DISPUTED QUESTIONS IN THEOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

DISPUTED QUESTIONS IN THEOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Also by John Hick AN INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD DEATH AND ETERNAL LIFE EVIL AND THE GOD OF LOVE PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE GOD AND THE UNIVERSE OF FAITHS GOD HAS MANY NAMES PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION THE SECOND CHRISTIANITY CHRISTIANITY AT THE CENTRE GANDHI'S SIGNIFICANCE FOR TODAY (editor with Lamont C. Hempel) THREE FAITHS - ONE GOD (editor with Edmund S. Meltzer)

Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion JOHN HICK Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities, University of Birmingham, and Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Emeritus, The Claremont Graduate School, California M MACMILLAN

John Hick 1993 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragr:aph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmil1s, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-349-12697-2 ISBN 978-1-349-12695-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12695-8

Contents Preface Acknowledgements vii xi PART I EPISTEMOLOGICAL 1 Religious Realism and Non-realism 3 2 Religious Experience: Its Nature and Validity 17 PART II CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY 3 An Inspiration Christology 35 4 The Logic of God Incarnate 58 5 The Non-absoluteness of Christianity 77 PART III HINTS FROM BUDDHISM 6 The Buddha's Doctrine of the 'Undetermined Questions' 105 7 Religion as 'Skilful Means' 119 PART IV RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 8 A Personal Note 139 9 Jews, Christians, Muslims: Do We All Worship the Same God? 146 10 The Real and its Personae and Impersonae 164 v

vi Contents PART V LIFE AND DEATH 11 A Possible Conception of Life after Death Index 183 197

Preface When medieval theologians wrote their Questiones Disputatae the disputed questions concerned relatively secondary and peripheral topics; for all of the most basic and important matters were agreed within Christendom. Today, however, even the most central issues are disputed; every theological topic of more than antiquarian interest has become controversial. Further, Christian discourse itself is now part of the wider universe of discourse that includes au the great religious and philosophical traditions of the world. Christianity has to be seen as one among several great world faiths. And because we are today irreversibly aware of this, we have to do our theological thinking consciously in the presence of our Jewish and Muslim, Hi:.\du, Sikh and Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian, and also our immediate post-christian and humanist neighbours. This means that instead of taking for granted inherited beliefs that strike those neighbours as groundless, arbitrary or arrogant (or indeed all three at once!), we have to ask ourselves if we have good grounds on which to hqld them; and if so, whether the ways in which they were formulated centuries ago in a very different intellectual world are still appropriate today. This book deals, then, with some of the living and disputed questions of today. It begins in Chapter 1 with the fundamental issue of a religious, versus a non-religious or naturalistic, response to the mystery of the universe and of our existence within it. Is religion a wish-fulfilling projection of our own ideals and hopes upon the fabric of the universe; or does it, although undoubtedly culturally and psychologically conditioned, constitute at the same time the range of our human responses to the Transcendent? My answer to these questions is based upon the fact of religious experience, in the broadest sense of that term. Chapter 2 accordingly inquires into the nature of religious experience, its relationship to other modes of experience, and the rationality or otherwise of basing beliefs upon it. We then turn to specifically Christian beliefs. Their traditional structure hinges upon the dogma that Jesus of Nazareth was God the Son, the second Person of a divine Trinity, living a human life; and that as such he is the one and only source of salvation for human beings. It follows from this that Christianity, alone among the relivii

viii Preface gions of the world, was founded by God in person and accordingly has a uniquely superior role on earth. But this conviction, with its baleful historical influence in validating centuries of anti-semitism, the colonial exploitation by Christian Europe of what today we call the third world, and the subordination of women within a strongly patriarchal religious system, not only causes misgivings among many Christians but also alarms many of our non-christian neighbours, creating invisible but powerful barriers within the human community. There are of course other religions that make their own equivalent claims to superiority, with equally alarming historical consequences. Thus the whole question of religious absolutism is due for critical re-examination. As a Christian theologian, however, I see it as my primary responsibility to contribute to the rethinking of absolutism within my own tradition. The Church's belief in the deity of Jesus has come under criticism, in our own day, on both historical and logical grounds. Historically, the recent intensive study of Christian origins by a multitude of scholars has made it clear that, so far as historical evidence can tell, Jesus himself never claimed to be God, or the unique Son of God, or God the Son, or the Second Person of a divine Trinity, incarnate. It is much more credible, in the light of modem New Testament scholarship, that he saw himself as the eschatological prophet within Israel, proclaiming the imminent coming of God's kingdom. The Church thus finds itself today in the new situation, precipitated by the work of its own biblical scholars, of officially proclaiming a momentous proposition about Jesus which Jesus himself did not believe and which he would indeed probably have regarded as blasphemous. And so Chapter 3 discusses these historical questions and then outlines the kind of understanding of Jesus, as a divinely inspired human being who has made God real to millions, to which many Christians are today moving, or have indeed already moved. Chapter 4 turns to the logical problem created by the traditional Christology. This is the problem of squaring the theological circle of the official dogma that Jesus was both fully God and yet also fully a man: how could Jesus have both divine omnipotence and genuine human weakness, divine omniscience and genuine human ignorance, divine goodness and genuine human temptability, divine omnipresence in a finite human body, and the divine status of uncreated self-existence and yet be a genuine human being? In this chapter I examine the most recent major attempt (and it is a philosophically highly sophisticated and impressive attempt) to square the circle,

Preface ix that of Thomas Morris in The Logic of God Incarnate, and seek to show that it does not succeed. And in Chapter 5 I look further at some of the historical outworkings of the traditional dogma, mentioned above, and argue for the emerging new self-understanding of Christianity as one among the great religious traditions of the world, but no longer claiming a unique superiority. Among the other religious traditions we perhaps have most to learn today from that which is in many ways most unlike Christianity, namely Buddhism. Having been involved for some years in Buddhist-Christian dialogue I seek in Chapters 6 and 7 to benefit from this at two points. One is the Buddha's teaching about the 'undetermined questions'. Here I distinguish between (contingently) unanswered questions, and questions that are not only unanswered but unanswerable because posed in human terms about that which transcends the network of human concepts, and suggest that most of the conflicting truth-claims of the different religions are about one or other of these types of issue, and that it is reasonable for different human groups to live with different answers to such questions. The other is the notion of religious teachings as 'skilful means' to lead us towards the transformation from self-centred ness to Realitycentred ness that is the essence of salvation/liberation. This opens up the possibility that different sets of teachings may serve this same spiritual function within different traditions. The way is now open to the pluralistic view of the great world faiths as different but, so far as we can tell, equally valid ways of conceiving, experiencing and responding in life to the ultimate Reality that we all affirm in one or other of its differing manifestations to mentalities formed within the varying cultural ways of being human. This is the subject of the next three chapters. Chapter 8 is a brief personal note about the way in which I have myself come to accept religious pluralism, namely through extended experience of encounter with people of other faiths and of interaction with them, both in Britain and in India, Sri Lanka, Japan and the United States. Chapter 9 comes out of the ongoing three-cornered dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims. And Chapter 10 offers the outline of a philosophy of religions - a conception of the relationship between the religions of the world and between them and the ultimately Real. Finally, we return to our immediate situation as mortals facing the ultimate mystery of the universe and the personal mystery of death. Here, too, we can, I think, learn from the other religious

x Preface traditions; and I try to do so in outlining in Chapter 11 a possible conception of life after death. I believe that any serious religious understanding of the universe has to include this dimension of our existence. Thus this book, whilst written from within Christianity and addressed primarily to fellow Christians and to the semi- and post Christian majority of our humanistic western culture, is also addressed within the new global dialogue to neighbours within the other great world religions, particularly within the other two Abrahamic traditions of Judaism and Islam and within the profound eastern tradition of Buddhism. In this book I have omitted the diacritical marks from Sanscrit words. For I think the time has come for our Western discourse to expand to include key Buddhist and Hindu terms; and this becomes a little easier when we do not insist upon the diacriticals. And so such words as niroana, siiiiyata, appear on these pages as niroana, sunyata, etc. Some of these papers originally appeared in various places during the last five years, though all were written within the overall plan of this book. I am grateful to the editors and publishers listed in the Acknowledgements for their permission to use the material again in this way, usually in a slightly revised form. JOHN HICK

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the following for permission to reprint material which originally appeared in their books or journals: Macmillan, London, for 'The Real and its Personae and Impersonae', from Concepts of the Ultimate, edited by Linda Tessier, 1989; 'A Possible View of Life after Death', from Death and Afterlife, edited by Stephen Davis, 1989; and 'Religious Language: the Realist/ Nonrealist Debate', from Is God Real?, edited by Joseph Runzo, 1992. Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, for 'An Inspiration Christology', from Encountering Jesus, edited by Stephen Davis, 1988. Orbis, Maryknoll, New York, for 'The Nonabsoluteness of Christianity', from The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by John Hick and Paul Knitter, 1987. Cambridge University Press, for 'The Logic of God Incarnate', from Religious Studies, edited by Peter Byrne, 1989. Wake Forest University, for 'The Buddha's Doctrine of the "Undetermined Questions" " from Hermeneutics, Religious Pluralism, and Truth, edited by Gregory D. Pritchard, 1989. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland, for 'Religion as "Skilful Means" " from the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, edited by Eugene Thomas Long, 1991. Edwin Mellon Press, Lewiston, New York, for 'A Personal Note', from Odysseys to Dialogue, edited by Leonard Swidler, 1992. xi