equally valid paths to the one ultimate reality, each a genuine human response to the same divine. Its most influential advocate is the British philosopher John Hick, whose "pluralistic hypothesis" has shaped the debate for half a century. This lesson sets out Hick's "Copernican revolution," the crucial distinction between the Real an sich and the Real as humanly experienced, the soteriological criterion and the resulting reinterpretation of the Incarnation; it adds Paul Knitter's liberative pluralism; and it weighs the powerful criticisms — self-reference, the loss of real difference, the abandonment of Christ's uniqueness, and the charge of disguised Western liberalism — pressed by D'Costa, Plantinga and others.
John Hick (1922–2012) began as a fairly conservative Christian philosopher and moved gradually toward pluralism, in large part through living and working in multi-faith Birmingham, where he saw at first hand devout people of many traditions whose holiness he could not dismiss. His mature hypothesis is set out most fully in An Interpretation of Religion (1989), his Gifford Lectures.
Two motivations drive Hick's argument, and naming them helps in evaluation. The first is observational and moral. Sharing community life with Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Jews, Hick judged that the fruit of the Spirit — love, compassion, self-sacrifice, holiness — was as evident among them as among Christians. If God is the God of love, it seemed to him incredible that this God would have arranged salvation so that the great majority of humanity, including these manifestly transformed people, were excluded merely by the religion of their birth. Pluralism thus begins, for Hick, as the only response that does justice both to the moral character of God and to the observed sanctity of non-Christians. The second motivation is philosophical: an account is needed of why, if there is one ultimate Reality, human responses to it are so various. Hick's answer is that the variety is a function not of the Real (which is one) but of the diverse cultural and conceptual "lenses" through which finite human beings inevitably perceive it — an application of the broadly Kantian insight that all experience is shaped by the categories of the experiencer. Critics who attack only the conclusion, without engaging these two motivating arguments, miss the force of the position.
Hick framed his proposal as a Copernican revolution in theology, by analogy with the shift from the Ptolemaic (earth-centred) to the Copernican (sun-centred) model of the heavens. Just as Copernicus displaced the earth from the centre of the cosmos, Hick proposed displacing Christianity (or any one religion) from the centre of the religious universe and putting God — or, in his more careful later term, "the Real" — at the centre, with all the religions, Christianity included, orbiting around it.
Key term: The Copernican revolution in theology (Hick) — the shift from a Christocentric (or any single-faith-centred) model, in which other religions are valued only by their relation to one's own, to a theocentric or Reality-centred model, in which all religions are valued as responses to the one ultimate Reality at the centre.
| Ptolemaic theology | Copernican theology |
|---|---|
| Christianity at the centre; others orbit it | The Real at the centre; all religions orbit it |
| Other faiths matter only as they relate to Christianity | Each faith has its own genuine relation to the Real |
| Salvation through Christ alone | Salvation/liberation through many paths |
| Exclusivism and inclusivism | Pluralism |
It is important for evaluation to note that Hick changed his terminology, and the change was forced on him. His early "theocentric" model put God at the centre — but this is no help to non-theistic religions such as Theravada Buddhism or Advaita, which do not centre on a personal God at all. To accommodate them, Hick replaced "God" with the more abstract "the Real," which can be conceived either personally or impersonally. This move is the hinge of the whole hypothesis, and also the point at which the deepest problems arise.
At the core of Hick's hypothesis lies a distinction borrowed from Kant: between the noumenon (the thing as it is in itself) and the phenomenon (the thing as it appears to a perceiver). Hick applies this to ultimate reality. The Real an sich — the Real in itself — is utterly beyond the reach of human concepts; we can say almost nothing positive about it. What the religions actually encounter and describe is not the Real in itself but the Real as humanly experienced, filtered through the particular cultural, historical, linguistic and conceptual lenses of each tradition.
Key term: The Real — Hick's term for the ultimate divine reality lying behind all the traditions. The Real an sich transcends all human categories; the various deities and absolutes that religions worship are authentic but culturally conditioned phenomenal manifestations of the one Real.
On this account the personal deities of the theistic faiths (the Holy Trinity, Allah, Vishnu) and the non-personal absolutes of the non-theistic faiths (Brahman, the Tao, Nirvana, Sunyata) are all genuine appearances of the same Real — what Hick calls the personae and impersonae of the Real. None is simply false; none is the Real exactly as it is. Each tradition meets the one Reality under a different authentic form. Hick is careful to say that the Real itself is neither personal nor impersonal, neither one nor many, neither good nor evil in any sense we can grasp — these are all categories of the phenomenal, not the noumenal.
If every great tradition is a valid response to the same Real, how can we evaluate or compare them at all? Hick answers with a soteriological (salvation-focused) criterion rather than a doctrinal one. Religions are to be judged not by the truth of their doctrines — which all describe only the phenomenal Real — but by their fruits: the extent to which they actually transform human beings from self-centredness to Reality-centredness.
Key term: Soteriological criterion (Hick) — the standard by which religions are assessed not by the truth of their creeds but by their effectiveness in turning people from self-centredness to Reality-centredness, that is, in producing love, compassion and saintliness.
By this measure, Hick argued, the major world religions appear to be roughly on a par: each, across its history, produces saints, moral heroes and transformed communities, and none is demonstrably superior to the rest in generating this turn from ego to Reality. Translated into each tradition's own vocabulary, the same transformation is described as the move from sin to salvation, from samsara to moksha, from the grip of craving to nirvana.
| Tradition | The "self-centred" condition | The "Reality-centred" goal |
|---|---|---|
| Christianity | Sin | Salvation/sanctification in God |
| Islam | Heedlessness of God | Submission to God (islam) |
| Advaita Hinduism | Avidya (ignorance); maya | Moksha (liberation) |
| Buddhism | Dukkha; craving (tanha) | Nirvana (liberation) |
A clarification often missed: Hick does not claim all religions are equally true in their doctrines, nor that their differences are trivial. He claims that their doctrinal differences concern only the phenomenal Real and so cannot be adjudicated, while their soteriological effectiveness is comparable. This is a more guarded thesis than "all religions are the same," and accurate answers should represent it as such.
Hick was well aware that religions make apparently conflicting truth-claims, and his treatment of them is essential to understanding the hypothesis. He distinguished three kinds of religious disagreement. First, differences of detail and practice — calendars, rituals, dietary laws — which are matters of cultural form and raise no problem. Second, historical and quasi-historical claims — for example whether Jesus died on the cross (affirmed by Christians, denied by the Qur'an) — which Hick regarded as genuine factual disputes that are simply, at present, unresolvable, and not central to salvation. Third, and most important, differences in the conception of the ultimate — personal God versus impersonal Absolute. It is only this third class that the noumenal/phenomenal distinction is designed to dissolve: these are not contradictory claims about one phenomenal object but different authentic experiences of the one Real an sich, which is in itself beyond both descriptions. Whether this third move is legitimate, or whether it simply redescribes a contradiction as a complementarity by fiat, is precisely where critics attack — but the candidate should show that Hick has a considered account of conflicting truth-claims, not a blanket "they are all true."
Two confusions must be cleared away for an accurate account. Pluralism is not relativism: Hick does not say that truth is whatever each community takes it to be, or that there is no fact of the matter about the Real. He holds that there is one ultimate Reality, and that traditions can be better or worse (by the soteriological criterion) at responding to it — a Hitlerian "religion" of cruelty would be a false response, not merely a different one. Nor is pluralism indifferentism — the view that it makes no difference which religion one follows. Hick thought one should normally practise the tradition of one's own culture, deepening it, rather than treating all faiths as interchangeable consumer options. These distinctions matter because many exam criticisms of "pluralism" are really criticisms of relativism or indifferentism, and a strong answer will not let the positions be conflated.
Hick's hypothesis carries a heavy cost for traditional Christianity, and he accepted it openly. If Jesus were literally and uniquely God incarnate — the one and only point at which God became human — then Christianity could not be merely one valid response among several; it would possess a unique status the hypothesis denies. So the doctrine of the Incarnation must be reinterpreted. In the controversial volume The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), which Hick edited, he and several colleagues argued that "God incarnate" is best understood mythologically — not as a literal metaphysical claim that the second person of the Trinity assumed a human nature, but as a poetic, evaluative way of expressing the religious significance of Jesus for his followers.
Key term: Myth (in Hick's Christology) — a story or affirmation that is not literally true but expresses an attitude or evaluation; to call Jesus "God incarnate" is, on this view, to express his supreme significance for Christians, not to state a metaphysical fact about his nature.
Hick's own analogy is illuminating: to call Jesus "Son of God" is like calling a deeply loving person "an angel" — true as praise and as an expression of impact, not as a claim that the person literally belongs to a higher order of being. On this reading Jesus was a human being extraordinarily open and transparent to the Real, supremely "Reality-centred," but not the unique God-man of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Whether this reinterpretation is a reasonable development or the destruction of Christianity's defining claim is one of the central evaluative questions of the topic, and is taken up below.
Paul Knitter (b. 1939), an American Catholic theologian, developed a distinct version of pluralism that places ethical practice before theological theory. Where Hick's route is epistemological (the Real behind the appearances), Knitter's is liberative.
In No Other Name? (1985) Knitter traced a movement in the theology of religions from ecclesiocentrism (the Church at the centre) to Christocentrism (Christ at the centre) to theocentrism (God at the centre), and pressed beyond it to what he later called soteriocentrism — putting salvation/liberation at the centre. The governing question is no longer "which religion holds the correct doctrine of God?" but "which religions actually promote human liberation, justice and the flourishing of life — especially for the poor and oppressed?"
Knitter, influenced by liberation theology and later by ecological concern, proposes that a shared commitment to justice and the well-being of the suffering provides the firmest common ground for interfaith dialogue — an ethical or liberative bridge. Religions need not first agree about metaphysics; they can meet in the common practice of resisting oppression and caring for a threatened planet, and discover their kinship there. This is sometimes called a globally responsible, correlational dialogue.
Knitter's approach has notable advantages over Hick's and notable problems of its own. Its advantage is that it sidesteps the most damaging objection to Hick: it does not need to postulate an unknowable Real behind the traditions, so it escapes the empty-Real and self-reference difficulties. It begins not from a contested metaphysics but from a concrete moral demand — the cry of the poor and the groaning of creation — that the traditions can recognise without first agreeing on the nature of the ultimate. Its problem is that it appears to smuggle in a substantive and arguably partisan value-commitment (a particular, broadly progressive conception of justice and liberation) and then make it the measure of all religions — which is itself a kind of meta-position that some traditions would reject, so that the charge of covert imperialism returns in ethical rather than metaphysical dress. Critics also ask whether "liberation" can really function as a religion-neutral criterion when traditions disagree about what human flourishing is. For evaluation, Knitter usefully shows that pluralism need not be Hick's pluralism — but he does not obviously escape the structural worry that every attempt to stand "above" the traditions ends up being one more particular standpoint.
Knitter is also valued for a widely used map of the whole field, set out in Introducing Theologies of Religions (2002). He distinguishes four models, and being able to place thinkers within them is examinable.
| Model | Core claim | Representative |
|---|---|---|
| Replacement | Only one religion is true; it should replace the others | Barth; conservative evangelicalism |
| Fulfilment | Other religions are genuine but find completion in Christ | Rahner; Vatican II |
| Mutuality | Religions are equal partners; many true paths | Hick; Knitter himself |
| Acceptance | Religions are distinct and incommensurable; accept the difference | Lindbeck; D'Costa (particularists) |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.