Abstract
John Hick’s revolutionary, “Copernican” approach to religious diversity received a great deal of criticism in his lifetime from more conservative theologians and philosophers of religion, many of whom were seeking to preserve a unique place of pre-eminence for Christianity amongst the world’s faiths. Critical responses to Hick’s Pluralistic Hypothesis have also emerged, however, from amongst his fellow religious pluralists, who have sought either to build upon or to go beyond his pivotal and groundbreaking work. In the same spirit as the responses given by this latter group, this chapter will seek to look beyond Hick’s important work, certainly not in an unfriendly fashion, but with the understanding that Hick is the proverbial “giant” upon whose shoulders subsequent generations of pluralists are standing as we seek to advance pluralism even further than he did in his work. Specifically, this chapter will draw on the Jain concepts of anekāntavāda, nayavāda, and syādvāda, as well as the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and his successors in the movement of process philosophy, to reconceptualize the Real, not on a Kantian foundation, as is done in the Pluralistic Hypothesis, but on the basis of a robust metaphysical realism. The aim of this approach to pluralism is to capture more fully the sense of mystics from diverse religious traditions that they have actually perceived the Real as such, and not merely one of its phenomenal appearances.
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Notes
- 1.
Regarding the predominance of religious pluralism as a popular view among many in the West today, see the Pew research data cited by Lisa Miller in her 2009 Newsweek article, “We Are All Hindus Now,” which indicates that 65 percent of Americans assent to the claim, “Many religions can lead to eternal life.” This number includes a startling 37 percent of white evangelical Christians.
- 2.
Though Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s concept of the “Anonymous Christian,” subsequently enshrined in the inclusivism of Nostra Aetate, is an important exception. According to this view, Jesus Christ is still the sole source of human salvation; but explicit faith in the historical Jesus proclaimed in the Christian faith is not the only way to access this salvation. The grace of Christ, according to this view, works through other religions. This is one way that Christians have sought to avoid the implication that the vast majority of humanity is damned for eternity that arises from an insistence on explicit faith in Christ as necessary for salvation. (Rahner 1966, 1974a, b, 1976, 1983) The idea of a posthumous encounter between each departed soul and Jesus Christ–an encounter that could lead to the salvation of a great many, or even all, human beings–has also been proposed. (Trumbower 2001)
- 3.
There is, of course, the option of purgatory, affirmed in the Roman Catholic tradition. Purgatory, however, is not a third alternative to either salvation or damnation, but a way station on the path to salvation. If one is in purgatory, one is saved, but has not yet experienced the fulness of salvation that awaits one after the purification that takes place in purgatory.
- 4.
The concept of pre-Axial and post-Axial religions is an important part of Hick’s project, as it enables him to confine the subject matter of the Pluralistic Hypothesis to a specific set of historical traditions, rather than being overly broad (such as referring to “all religions”–which would then require him to set up criteria to exclude immoral movements such as Nazism) or overly restrictive (such as by confining himself to theistic religions and thus excluding important non-theistic traditions such as Buddhism and Confucianism).
- 5.
I am specifying that, by naturalism, Hick has a materialist or physicalist conception of reality in mind because there are forms of naturalism, such as that affirmed in process thought, that are theistic and not materialist or physicalist, and that would therefore be categorized as what Hick would call religious understandings of reality. See Griffin (2001).
- 6.
One might conclude after a sincere and in-depth study of many traditions that a particular tradition has a depth and a level of insight that one does not find in others; but even in such a situation, there should always be self-questioning, for one might simply be continuing to impose, however unconsciously, the cultural norms of one’s upbringing onto realities that one has not yet fully grasped. All such claims should therefore remain tentative and open-ended. See Long (2010).
- 7.
Many modern Jains indeed see syādvāda and its accompanying doctrines as an extension of the central Jain ethical principle of ahiṃsā, or nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, into the realm of philosophy: as a form of “intellectual ahiṃsā.” This idea has been contested by some scholars of Jainism, for this was not the use to which many premodern Jain thinkers put these doctrines, using them rather to show that while other schools of thought might have a partial vision of truth, the Jain vision, or darśanas, was the synthetic and complete perspective. These doctrines thus served as polemical tools. Other premodern Jain thinkers, though–notably the eighth century philosopher Haribhadrasūri–did deploy these doctrines in a way aimed at affirming harmony among traditions. See Chapple (2003), Long (2009), and Schwartz (2018).
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Long, J.D. (2023). On the Shoulders of a Giant: The Re-envisioning and Reconstruction of John Hick’s Pluralistic Hypothesis. In: Sugirtharajah, S. (eds) John Hick's Religious Pluralism in Global Perspective. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11008-5_8
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