John Hicks A Pluralistic View

            In this contribution to Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, John Hicks lays out the case for a pluralistic view of religion, and what salvation would look like in that view.  He speaks of his conservative roots in Christianity, yet as his education moved on, he came to ask “awkward questions” of his fellow believers.  Not being satisfied with others’ “reluctance” to field these questions, he moved on to explore Christianity more deeply.  His departure from “conservative” Christianity was as a result of reflection and philosophical training.  It is important in Hicks’s view that one sorts out what is intellectually acceptable and unacceptable, and “eventually discard the latter.”

            Hicks sees the biblical story as “heavily edited and slanted history” and the gospels of Jesus infused with “faith-created pictures of his religious significance.”  Fundamentalist Christianity paints a high Christology from the pages of the New Testament, but Hicks states that these documents are corrupted because the gospels were written forty or more years after the fact.  Therefore, in his view, plenty of time would have elapsed for legend and magnification of who Jesus was to evolve.  His opinion is we should not trust such distorted views.

            Hicks’s experience in academia led him to see that “from a religious point of view basically the same thing is going on in all [religions].”   Many religions include humans coming together and opening their hearts and minds to God. He sees no great moral difference in the major world religions in that they all see to produce moral people in similar numbers.  Hicks makes a case that for any religion (such as Christianity) to be superior it must produce, on average, more moral people and he doesn’t see this as being the case.

            Finally, Hicks says that salvation has to be understood from a more universal perspective.  Understanding salvation as a gift from the cross is incompatible with our knowledge of the world and God.  Salvation should be seen as transformation “from self-centeredness to Reality [God] – centeredness.” In Hicks’s view this transformation will be attained by all “perhaps after many lives in many worlds.”

            I find several major flaws in Dr. Hicks’s argument.  First his view on the historicity of the New Testament is very stereotypical and not well formed.  He asserts that there is a great consensus on his point of view, but this is just not the case.  Dr. Gary Habermas makes a strong case for the historicity of the resurrection in The Risen Jesus and the Future Hope.  Dr. N. T. Wright lays out the case for a high Christology in The Resurrection of the Son of God.  In the latter book Wright makes a case not only for the close followers of Jesus believing in his resurrection and divinity, but that Jesus himself makes this case.  Justification is needed for the exclusion of such scholars’ work.

            Second, in making his moral argument for pluralism, Hicks fails at several points.  He judges all religions on the basis of making morally equal people while not defining a moral rubric.  In this, he also fails to deal with many of the underlying philosophical differences within these moral world views.  For example, the value a religion places on an individual will greatly affect the morality of the religion.  How would a Muslim view the individual?  How would a Buddhist?  These differences in ideas matter greatly when comparing religions. 

            Dr. Hicks spells out clearly what pluralism is, but he is not logically convincing in his case for following pluralistic views.