Content area
Full Text
John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: One World, 1993), pp. xix + 201, this book is a reissuing of the work originally published in 1973, provided with a new preface.
John Hick has, in the past three decades, become a name intimately connected with a thoroughgoing pluralism, which Hick defines as "the great world faiths, including Christianity, are different and independently authentic spheres of revelation and salvation" (vii). Many of the chapters in this volume were originally articles or lectures presented elsewhere.
The book is set up in such a way that Hick first deals with philosophical questions basic to understanding religious language and the character of religious knowledge as well as the role of faith as "the interpretative element within religious experience" (xviii, cf. chapter 3). In his argumentation, Hick reveals a sensitivity to many of the questions which have come to characterize a post-modern mind-set although his painstaking, analytical (it is tempting to say "fundamentalistic") style is a throwback to an earlier age, particularly in the first half of the book.
The more fascinating section of the book is the second half where he dissects traditional Christian faith and reconstructs it in categories which he finds more compatible for dialogue with other faiths. For those who confess a more traditional Christian faith, his discussion will come across as frustrating, even arbitrary. Although Hick claims to be digging through the baggage of the centuries to...