More Than One Way? John Hick & Pluralism

I love California. I love the temperature, the beaches, the cities, the mountains, the deserts, the national parks, we have it all. It is amazing how one state can be so diverse. California also has a lot of religion. This may not be such a wonderful diversity. California has seen some weird things (hippies, Church of Satan, etc.) and amidst of all the religious commotion, I find that the layman comes to popular slogans such as “All religions are basically the same” or “All that matters is that you’re a good person” or “You have your way to God, and I have mine” “That religion is true for you, but not for me” and other abject nonsense. How are we to make any sense of all of this?

Before we answer this question, let us examine what it is that is at stake for the Christian. The Christian believes, or at least the conservative Christian believes, that there is no other valid religion apart from their own. If, however, there is another way to achieve the ends that the Christian seeks, then this deems Christianity, as a whole, useless at worst, and arbitrary at best. This threat, known as Religious Pluralism, aims at the exclusive claims at Christianity, and says, No, Jesus is not the only way to God, there is another. But of course, if there is another way, then Christ died for nothing. This deems the resurrection as irrelevant, and we ought to be pitied. This is what is at stake.

We must, on a Biblical basis, reject this. Here is a wonderful resource which gives plenty of Biblical ammunition for the case that Jesus is indeed the only way. Some classic verses you might want to underline in your Bible are John 14:6, which reads: Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me; and Acts 4:12, which reads: Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.

When a student of philosophy thinks of religious pluralism, John Hick usually comes up. He’s quite notorious for putting forth such arguments, and sub arguments, to defend religious pluralism (such as Jesus never claimed to be God). Before we get into his argument however, let me set aside the most common lay version of pluralism one might hear from a college student.

“Exclusivity is intolerant.”

What is meant by exclusive? Simply, we believe we are the only right ones, and everyone opposed is wrong. Gee, sure sounds that way, huh? How intolerant, how bigoted, how closed minded, yet we Christians claim to be so humble!

A funny example of the kind of finger pointing against the Christian is this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmHzYWO6b0k

I think G.K. Chesterton hit on the head when he said, “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

If saying it is intolerant to say that one is right, and surely the person who says this believes they themselves are right, then they themselves are guilty of intolerance. So why their intolerance over my intolerance? Why are they not tolerating my “intolerance”? Why are the excluding my exclusivity? Truth is exclusive. If someone calls me intolerant, then I could just very well say, “And you’re ugly.” Mudslinging and name calling gets us nowhere, and doesn’t focus on the issue at hand.

In my Philosophy of Religion textbook, there is a short article written by John Hick (whom William Lane Craig studied under) entitled, “The Pluralistic Hypothesis”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the same article online, so here is a similar article which has the same kind of material. So when I quote Hick, just take it on good faith I’m accurately quoting him from my textbooks, and I’m not taking him out of context.

Hick begins his observation of world’s great  religions, “…I have to record the fact that my own inevitably limited experience of knowing people who are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, [etc.]…has led me to think that the spiritual and moral fruits of these faiths, although different, are more or less on par with the fruits of Christianity…I suggest that we should continue to follow the clue provided by these fruits; for Jesus was clearly more concerned with men’s and women’s lives than with any body of theological propositions that they might have in their minds…I think it is clear that the great postaxial traditions, including Christianity, are directed towards a transformation of human existence from self-centredness to a re-centring in what in our inadequate human terms we speak of God…” 

Hick seems to be judging the truth value of a certain worldview or religion by the actions and fruits of its adherents. But why start here? Why have this as foundational? Hick gives no justification for this. As it turns out, contra Hick, when Jesus was asked, in Mark 12:28-31, which was the greatest commandment, he started off with a theological statement, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” We can’t love God if we are worshiping the wrong God. Theological truths are terribly important. We can also ask how John Hick knows genuine spiritual transformation is taking place. He can’t justly come to this conclusion by merely judging their external actions. If I share my food with someone else, Hick might see that and walk away convinced that I did a good thing. But what if I did it with the expectation of someone somewhere returning the favor? He cannot judge from my external actions that because I actually shared my food with a starving child that I do it because I know I ought to share my food with a poor starving child. Behavior can be identical yet intentions be completely different. And what of those thoughts in my head? If spiritual transformation is judged by my external actions, what of the pedophile in the park who gives children candy, while at home he fantasizes about killing and raping them all? How do you judge “fruits” in the individual’s mind? Simply put, Hick has no adequate way of judging genuine spiritual transformation. And finally, why not judge a religious system of belief by the plausibility of the worldview rather than the actions of its followers? For example, I know with certainty that I exist. If I didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here pondering about my existence (I think therefore I am). Yet some Buddhist’s hold to the doctrine of Anatta, or the doctrine of “no-self”, which basically says, you don’t really exist! Why can’t I judge worldviews like Christianity more plausible than Buddhism on grounds such as these? Hick just arbitrarily chooses, exclusively, where to start.

Hick’s main concern is that of salvation. He says, of exclusivism, “Their position is a consistent and coherent one for those who can believe that God condemns the majority of the human race, who have never encountered or who have not accepted the Christian gospel, to eternal damnation. Personally, I would view such God as the Devil!”

Hick’s complaint is that an all loving God is incompatible with the notion of the vast majority of people going to hell. But is this so? Some people may think so.

It seems assumed that people go to hell is unfair, whether they have been in contact with gospels or not. But as I have argued elsewhere, if it is unfair to anybody, it is unfair to the people who go to heaven, because everyone deserves to go to hell. A question one could ask Rob Bell, and maybe John Hick, is: Where do you get this notion that God is all loving?

I’m not denying that God is all loving. I affirm that. What I am doing here is trying to get them to a conclusion, and I’m just holding their hand. Now, Rob Bell better say he got this idea of God being all loving from the Bible (and judging from Hick’s use of Christian vocabulary, I guess he would give the same answer). And that would be my answer as well. But if he gets God being all loving from the Bible, then I got the idea of Hell from the Bible as well. Why is the latter not legitimate? Let it also be noted that in the Book of Acts, (which has 28 chapters versus the average 18) the word Love is never employed. This is the history of the early Church, and love is never mentioned. Now, that is not to say love isn’t important, but when the early Christians preached, they preached judgment and forgiveness, or our sinfulness and then the resurrection of Jesus. This is all rooted in the reality of Hell. The problem of Hell, then, is not a real problem.

But if the ethical justification behind hell is not a real problem, and it is in fact taught to be true, then what’s wrong with exclusivism, for Hick anyways? Hick then goes on and considers two alternatives to exclusivism, which is inclusivism and pluralism. I won’t talk about inclusivism here for a few reasons. One, I have already argued that the doctrine of Hell is not so immoral and is what we expect. So why talk about inclusivism afterwards? Two, there are already resources that deal with inclusivism at an introductory level, so it will save me some time and energy if I just refer you to them. Thirdly, Hick doesn’t spend too much time with it, and says the logical outworking of inclusivism is actually pluralism. So it may not be worth it to actually talk about it now. And finally, I don’t think Hick has properly understood the theologians he quoted to represent the inclusivist view anyways. So it’s not a big issue.

Hick goes on to say, “In order to make sense of the idea of Christ at work within the world religions, including those that precede Christianity, it will be necessary to leave aside the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and his death on the cross, and to speak instead of a non-historical, or supra-historical, Christ-figure or Logos (i.e. the second person of the Trinity) who secretly inspired Buddha, and the writers of the Upanishads, and Moses and the great Hebrew prophets, and Confucius,…and many others since. … But this Christ figure…operating before, and thus independently of the historical life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, then becomes in effect a name for the world-wide and history long impact upon human life…” This is the pluralism Hick wants us to adopt.

Hick’s brand of pluralism is not without its critics. Perhaps the biggest and most obvious criticism is that of mutually exclusive claims. For example, Christians say that Jesus was crucified, and the Muslims say that Jesus was not crucified. How can both be true? As Bertrand Russell said in his essay Why I Am Not A Christian, “it is evident as a matter of logic that, since [the great world religions] disagree, not more than one of them can be true”.  Hick anticipates this and gives three analogies in response.

The image above is known as the Duck-Rabbit. Is it a duck? Is it a rabbit? “Suppose there is a culture in which ducks are a familiar sight but rabbits are completely unknown and have never even been heard of before; and another culture in which rabbits are familiar but ducks are completely unknown. So when people in the duck-knowing culture see the ambiguous figure they naturally report that it’s the picture of a duck….And of course the other way around with the  rabbit-knowing culture….each group is right in what it affirms but wrong in its inference that the other group is mistaken. They are both…right in virtue of the fact that what is actually there is capable of being equally correctly seen in two quite different ways, as a duck or a rabbit. 

"The analogy that I am suggesting here is with the religious experience component of religion. And the possibility that I want to point to is that the ultimate ineffable Reality is capable of being authentically experiences in terms of different sets of human concepts…”

There seem to be a few problems with this analogy. First, if the image is meant to be interpreted ambiguously, and we thus cannot say others are wrong in their interpretation, then why does Hick believe he has the real concept of the image? It’s exactly that idea he is rejecting, yet he is assuming it. Secondly, if it is so ambiguous, and because of this ambiguity we cannot say the other camps are wrong, why is saying the camps that says other camps are wrong, wrong? Again, it seems like he is assuming the very thing he is denying. Thirdly, why not just ask the artist what his intention was when he drew the image? If the artists says he meant it to be a duck, the rabbit culture is wrong, and so is Hick. If the artists says it was a rabbit, then the duck culture is wrong, and so is Hick. If the artist names some other animal, then Hick is still wrong. There is still a right and wrong interpretation. If the artists says it was meant to be ambiguous and open to interpretation, then Hick is right, which means those who say Hick is wrong are wrong, which means Hick is wrong yet again. Fourthly, this doesn’t address the criticism set by people like Russell, who point out that mutually exclusive claims means not all religions can be true. Hick’s analogy, as he says, is meant for how one may personally experience this transcendent Real. But this completely subjective. Yet when we say Jesus was or was not crucified, we aren’t talking about subject experience, we are talking about objective events in history. Events are not left up to interpretation like experience is. The analogy is inadequate.

The second analogy Hick uses is the light wave-particle phenomenon. Does light act as a wave or as a particle? In a weird kind of way, it could be both, yet when we try to observe this phenomenon, the way the light acts changes. “The analogy I have in mind here is with spiritual practices…The suggestion here is that if in the activity of I-Thou prayer we approach the Real as personal then we shall experience the Real as a personal deity…Or if our religious culture leads us to open ourselves to the real in various forms of meditation, the infinite non-personal being…then this is likely to be the way in which we shall experience the Real.”

 

The problem with this analogy is very much the same as the first. Hick is focusing on the subject experiencing God (or what he insists on calling the Real), and not on the ontology, or nature, of the thing being experienced. It is thus reduced to subjectivity yet again. Yet when Christians like myself say Christ is risen, we aren’t talking about a subjective relationship with the deity, we are talking about God’s interaction with history. Also, in Christian theology, it is not primarily the human individual who seeks God, but God who seeks the human individual. If this God seeks a relationship with us, and reveals Himself to us, then this God becomes incoherent, and thus does not exist, since this God does indeed say He does not change. Again, if we are right, then Hick is wrong. If Hick is right, then we are wrong, and Hick is wrong yet again.

Hick’s final, and I think his most profound analogy, is his cartography analogy. There are three basic kinds of maps.

The above map is called the Mercator Projection. The Mercator Projection is excellent for uses in navigation but it radically distorts and dramatically enlarges the size of Eurasian and North American countries, and Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, yet Africa’s land mass is actually fourteen times larger.

The map above is called the Galls-Peter projection. The Gall-Peters Projection more fairly illustrates the size of third world countries, but in doing so it more radically distorts the shape of Eurasian and North American countries.

And this map projection is called the Robinson Projection. The Robinson projection is a bit of a compromise between the Mercator and the Gall-Peters projections. The overall look is more globe-like. The high latitudes are less distorted in size, but more so in shape.

“Because the earth is a three-dimensional globe, any map of it on a two-dimensional surface must inevitably distort it, and there are different ways of systematically distorting it for different purposes…But it does not follow that if one type of map is accurate the others must be inaccurate. If they are properly made, they are all accurate-and yet in another sense they are all inaccurate, in that they all inevitably distort…The analogy here is with theologies, both the different theologies of the same religion and the even more different theologies and philosophies of different religions. It could be that representations of the infinite divine reality in our finite human terms must be much more radically inadequate than a two-dimensional representation of the three dimensional earth. And it could be that the conceptual maps drawn by the great traditions, although finite picturings of the Infinite, are all more or less equally reliable…and more or less equally useful for guiding us on our journey through life.”

Firstly, it is interesting to note that Hick believes that every religion has something distorted about their view of God…except for perhaps his own! If every view of God has a distortion, then why cant the distortion in Hick’s view be that all other views have a distortion, entailing that there is a view, other than his own, that has no distortion in it? It’s like saying, no one knows how God really is, and that’s how God really is! It's self-contradictory. Secondly, this view disregards the value of truth. If each religion is merely meant to help guide us through life, and not give us an accurate picture of reality, then what if my religion is compromised of almost entirely false propositions, yet it gets me happily through life? Who cares if it is actually true or not, it sustained me through life! It’s reminiscent of Plato’s cave. Thirdly, why think that the similarities are greater or hold more weight than the differences? Hick seems to give no reason for this. If God reveals himself to people, as Christians believe, and tells us His nature is a certain way, then we can know at least that much, and have a good foundation to stand upon, and reject all other contrary worldviews.

Hick is able to get away with a lot in his article (or the excerpt in my textbook, wherever it originated) because he denies the historical Jesus. If it can be shown that Jesus was who he said he was, and that he died and was resurrected, we have good reasons right there to reject pluralism. I’ll leave it to others to make such as case.

Christianity is only one voice among many other religions trying to get your attention. Many of us can be confused by all the religious chit-chatter, and we can get scared. Many try to provide different solutions to the same problem: guilt, or in theological terms, sin. We all sin, we all feel guilty. I find the most appealing solution to getting rid of my guilt, my sin, is in Jesus. Jesus sees the burden of my guilt, and graciously takes it away from me, on the cross. If it weren’t for Jesus to take my guilt away, I would have to be forced to live with it, with all the evil and malicious things I’ve done to the people that love me. If I still had to carry the burden of my own guilt, I might not be here typing this essay about John Hick. Jesus died so I could live. With an offer like that, why would I want any other religion to be true anyways?