John Hick

John Harwood Hick (20 January 1922 – 9 February 2012) was a philosopher of religion and theologian born in England who taught in the United States for the larger part of his career.

In philosophical theology, he made contributions in the areas of theodicy, eschatology, and Christology, and in the philosophy of religion he contributed to the areas of epistemology of religion and religious pluralism.

John Hick was born on 20 January 1922 to a middle-class family in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England.

In his teens, he developed an interest in philosophy and religion, being encouraged by his uncle, who was an author and teacher at the University of Manchester.

Hick initially went to Bootham School in York which is Quaker, and then pursued a law degree at the University of Hull, but, having converted to Evangelical Christianity, he decided to change his career and he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1941.

During his studies, he became liable for military service in World War II, but, as a conscientious objector on moral grounds, he enrolled in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.

After the war, he returned to Edinburgh and became attracted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and began to question his fundamentalism.

During his fifteen years at the University of Birmingham, Hick became a founder, as well as the first chair, for the group All Faiths for One Race (AFFOR); he served as a chair on the Religious and Cultural Panel, which was a division of the Birmingham Community Relations Committee; and he also chaired the coordinating committee for a 1944 conference convened under the new Education Act with the aim of creating a new syllabus for religious instruction in city schools.

He also held teaching positions at Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University.

During his teaching stay at Princeton Seminary, Hick began to depart from his conservative religious standings as he began to question "whether belief in the Incarnation required one to believe in the literal historicity of the Virgin Birth".

This questioning would open the door for further examination of his own Christology, which would contribute to Hick's understanding of religious pluralism.

He was the Vice-President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and Vice-President of The World Congress of Faiths.

In 1948 he completed his MA thesis, which formed the basis of his book Faith and Knowledge.

He went on to complete a D. Phil at Oriel College, Oxford University in 1950 and a DLitt from Edinburgh in 1975.

In 1953 he married Joan Hazel Bowers, and the couple had four children.

In 1961 or 1962, he was asked whether he took exception to anything in the Westminster Confession of 1647 and answered that several points were open to question.

Because of this, some of the local ministers appealed against his reception into the presbytery.

Their appeal was sustained by the Synod.

A year later, a counter-appeal was sustained by the Judicial Committee of the General Assembly, and Hick became a member of the presbytery.

Robert Smid states that Hick is regularly cited as "one of the most – if not simply the most – significant philosopher of religion in the twentieth century".

Keith Ward once described him as "the greatest living philosopher of global religion."

He is best known for his advocacy of religious pluralism, which is radically different from the traditional Christian teachings that he held when he was younger.

Perhaps because of his heavy involvement with the inter-faith groups and his interaction with people of non-Christian faiths through those groups, Hick began to move toward a pluralistic outlook.

He notes in both More Than One Way? and God and the Universe of Faiths that, as he came to know these people who belonged to non-Christian faiths, he saw in them the same values and moral actions that he recognized in fellow Christians.

This observation led him to begin questioning how a completely loving God could possibly sentence non-Christians who clearly espouse values that are revered in Christianity to an eternity in hell.

Hick then began to attempt to uncover the means by which all those devoted to a theistic religion might receive salvation.

In 1977 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Hick's academic positions included Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the Claremont Graduate University, California (where he taught from 1979 to 1992); H.G. Wood Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham; and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham.

While at the University of Birmingham Hick played important roles in a number of organisations centred on community relations.

Non-Christian communities, mostly Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, had begun to form in this central England community as immigration from the Caribbean Islands and Indian subcontinent increased.

Due to the influx of peoples with different religious traditions, organizations focused on integrating the community became necessary.

Hick delivered the 1986–87 Gifford lectures and in 1991 was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary for Religion.

Hick was twice the subject of heresy proceedings.

Hick has notably been criticized by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope between 2005 and 2013, when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ratzinger had examined the works of several theologians accused of relativism, such as Jacques Dupuis and Roger Haight, and found that many, if not all, were philosophically inspired by Hick.

Therefore, the declaration Dominus Iesus was seen by many at the time as a condemnation of Hick's ideas and theories.

Having begun his career as an evangelical, he moved towards pluralism as a way of reconciling God's love with the facts of cultural and religious diversity.

He was primarily influenced by Immanuel Kant in this regard, who argued that human minds obscure actual reality in favor of comprehension (see Kant's theory of perception).

After many years as a member of the United Reformed Church, in October 2009 he was accepted into membership of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.

He died in 2012.