Can anyone be saved apart from explicit faith in Jesus Christ? Or is it more proper, in this politically-correct age, to propose that all religions are more or less equal in terms of their salvific value? Those who insist that explicit faith in Christ as revealed in the Scriptures is the necessary precondition for salvation are known as religious exclusivists. Those diametrically opposed who say that all religions are salvifically equal are known as religious pluralists. There is a middle position, held by many Catholics and evangelicals, that promotes a view known as inclusivism. Inclusivists would argue that Christ is the only true Savior, but that many who have never heard of Him or even some who have rejected Him in favor of their own religion will still be saved. Though inclusivism is an important topic, it is not the subject of this paper. This paper concentrates on the debate between Christian exclusivists and religious pluralists. The arguments of British philosopher John Hick, being the most influential proponent of the latter group, will be the subject of the bulk of this paper.
This issue is not one that should be confined to the halls of academia and reserved for scholars in ivory towers. The heart of this issue involves the very souls of persons in every region of the world. How one comes out on this debate may determine with how much fervor and passion one will support Christian evangelism, if at all. A person’s stance on this issue speaks volumes about his view of Scripture, the place that Jesus Christ occupies in his life, and possibly even the goals and ambitions he seeks. The importance of the issue simply cannot be overstated. Just a cursory reading of the New Testament reveals how seriously this issue was taken by Christ and His apostles. Every one of them gave his very life one way or another to spread the message that salvation is found in Christ alone.
Yet today there is a strong ecumenical movement that abhors any type of religious exclusivism, especially Christian. The 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Chicago, Illinois serves as an accurate barometer of the current climate in world religious affairs. At the Parliament, any position other than pluralism was ridiculed as intolerant and bigoted, especially if it was one that exalted Jesus Christ as exclusive Lord and Savior. Christ, of course, was highly admired by pluralists as “one among many great religious gurus,” but any notion that He is supreme over all is anathematized. As evangelical Erwin Lutzer observed in his book Christ Among other Gods, “What place did Christ have in the more than 700 workshops that were available during the eight-day conference? At times He was variously admired, quoted, and favorably compared to other religious teachers, ancient and modern. He was seen as one more stage in the evolutionary development of religion; indeed, He was a very necessary and important stage, but He was only one enlightened man among many.”[1]
And thus the battle lines have been drawn and the pluralists intend to dictate the rules of engagement. It is permissible to speak highly of Christ, but one should not worship Him as the one true God. It is perfectly allowable to share how Christ has “enlightened” you or made you a “better person,” just do not offend by attempting to evangelize. As the title of Lutzer’s book suggests, it is fine to revere Christ among the gods, just as long as He ascends no higher than that. No one is offended when one speaks of Christianity as a way of salvation, just as long as it is not the way. That is the controversy this paper will briefly attempt to explore.
Since religious pluralists generally repudiate the inerrancy and authority of Scripture, most of the dialogue with them necessarily revolves around philosophical considerations. It is imperative, however, to establish from Scripture the fact of salvific exclusivity to demonstrate that the exclusivist stands for a Biblical doctrine rather than a mere sectarian cause.
The very first of the Ten Commandments is the command to worship the one true God alone (Exod. 20:3). Related to that command, repeated warnings are given to abstain from any practice that from the Divine perspective constitutes idolatry (Exod. 20:4-6, Lev. 19:4, Ps. 16:4, Isa. 42:17, Mic. 5:13-15). There is only one God and He reserves the right to receive proper worship from His creatures and to condemn those who reject Him and His commands (see Gen. chs. 6-8 and 19; 2 Kings 17:29-36 and Jer. 25:6-11).
The New Testament teaches explicitly that Jesus Christ is the one true God incarnate and that exclusive salvation belongs to Him (John 1:14; Rev. 7:10). Simeon declared upon seeing the child Jesus that his eyes had seen God’s salvation (Luke 2:30; see also Titus 2:11). At the dawn of His ministry, Jesus reiterated the Old Testament command to worship the one true God (Matt. 4:10). John tells us that Christ Himself was God the Son and that He declared God the Father to the world (John 1:1, 18). Jesus later claimed that only those who explicitly put their trust in Him would see eternal life (John 5:24, 17:3, Matt. 11:27, Luke 12:8-9). The message preached by the apostles was one of exclusive salvation in Christ alone (Acts 2:38, 4:12, 10:43, 16:31, 17:31, 26:18). In Romans, the Apostle Paul argues that only the gospel has the power to save (1:16), that the heathen are condemned by their suppression of the light of general revelation (1:18ff), and that the Jews are condemned by their disobedience to the Law (2:12-13). Hence, Jew and Gentile alike are guilty before God and can only find salvation through explicit faith in His Son (3:10-24, 6:23, 10:9ff). Through Paul’s other letters, God reveals that those without Christ are likewise without hope (Eph. 2:12), that Christ Himself will execute the vengeance of God on those who do not obey the gospel (2 Thess. 1:8-9), that Christ is the only Mediator between God and man (1 Tim 1:17, 2:5), and that the Old Testament foreshadowed the salvation that is found only in Christ (2 Tim. 3:15). Additionally, the general epistles and the Revelation declare that God has made His final and full revelation in Christ (Heb. 1:1-2), that Christ is the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him (5:9), that he who denies Christ is a liar devoid of a saving relationship with God (1 John 2:22-23, 5:12), and that the eternal Lake of Fire awaits those whose names are not written in the Book of Life (Rev. 20:15).
Furthermore, the major creeds and confessions of the Church, from the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds to the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions, have continually affirmed that there is one God, Maker of heaven and earth, who sent His one and only Son to die for sinful man, and that only by faith in Him can one be saved from eternal separation and torment in hell. The position of the Church has historically been to affirm the clearly Biblical position of the salvific exclusivism of the Christian faith.
The most influential religious pluralist is British philosopher John Hick. An analysis of his arguments for pluralism reveals that 1) he equalizes the salvific value of all the “great” religions based upon superficialities judged by his own subjective standards, 2) he posits a Kantian epistemology that concludes that God is ultimately unknowable and no one religion can claim exclusive rights to truth and salvation, and 3) he unjustifiably rejects the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, calling for a “Copernican Revolution” that would replace the “Ptolemaic” christocentrism with a more universally acceptable theocentrism.
In his personal testimony, Hick relates how he underwent an “evangelical conversion” at the age of 18 and at that time accepted the “whole theological package” of evangelicalism.[2] After serving in the military during WWII, Hick returned to his religious studies only to find that he was now out of step with some of the fundamentals of orthodox Christian doctrine. He stumbled over scientific issues such as the account of the sun standing still in Joshua 10:13 and the contradictions between evolution and the Genesis record of creation. Furthermore, he found himself unable to reconcile the doctrine of eternal hell with his belief in the infinite love of God. These stumbling blocks were his first steps toward a whole-scale rejection of evangelicalism.[3]
Due to the massive immigration of Easterners to the Western world following WWII, Hick increasingly came in contact with devotees of other religions that had previously been known to him only as the subjects of Christian missionary efforts. These contacts, coupled with the fact that, according to some statistics, the proportion of Christians worldwide was decreasing, led him to conclude that it must not, after all, be God’s will to Christianize the whole world.[4] He comments that, “the Christian faith is held today, as in the past, only by a minority of the human race; and it looks as though this minority may well be smaller rather than larger in the future. This thought casts a massive shadow over any assumption that it is God’s will that all mankind shall be converted to the Christian faith.”[5]
An underlying disillusionment with previously held post-millennial hopes and a distaste for Christendom’s imperialistic past helped “enlighten” him to the salvific value of other religions that he had beforehand been blind to.[6]Hick also challenged Christian thinkers to account for the “fact” that any religion’s devotees are nearly always born intotheir religion rather than freely choosing it. This, he implied, makes the doctrine of sovereignty little more than divine cruelty if in fact the religions that all these people are born into cannot provide real salvation for them.[7] Further experience led him to conclude that the various worship styles of the various world religions, though superficially different, were essentially the same.
When you visit the various non-Christian places of worship in one of our big cities you discover – possibly with a shock of surprise – that phenomenologically…the same kind of thing is taking place in them as in a Christian church. That is to say, human beings are coming together to open their minds to a higher reality, which is thought of as the personal creator and Lord of the universe, and as making vital moral demands upon the lives of men and women…the supreme being is referred to as God in a Christian church, as Adonai in a Jewish synagogue, as Allah in a Muslim mosque, as Param Atma in a Sikh gurdwara, as Rama or as Krishna in a Hindu temple. And yet there is an important sense in which what is being done in the several forms of worship is essentially the same.[8]
Hick’s increased contact with “saints” in other religions led him to conclude that if one were to take the average Christian and compare their level of morality with that of the average devotee of any other of the great religions, one would not observe any appreciable difference. If Christianity were indeed a superior religion, he reasoned, should it not be expected that Christ’s followers would attain a higher level of morality? He argues that his “own global impression…is that the virtues and vices seem to be spread more or less evenly among human beings, regardless whether they are Christians or – to confine ourselves for the moment to the “great world religions” – Jews, Muslims, Hindus (including Sikhs), or Buddhists. But is this what we would expect if Christians have a more and direct access to God than anyone else and live in a close relationship to him, indwelt by the Holy Spirit?” [9]
Since he did not observe the difference in practiced morality he thought should be there, and because he equated visible morality with salvific efficacy, he concluded that the different religions were all of more or less equal value and the all-loving God accepts all these devotees. Hick eventually came to a crossroads of reconciling the nature of God and the different representations of Him in the various religions. He concluded “that there is but one God, who is maker and lord of all; that in his infinite fullness and richness of being he exceeds all our human attempts to grasp him in thought; and that the devout in the various great world religions are in fact worshipping that one God, but through different, overlapping concepts or mental images of him.”[10]
By observing an alleged superficial equality of religions based upon self-styled arbitrary standards, Hick concluded that devotees of all the great religions are in fact sincerely worshipping the same God and that God accepts that worship. But despite the superficial similarities, the actual teachings about God throughout the religious world were mostly contradictory. Thus, Hick was forced to recognize “that pluralism could not succeed if any specific knowledge about God is possible…and so [he concedes] that God as he (or whatever) really is, is unknowable.”[11]
Hick alleges that the world’s religions must be more or less equally salvific because the observed morality of the average devotees of the world’s religions is essentially the same across the board. A number of problems with this conclusion should be pointed out. To begin with, Hick is forced to completely redefine salvation in order to posit any salvific equality among the religions. He takes particular exception to the Christian understanding of salvation.
If we define salvation as being forgiven and accepted by God because of Jesus’ death on the cross, then it becomes a tautology that Christianity alone knows and is able to preach the source of salvation. But if we define salvation as an actual human change, a gradual transformation from natural self-centeredness (with all the human evils that flow from this) to a radically new orientation centered on God and manifested in the “fruit of the Spirit,” then it seems clear that salvation is taking place within all the world religions – and taking place, so far as we can tell, to more or less the same extent.[12]
Christian apologist Norman Geisler notes several inherent problems with Hick’s redefinition of salvation. First, Hick assumes that all religions are properly related to what is really Ultimate. Second, he presupposes an antisupernatural, Eastern pantheistic view of the Ultimate. Third, he betrays his pluralism and creates a new exclusivism by denying the truth of any particular religion and subsequently offering his own truth. Fourth, “the pluralist view often degenerates to the position that whatever is sincerely believed is true.” But by doing that, Hick is unjustified in even mentioning “human evils.” Perhaps one sincerely believes in genocide and that by reorienting himself to that Ultimate Truth he is therefore “saved.” Sincerity of belief is obviously no test for truth. Finally, the “opposing truth claims of various religions cannot both be true.” For example, both the Christian and the Muslim cannot both be right about their contradictory views of Christ.[13]
Hick reinterprets salvation to such an absurd degree that according to Ronald Nash he goes as far as admitting “that female salvation may well be the opposite of male salvation. Female salvation, at least for oppressed and male-dominated women, is the transformation from weakness to self-centeredness!”[14] Seemingly, salvation occurs whenever a person undergoes a transformation from what they are now to what a “better self” would be, no matter how bizarre that transformation is and no matter how arbitrary the standard used to judge the legitimacy of one’s transformation might be.
Second, it is clearly debatable whether or not “the virtues and vices [are] spread more or less evenly among human beings” regardless of their religious affiliation. Some arbitrary standard, either common to all religions or superior to all religions, would have to be used to determine such a thing. Otherwise, one would simply be judging one religion by another, which is clearly antithetical to Hick’s pluralism, or have to assume a privileged and objective position by which he can judge the morality of the various religious peoples of the world.
Third, as Geisler points out, “while no one denies that there are good people in other religions, this is not to say they are manifesting the widely recognized highest moral standard, agape love.”[15] To say that a loving Hindu exhibits as high a standard of love as a loving Christian is highly debatable for agape love, available only to the Christian, is vastly superior to any mere human love. As Jonathan Edwards argued:
[To suppose that love is an undeniable evidence of salvation] is a poor argument, for it assumes that there are no counterfeits of love. It should always be noted that the more excellent something is, the more likely it will be imitated…However, the more excellent things are, the more difficult it is to imitate them in their essential character and intrinsic virtues. Yet the more varied will the imitations be, the more skill an subtlety will be used in making them an exact imitation, at least of the outward appearance…So no graces are more counterfeited than love and humility. For these are the virtues where the beauty of a true Christian is seen most clearly.[16]
Fourth, Hick commits a serious error when he presumes to be able to judge a man’s heart by what he sees in the outward behavior. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day would be fine examples of Hick’s moral salvation, yet no group was on the receiving end of more condemnation from Christ than this group of outwardly upstanding individuals. The Bible makes it clear that the heart is deceitfully wicked (Jer. 17:9) and that the outward appearance is no sure indicator of what is really in a man (1 Sam. 16:7; John 2:24-25).
Fifth, Christianity is a faith that does not always attract the good, but oftentimes the bad and the ugly. Many people begin their Christian walk by taking their first step out of a moral cesspool. All Christians have a long road of sanctification ahead of them and any human judgment of their outward appearance can be seriously misleading at times. It is a credit to the Christian faith that Christ accepts all those who call to Him for salvation no matter the depth of their moral despair. Thus, notorious serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and can (and do) find forgiveness and acceptance in Christ and rightly call themselves Christians no matter how ragged they appear on the outside. Hick’s argument simply does not take into account that God provides freedom from sin to the most wretched of sinners. Could a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim ever pen the immortal words of “Amazing Grace”? No doubt they could not. But a redeemed slave trader like John Newton can when he meets eye to eye with the forgiveness and grace found only in Jesus Christ.
Finally, the measure of the worth of Christianity is founded not on the feebleness and brokenness of the followers but upon the worth of Jesus Christ. Christianity “is not founded on the moral character of fallible Christians but is attested by Jesus’ own sinless life as the incarnate God-man whose righteousness is imputed to those who believe in him.”[17]
Since all religions allegedly enjoy moral equality, Hick sought an understanding of God that would unify and explain their fundamental contradictory teachings. His answer was that God is actually the unknown, unknowable noumena who is manifested through various religious phenomena. Hick says that “we must distinguish between the world as it is in itself, unperceived, and that same world as humanly perceived.”[18] Like Immanuel Kant before him, Hick came to believe that there is a difference between the world as it really is (noumenal) and the world as it is perceived by humans (phenomenal). According to Nash, Kant believed that “the center of the epistemological universe is not reality but the mind. The world appears the way it does not because that’s the way it is but because the world is a construct of our mind.”[19] Nash explains that to Kant, “human knowledge never brings us into contact with the real world, what he called the noumenal world. Since our knowledge is always perceptually modified by the a priori categories of the mind, the real or noumenal world is not only unknown but also unknowable. Since Kant’s categories operate only in the phenomenal world, one could not possibly know of a thing-in-itself in the noumenal world.”[20]
So we find in Kant’s epistemology the belief that reality cannot be known. All that can be truly known is reality only as it is mediated through the categories in the human mind. Hick explains the connection of Kantian epistemology with pluralism.
We therefore have to distinguish, as Immanuel Kant did, between a thing as it is in itself and that thing as humanly perceived – that is , as phenomenon. This understanding of our cognitive situation is well supported today not only by strong epistemological considerations, but also by research in cognitive psychology and the sociology of knowledge…If, then, we distinguish between the Real/ Ultimate/ Divine in itself and that Reality as humanly perceived, recognizing that there is a range of modes of human cognition, we can at once see how there is a plurality of religious traditions constituting different, but apparently more or less equally salvific, human responses to the Ultimate. These are the great world faiths.[21]
Thus, the “great world faiths,” which are simply manifesting God, not as He really is but as He is perceived by the human mind, owe their very existence to the fact that God is unknowable. No one knows who God really is, thus it should not surprise us to find a tremendous variety in the phenomenological expressions of religion. In fact, Hick asserts that “if we think we know what God is, then what we are thinking of is not God!” [22] The phenomenal/noumenal distinction to Hick is the bottom line of pluralism. To pluralists, “the hypothesis is that in order to account for the existence of the different religio-cultural totalities…as apparently more or less equally effective contexts of salvation/liberation, we have to postulate an ultimate transcendent reality, the source and ground of everything, that is in itself beyond the scope of human conceptuality but is variously conceived, therefore variously experienced, and therefore variously responded to in life, from within these different religious totalities.”[23]
Apparently anticipating the objection that seeing God as “an ultimate transcendent reality…that is itself beyond the scope of human conceptuality” would prohibit any true worship, Hick explains that “we do not worship the Real in itself but always one or other of its manifestations to humanity.”[24] Consequently, what man can say that his religion’s perception of God is better than anyone else’s?
The epistemological basis of Hick’s pluralism is Immanuel Kant’s agnosticism. Hick has argued that pluralists “have to postulate an ultimate transcendent reality” in order to substantiate their philosophy of religion and he recognizes that “pluralism could not succeed if any specific knowledge about God is possible.”[25] So it follows that Hick’s pluralism stands or falls on the worthiness of its Kantian epistemological foundation.
As previously noted, Kant believed that we could not know reality in and of itself, but only as it is perceived. Geisler explains that “if one cannot know anything until after it is structured by the a priori forms of sensation (time and space) and the categories of understanding (such as unity and causality), then there is no way to get outside one’s own being and know what it really was before he so formed it. That is, one can know what something is to-him but never what it is in-itself. Only appearance can be known, but not reality.”[26]
Hick’s contention that “[Kant’s] understanding of our cognitive situation is well supported today…by strong epistemological considerations” is patently false, for Kant’s epistemology is riddled with self-refuting assertions. To begin with, Hick’s assertion that God is an “unknowable Ultimate” is itself self-defeating. He apparently knows something about God in order to say he is unknowable. As Nash amplifies this important point, “Hick tells us that God is unknowable. But in making this claim, Hick reveals at least two things that he knows about God. For one thing, he seems to know that there is a God. Second, to claim that God is unknowable is already to know something very significant about God. If God really were unknowable, then we should be unable to know that he is unknowable.”[27]
According to Nash, Hick’s view of God exposes him more as an advocate of Eastern religious thought than an open-minded pluralist who accepts all views of God.[28] All that is to say that Hick is not really a consistent pluralist. On the contrary, as Nash points out, he is really arguing for a new form of exclusivism to replace Christianity’s exclusivism.
When Hick then appeals to the love of God as the ground of one of his [universalist] convictions, he is clearly contradicting himself. A loving God is a supreme being with known properties. As soon as we can legitimately ascribe any properties to God, problems arise for the pluralist, specifically because that God with those attributes (such as love) will conflict with the gods of other religious systems who do not possess those attributes or that set of properties. Hick failed to appreciate that many non-Christian religionists would regard his appeal to an all-loving God as an insult or, even worse from Hick’s standpoint, as a new kind of exclusivism.[29]
But even if Hick did in fact accept all views of God, he would still be an exclusivist in his own right for by accepting all views he necessarily excludes those views that do not accept all views. He insists, however, that pluralism is non-exclusive and is not an attempt to create a new meta-narrative to replace the old Ptolemaic ones but simply a “…philosophical interpretation of the global religious situation.”[30] The fact is, however, that this “philosophical interpretation of the global religious situation” is indeed a new meta-narrative that seeks to neuter all religious claims, especially the claims of Christianity, and create a synthetic explanation for the various manifestations of the Divine. Most world religions (including Christianity) already possess a “philosophical interpretation of the global religious situation.” So for Hick to posit a new one to allegedly include all faiths is indeed an attempt to replace any existing interpretations, despite any claims to the contrary.
Furthermore, Hick’s concept of God fails the test of logic. God cannot be both an “unknowable Ultimate” and at the same time a knowable Person as claimed by many different faith traditions. God cannot be both personal and impersonal. God cannot be both transcendent and non-transcendent. Hick, however, expects devotees of the great world religions to concede that both their beliefs and those contradictory beliefs held by others are all equally valid and that his model serves as the only objective meta-narrative. Amazingly, Hick tries to explain away the contradictory truth-claims of the various religions by asserting that they are not actually making truth claims, but only describing religious reality (noumena) as they experience it.[31] But as Nash points out, “not only are the things (various religions) say apparently truth-claims to our minds, but also they were understood to be truth-claims by the people who uttered them. Basic to Hick’s approach to world religions is the conviction that regardless of what the followers of these religions thought they were doing, pluralists know better.”[32]
All worldviews, including pluralistic ones, are equally exclusivistic. Some might be more salvifically inclusive than others, but as a worldview they are exclusive and by their truth claims they logically falsify all opposing worldviews, asserting that their worldview is correct over and against all others. But Hick fails to see the hypocrisy of denouncing Christian exclusivism and at the same time asserting his own pluralist exclusivism. His contention that “if we think we know what God is, then what we are thinking of is not God,” is ultimately a boomerang that returns to cut the legs out from under his own philosophy of religion. It is apparent even from his own logic that whatever he says about God, ultimately he is not thinking of the true God.
Hick takes particular aim at discrediting the deity and resurrection of Christ by embracing liberal New Testament scholarship and its anti-supernaturalistic bias. He asserts that Jesus never claimed to be God and rejects as heresy the “mythological” doctrine of the hypostatic union due to its supposed incoherence. Hick writes that, “one may say that the fundamental heresy is precisely to treat the Incarnation as a factual hypothesis! For the reason why it has never been possible to state a literal meaning for the idea of Incarnation is simply that it has no literal meaning. It is a mythological idea, a figure of speech, a piece of poetic imagery. It is a way of saying that Jesus is our living contact with the transcendent God.”[33]
In other words, historic orthodox christology is based not upon what amounts to what he calls the “fragmentary and ambiguous” data of the New Testament but on the “contribution of the imagination to our ‘pictures’ of Jesus.”[34] He disdains conservative scholars as academic obscurantists and counsels that “we must…distinguish between biblical fundamentalists, who hold to the verbal inerrancy of the Bible, and mainstream biblical scholars, such as those teaching in academically accredited universities and colleges.[35]
In concert with higher criticism, Hick takes particular aim at the Gospel of John because of its high christology. According to Hick, this high christology is due to a distorted historical redaction and is therefore an unreliable record of the real Jesus. Hick argues that, “if we accept, with the bulk of New Testament scholarship, that the Fourth Gospel is a profound theological meditation in dramatic form, expressing a Christian interpretation of Jesus which had formed (probably in Ephesus) fairly late in the first century, we cannot properly attribute its great christological sayings – ‘I and the Father are one’, ‘No one comes to the Father but by me’, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ – to Jesus himself.” [36] He continues that, “certainly one can no longer regard it as a fact proved out of the New Testament that Jesus thought of himself as God incarnate. On the contrary, this now seems to be very unlikely. And certainly we cannot rest anything on the assumption that the great christological sayings of the fourth gospel (such as ‘I and my Father are one’) were ever spoken, in sober historical fact, by the Jesus who walked the hills and villages of Galilee.”[37]
Hick further contends that the inability of Christian thinkers for 2000 years to adequately explain the doctrine of the hypostatic union is sure proof that it is nothing more than a mythology created by the Church.[38] Hick questions how Christ could possibly contain infinite knowledge in a finite human brain, possess omnipotence in a human body, and be self-existent though born of a woman.[39] Thus, Hick concludes, “on the one hand, the idea of Jesus being God incarnate has no acceptable literal meaning, or at least none that has yet been discovered. On the other hand, it does have a powerful metaphorical meaning, in that Jesus was so open to divine inspiration, so responsive to the divine spirit, so obedient to God’s will, that God was able to act on earth in and through him. This, I believe, is the true Christian doctrine of incarnation.”[40]
And what about the resurrection? Would not that watershed event certainly demonstrate that Christ was indeed the incarnate Son of God despite any intellectual difficulties involved in understanding the hypostatic union? Hick recognizes the importance of the “resurrection-event,” yet he denies its historicity and the theological significance attributed to it by the Church. Does not his resurrection set him apart from all other men and show him to be God incarnate? Such an argument inevitably suggests itself; and yet it proves difficult to sustain…[and] it must be doubted whether the resurrection-event – whatever its nature – was seen by Jesus’ contemporaries as guaranteeing his divinity.[41]
By denying the deity and resurrection of Christ, Hick denies those doctrines that most distinguish Him from all other religious founders and leaders. Hick understands that this denial is crucial to his rejection of Christian exclusivism and concedes that “there is a direct line of logical entailment from the premise that Jesus was God, in the sense that he was the Son of God, the Second Person of the Divine Trinity…and that…outside Christianity, [there is] no salvation.”[42]
Hick therefore chastises historic Christianity for its christocentrism and calls for it to be replaced by theocentrism instead. To Hick, the unknowable, unknown Reality should be the center of the religious universe, not the particular Person of Jesus Christ. Hick calls this his “Copernican Revolution,” patterned after the 16th century scientist who revolutionized the model of the solar system by placing the sun, instead of the earth, as its center.[43] Hick argues that the same type of Copernican revolution is needed in our view of the world’s religions today and that the same stubbornness to change evident in the Church then is exemplified by the exclusivists of today.[44] No longer is it permissible to have a Christ-centered worldview. One must place the noumenal Real at the center and demote Christ to nothing more than one of the many orbiting satellites of great religious leaders. To Hick, “the ‘no salvation outside Christianity’ doctrine is theologically Ptolemaic.”[45]
Because christocentrism amounts to Christian exclusivism the former must therefore be discarded for theocentrism since “we have to realize that the universe of faiths centres upon God, and not upon Christianity or upon any other religion. [God] is the sun, the originative source of light and life, whom all the religions reflect in their own different ways.”[46]
Hick sees any effort of defending Christian exclusivism as the equivalent of the “epicycles” subsequently added to Ptolemy’s system. The epicycles were clever but doomed attempts by Ptolemaic philosophers to preserve the old model and fend off the Copernican Revolution. Ronald Nash explains that, “[According to Hick] the religious analogue of Ptolemaic astronomy is any view that places Christianity at the center of the world’s religions…[and] the efforts of exclusivists and inclusivists to defend their positions are examples of contrived, arbitrary, and artificial measures.”[47]Because Christ is no more unique than any other religious founder, Christianity itself is not unique and should not be at the center of the religious universe claiming exclusivity of salvation.
Hick’s rejection of the historically cherished doctrines of the incarnation, deity, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is based upon, more than anything else, his affinity for liberal Biblical scholarship. Once that affinity is established, he is then able to denounce John’s gospel as fraudulent, reject as distorted redactions any of Jesus’ sayings in which He even alluded to His deity, and reinterpret the resurrection as the wishful thinking of Christ’s sincere followers who wanted to deify their fallen hero. Once he has accomplished this, he can then pontificate that the theocentric religious universe indispensable to his pluralism is much more akin to reality than the outdated christocentric one he seeks to oust.
In the preface to The Myth of God Incarnate, the writers of the book, including Hick, agree that “the books of the Bible…cannot be accorded a verbal divine authority” which hastens them to conclude that the title “Son of God” is merely a “mythological or poetic way of expressing [Jesus’] significance for us.”[48]
As Geisler notes, however, there are several noteworthy problems with Hick’s liberal view of Scripture. First, the Bible claims to be inspired (2 Tim. 3:16) so the liberal who rejects inspiration does so in bold defiance of Scriptural claims.[49] Secondly, the liberal view is inconsistent with the orthodox view that has been held for nearly 1900 years. Third, as already noted, “behind most denials of the orthodox view is an antisupernatural bias.” Fourth, the “denial of inspired words is often based on the presupposition that revelation cannot be propositional.”[50] Indeed, Hick himself admits that he “[does] not believe that God reveals propositions to us, whether in Hebrew, Greek, English, or any other language.[51] And fifth, liberal scholars position themselves, and not God, as the final authority on Biblical matters.[52]As Nash points out, “Hick falls back on a number of old and outdated attacks on the reliability and integrity of the New Testament documents.”[53] Thus, when Hick appeals to a “bulk of New Testament scholarship” to which he owes his renunciation of evangelicalism, he appeals to a group that is seriously out of touch with the most erudite Bible scholars of the day, who in accord with the orthodox view, maintain the historicity and integrity of the gospels.
Furthermore, Hick’s bifurcation of the “synoptic Jesus” from “John’s Jesus” is fundamentally flawed. As noted New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg remarks:
[John’s exalted view of Christ] contains nothing which is not implicit in the picture painted by Matthew, Mark, and Luke of a man who would sovereignly overrule Jewish interpretations of the Law, claim that his words would last forever, pronounce the forgiveness of sins, describe humanity’s eternal destiny as dependent on its reaction to him, demand absolute loyalty from his disciples, offer rest for the weary and salvation for the lost, promise to be with his followers always, and guarantee that God would grant them any prayers requested in his name. Even if one analyses (sic) only those few Synoptic sayings of Jesus which are regarded as authentic by almost all scholars…one finds included many of the above-mentioned claims which require one to assume that Jesus viewed himself as more than a man.[54]
Thus, not even Hick’s rejection of the gospel of John is sufficient grounds for denying the deity of Jesus Christ as the doctrine is implicitly, if not explicitly, revealed in the synoptics. Geivett concurs that “a high Christology is discernible within the minimal core of Jesus’ sayings whose authenticity is approved by radical critics themselves.”[55]
Hick’s denial of the literal bodily resurrection of Christ naturally follows from his commitment to liberal New Testament scholarship and its attendant antisupernaturalism. If the gospels are not trustworthy historical documents but rather distorted theological redactions as Hick contests, then there is no reason to believe in a literal resurrection as recorded in those documents. And if Christ is not the Son of God incarnate, then it follows that He did not have any real power over death. Hick offers his own reinterpretation of what really happened on that first Easter Sunday, namely, “that there was some kind of experience of seeing Jesus after his death, an appearance or appearances which came to be known as his resurrection, seems virtually certain in view of the survival and growth of the tiny original Jesus movement. But we cannot ascertain today in what this resurrection-event consisted. The possibilities range from the resuscitation of Jesus’ corpse to visions of the Lord in resplendent glory.”[56]
Haunting questions remain, however, for Hick and all who deny the literal, bodily resurrection of Christ, most notably, Where is the body of Jesus? Why has no one produced it to this day? The tomb was empty that Sunday morning and no one to date, including Christ’s most antagonistic contemporaries, has produced any remains. No skeptic’s explanation fits all the known facts as does the truth that God raised up Jesus and vindicated His claims to be the Son of God (Rom. 1:4). Hick’s reinterpretation of the resurrection is based not on scholarly historical research but on a presupposed pluralism that simply cannot countenance a religion that has as its founder the resurrected Son of God.
Concerning Hick’s charge that two thousand years of Christian theology has yet to produce a sensible explanation of the hypostatic union, several points need to be made. First, Hick commits a straw man fallacy by misrepresenting the orthodox position. As Geisler notes, Hick’s objections about the view of the two natures of Christ “assume an unorthodox view known as the Monophysite view which confuses the two natures of Christ…The orthodox view does not claim that there was infinite knowledge in the finite brain of Christ. Rather, it affirms that there were two distinct natures of Christ, one infinite and the other finite. So the person of Christ did not have infinite knowledge in his finite brain. He had infinite knowledge only in His infinite nature.”[57]
Second, Hick argues from ignorance that the doctrine of the union of the two natures of Christ is meaningless if it cannot be intelligibly spelled out to his satisfaction. As Geivett puts it, “why should anyone think that [it has to be perfectly intelligible], especially if one of the terms of the relation is God?”[58] The lack of an heretofore intelligible explanation does not stop Hick from believing in biological evolution.[59] Why should it prevent him from accepting the doctrine of Christ? Besides, reasonable explanations of the conjunctions of the two natures of Christ have been offered for centuries, but Hick’s misunderstanding of the doctrine prevents him from understanding the explanations of the doctrine.
Third, Hick’s rejection of the hypostatic union is not the result of any demonstrable logical contradiction in the doctrine, but is rather an a priori presumption. As Geivett notes, “Hick holds that the conjunction of [deity and humanity in the Person of Christ] must be false, since their conjunction entails the uniqueness of Christianity, and the uniqueness of Christianity is incompatible with our enlightened awareness of other faiths in the world.[60] And as Hick himself admits:
If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved? Is not such an idea excessively parochial, presenting God in effect as the tribal deity of the predominantly Christian West? [61]
When the evidence is weighed, it is discovered that Hick has used faulty logic and dubious scholarship to come to erroneous conclusions about the uniqueness of Christ. His call for a Copernican Revolution is found to be unjustified for he has done nothing to truly discredit the Person of Jesus Christ and the Christian commitment to Him as the one and only Lord and Savior. His highly emotional appeal to pluralism, though attractive to those who confuse imperialistic Christendom with Biblical Christianity, labors under the false impression that superficial similarities amount to fundamental equality, lacks a solid epistemological foundation, and is dominated by less than credible New Testament scholarship.
The exclusivity of Christian salvation rests upon the facts that there is only one true God, Maker of heaven and earth, that He has revealed Himself in nature, Scripture, and Christ, and that He has attested to His revelation through signs and wonders. Furthermore, the very nature of truth and logic inform us that there is absolute, objective truth, that truth itself is exclusive, and that truth necessarily falsifies all opposing propositions.
If the theistic worldview can be proven to be congruent with the facts of existence, then logic tells us that the six other contradictory worldviews, namely pantheism, panentheism, deism, atheism, deism, and finite godism, must necessarily be false. Thus it is only reasonable to establish the theistic world view as a starting point for demonstrating the exclusivity of the Christian message.
Geivett does just that, beginning his defense of exclusivism by arguing for the existence of a Necessary, personal Being who is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe.[62] From there he reasons that only a Personal Creator gives meaning to human existence and adequately accounts for all that we know about ourselves. But unfortunately, man is estranged from His God as there has been “a deterioration of some prior relationship, an interruption in fellowship between human persons and God…[thus]…the desire to know God also includes a desire to understand the cause of alienation from him and the conditions for reconciliation.” [63] From this, Geivett goes on to argue that it is only reasonable to expect that God would reveal Himself and His remedy for our estranged condition. He asserts that at the very least, “the possibility of a particular revelation from God cannot be ruled out a priori.”[64] His argument eventually leads him to conclude that only the Christian revelation is a historically verifiable and salvifically sufficient answer to the human condition.
The most obvious sign attesting to the veracity of the Christian message is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christianity is a vulnerable religion in that its integrity rests on historical facts that are open to examination by seeker and skeptic alike. All one has to do is prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the resurrection either could not or did not take place and the whole foundation of Christianity crumbles. A common though thoroughly discredited liberal tactic used to dismiss the resurrection is to mythologize it so that it loses its literal historical value. Lesslie Newbigin speaks to the heart of this issue:
The crucial issue for Professor [Rudolf] Bultmann’s programme of demythologizing (to which John Hick concurs) is precisely the resurrection…Bultmann ascribes to the cross a historical reality which he denies to the resurrection. He does believe that Jesus died on the cross, but he does not seem to believe that Jesus really rose from the dead in the sense that the tomb was empty on Sunday morning.[65]
It is precisely the resurrection that stands in the way of pluralism and stakes out Christianity’s claim to exclusivity. Newbigin observes that, “modern Hindus think and speak much about the cross. One of the most common and popular pictures in India today depicts together Jesus on his cross, Buddha under his tree, and Gandhi – three great exemplars of the holy life. It is easy to see that to introduce the idea of the resurrection would shatter the unity which that picture represents.”[66]
Indeed, Buddha and Gandhi are long dead and their bodies have returned to dust. But Christ is gloriously risen, setting Him infinitely higher and more worthy than all “thieves and robbers” who falsely claim to have the way of salvation (see John 10:8).
Furthermore, the nature of truth itself demands that anything that claims to be true must be exclusively true. Pluralists are fond of accusing Christianity of intolerance and narrow-mindedness. Christians should not back down if their position is one of intolerance and narrow-mindedness. Only if the attitude with which the position is defended is intolerant and narrow-minded is the Christian guilty of any wrongdoing. But Christians do not hold a monopoly on intolerant and narrow-minded attitudes. Even if they did, that would not of itself disprove the truth of their position. The fact is, truth is narrow and truth is intolerant. For example, though there is a wide breadth of numbers between zero and infinity, there is only one answer to the equation two plus two.[67] Likewise, there is only one answer to the question, “Who was the President of the United States of American in the year 1984?” Though there were over 200,000,000 Americans living in the country at the time, only Ronald Reagan is the correct answer.
Truth is objective, absolute, and narrow. If the Christian message is really the Truth, then it follows that the Christian message is objective, absolute, and narrow. In other words, exclusivity is the only option for a position that claims to be the truth. Just as four is the exclusive answer to the equation two plus two and Ronald Reagan is the exclusive answer to the question, “Who was the president of the United States in the year 1984?”, salvation by grace through explicit faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God is the exclusive answer to the question, “How can sinful man be made right with a holy God?”
Based upon the very nature of truth itself, if Christianity is indeed true, then all other religions are necessarily false and the exclusivity of salvation in Christ alone is established beyond any reasonable doubt.
Pluralist John Hick provides the most formidable attack on the Biblical message of salvific exclusivity. As has been demonstrated, however, his three-pronged attack of equalizing the salvific value of religions, positing a Kantian-type Unknowable God, and rejecting the uniqueness of Christ simply does not withstand theological or philosophical scrutiny. The teaching of the exclusivity of the Christian faith does withstand such scrutiny. Thus, Christians are wise to make at least two conclusions from this. First, our salvation is secure in Jesus Christ. His claims are demonstrably true and historically verifiable and we can rest in the assurance of the great hope of our salvation. Secondly, however, we should be disturbed and grieved by the deception and false hope of the world’s other religions. The knowledge that only by exercising explicit faith in Christ can one be saved should inspire us to recover the lost missionary zeal that characterized the nineteen century Church. In both cases, above all, Jesus Christ should be honored and worshiped for the unique Person He is and the unique redemptive work He has accomplished for mankind.
[1] Erwin Lutzer, Christ Among Other Gods: A Defense of Christ in an Age of Tolerance (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994, 12, emphasis added
[2] John Hick, A Pluralist View, Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, ed. Dennis L. Okholm and Timothy R. Phillips (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 30.
[3] Ibid., 31-33.
[4] John Hick and Brian Hebblethwaith ed., Christianity and the World Religions (Great Britain: Fount Paperbacks, 1980), 171.
[5] Ibid.
[6] see Hick, Pluralist View, 37, for his allusion to previously held post-millennialism and his disillusionment with it. See Hick and Hebblethwaith, Christianity, 171, for references to Christian imperialism.
[7] Hick and Hebblethwaith, Christianity, 172.
[8] Ibid., 174, emphasis added.
[9] Hick, Pluralist View, 40-41.
[10] Hick and Hebblethwaith, Christianity, 177-178.
[11] Ronald H. Nash, Is Jesus the Only Savior (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 33.
[12] Hick, Pluralist View, 43.
[13] Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 599.
[14] Nash, Jesus, 51.
[15] Geisler, BECA, 598.
[16] Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections: A Christian’s Character Before God, edited by Dr. James M. Houston (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996), 47.
[17] R. Douglas Geivett and W. Gary Phillips, Response to John Hick, Four Views, 78.
[18] Hick, Pluralist View, 46.
[19] Ronald H. Nash, Life’s Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 263.
[20] Ibid., 264-265.
[21] Hick, Pluralist View, 47, emphasis added.
[22] Ibid., 48.
[23] Ibid., 50, emphasis added.
[24] Ibid.
[25] See Hick, Pluralist View, 50; Nash, Jesus, 33.
[26] Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976), 16.
[27] Nash, Jesus, 36.
[28] Ibid., 49.
[29] Ibid., 33-35.
[30] Hick, Pluralist View, 51.
[31] John Hick, A Christian Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 23-30.
[32] Nash, Jesus, 66, emphasis added.
[33] Hick and Hebblethwaith, Christianity,186.
[34] John Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 167.
[35] Hick, Pluralist View, 53.
[36] Hick, Myth, 171-172, emphasis added.
[37] Hick and Hebblethwaith, Christianity, 184.
[38] Hick, Pluralist View, 55-59.
[39] Ibid., 55-56.
[40] Ibid., 58.
[41] Hick, Myth, 170, emphasis added.
[42] John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: Westminster Press: 1982), 58.
[43] Nash, Life’s Ultimate Questions, 260.
[44] Hick and Hebblethwaith, Christianity, 180-181.
[45] Ibid., 181.
[46] Ibid., 182.
[47] Nash, Jesus, 32.
[48] Hick, Myth, ix.
[49] Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, revised and expanded (Chicago: Moody, 1986, 185.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Hick, Pluralist View, 36.
[52] Geisler and Nix, General Introduction, 186.
[53] Nash, Jesus, 77.
[54] Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1987), 166.
[55] Geivett and Phillips, Response to John Hick, 72.
[56] Hick, Myth, 170, emphasis added.
[57] Geisler, BECA, 600.
[58] Geivett and Phillips, Response to John Hick, 75.
[59] Hick, Myth, ix.
[60] Geivett and Phillips, Response to John Hick, 76.
[61] Hick, Myth, 180.
[62] R. Douglas Geivett and W. Gary Phillips, A Particularist View: An Evidentialist Approach, Four Views, 220-222.
[63] Ibid., 225.
[64] Ibid., 226.
[65] Lesslie Newbigin, A Faith for this One World? (Naperville: SCM Press, 1961), 63.
[66] Ibid., 63-64, emphasis added.
[67] See Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology, volume one: Prolegomena and Bibliology (copyright by Norman L. Geisler, 2000), 17.