Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Is There One Way To Salvation?

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Is There One Way To Salvation?

John Hick is an English philosopher of religion – who in his early years embraced a more evangelical form of Christian belief – one that was firmly committed to the idea that Christianity was the true faith, and the Bible as God’s sole revealed Word. However, during the course of his life he began to find great difficulty in trying to justify the belief that one faith-tradition was true, and that friends of his who were not-Christians would be going to hell for not subscribing to a belief in Jesus Christ. Furthermore, on the basis of his extensive reading of the scriptures of other faith traditions, he began to see that there was just as much ‘good’ to be found in them, as there was in the Bible.

Reviewing his subsequent shift in thinking in “God Has Many Names” he writes, “I have from almost as early as I can remember had a rather strong sense of the reality of God as the personal and loving lord of the universe.” The idea that God is both “personal” and “loving”, were major influences in the development of his pluralist hypothesis.

Hick began to argue that a person’s religious beliefs were largely decided by where they were born, and that people cannot be held accountable for “accidentally” being born in a non-Christian environment. For example, if a person is born in India into a Hindu family and leads a devout Hindu life, it seems odd that God should condemn them for this simply because they were not born in a Christian country, or a Christian family, or because a Christian missionary had failed to reach them and tell them about Jesus before they died. In fact, it is obviously going to be the case that a person born in India will most likely grow up with the belief that salvation is achieved through the many Hindu gods. Moreover, as someone born in Saudi Arabia is most likely going to become a Muslim and follow the teachings of Islam.

With this insight, Hick felt he had dealt Christian exclusivism a mortal blow:

“Can we be so entirely confident that to have been born in our particular part of the world carries with it the privilege of knowing the full religious truth?”

He further states that there is both the world in itself (noumenal) and the world as we understand and perceive it (phenomenal). We know this because people see things in the world differently. Hence, we all cannot be seeing the world as it really is – otherwise there would be no disagreement. Each person’s experience of the way the world is, is therefore “an interpretation” of it specific to that individual’s point-of-view.

When Hick applies this insight to the matter of religious experience, he concludes that all religious experience is simply a particular experience of the divine by the devotee.

From this we can see how someone born in India is not only going to naturally be a Hindu, but also considers the Hindu-worldview normative and all others wrong. For they simply have no way of seeing things any differently.

The idea that we experience the Real in different ways, and this is the reason why there are different faith traditions in the world, also releases an inherent tension in pluralist theologies. Religious diversity does not reveal contradictions; it is simply an expression of the varieties of human experience. In other words, just as there are different styles of art and music, so there are naturally going to be different “styles” of faith.

People are different – they have been born in different places, have been born into different families, and have been raised in different ways – so we should not be surprised that just as they like and have developed different sorts of music and art, so they are naturally going to like and develop different expressions of religious faith, belief and practice too.

Throughout all religions, Hick believes a common teaching can be found - known as the “Golden Rule.” In the Christian tradition, this is expressed as “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Hick believes the extent to which faith-traditions promote this attitude in its adherents, is the extent to which we can consider it to be an expression of “true faith.” Now this might immediately imply a sense of moral exclusivity, except that when we compare each of the great world faiths to each other. They all seem to be equally as effective in promoting this attitude in their devotees as each other.

“We have no good reason to believe that any one of the great religious traditions has shown itself to be more productive of love/compassion than another.”

Although members of a faith may want to suggest that they are morally superior to others, any claim to moral superiority cannot be validated by religious history. In each of the great world faiths there has been both evil and good actions performed by its devotees. As Hick himself comments, “I suggest today that the onus of proof or of argument is upon any who claim that their own tradition produces morally and spiritually better human beings than all the others.”

Initially Hick presented his pluralistic hypothesis as something to hold in tension the idea of a God of love, and a universal plan of salvation. However, in recent years his starting point has shifted to focus more on the idea that each of the religions of the world are various culturally conditioned human responses to what he calls the Real. Yet because the Real is ineffable, the various religions of the world are not there to pass on “truths” concerning the Real, but to act as contexts in which human salvation can take place. Although each religious tradition would distinguish itself from the others by seeing itself as superior to them, this claim cannot be validated when we see that religious history reveals no distinguishable difference between each of them, so as to suppose the moral superiority of one above the others.

Hujjatullah Zia is the newly emerging writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at outlookafghanistan@gmail.com

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