PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A contemporary introduction

NOTES 371

6 Religious pluralism

1 (London: Macmillan, and New Haven: Yale University Press).

2 (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995).

3 Much of the rest of it will come up during our critique.

4 Professor Hick in A Christian Theology of Religions, op. cit. claims

the religions ask different questions. I want to suggest that these questions, whilst

specifically different, are generically the same. They all presuppose a profound

present lack, and the possibility of a radically better future; and they are all answers

to the question, how to get from one to the other. In traditional Christian language

they are all ways of asking, What must I do to be saved?

(p. 41)

5 Ibid. Professor Hick says, “each of the great world religions is a response to the ultimately

real, and that each is a context of human salvation,” and “On the one hand religious

pluralism leaves the different doctrinal systems intact within their own religious traditions,

but on the other hand it proposes the meta-theory that these traditions, as complex totalities,

are different human responses to the Real.”

6 Ibid.

Not more than one of these rival belief-systems could be finally and universally

true, and yet the traditions within which they function seem, when judged by

their fruits, to be more or less equally valid responses to the Real. Now the

distinction between the Real in itself and the Real as variously humanly thought

and experienced enables us to understand how this can be: namely, the differing

belief-systems are beliefs about different manifestations of the Real. They’re not

mutually conflicting beliefs, because they’re beliefs about different phenomenal

realities. It’s in this sense that they are reduced or “downgraded” in their scope.

7 Ibid. To the question “that’s a pretty radical reinterpretation, isn’t it?” Professor Hick

replies, “Yes; but we really do have to make a choice between a traditional absolutism and

a genuinely pluralistic interpretation of the global religious situation.”

8 Ibid. As a basis for these claims, Professor Hick asserts that:

I want to say that what is literally or analogically true of, say, the heavenly Parent

of Christian belief – for example, that God is loving, like an ideal parent – is

mythologically true of the Real in itself... I mean by a myth a story that is not

literally true but that has the power to evoke in its hearers a practical response to

the myth’s referent – a true myth being of course one that evokes an appropriate

response. The truthfulness of a myth is thus a practical truthfulness, consisting in

its capacity to orient us rightly in our lives. In so far as the heavenly Parent is an

authentic manifestation of the Real, to think of the Real as an ideal parent is to

think in a way that can orient us rightly to the Real, evoking in us a trust which

can pervade our lives and free us to love our neighbour. And of course I want to

give a parallel account of the language about the Ultimate used by each of the

other world religions.

9 If one asks what reason there is for thinking religious pluralism to be true, Professor
Hick’s answer is: “the hypothesis is offered as the best explanation’, i.e. the most