The Pluralistic Hypothesis

“The Pluralistic Hypothesis” is a chapter in a book entitled An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent by John Hick. It concerns a defense of religious pluralism from a secular perspective. John Hick (1922-2012) was a very well-known British philosopher of religion who held controversial views about many theological beliefs. He was subjected to heresy proceedings to the presbytery. He was eventually admitted to the presbyterian church by some persistence after objections from ministers who examined his errant positions on theology, confessions, and tradition. John Hick accepted the influential worldviews of Kant and Schleiermacher to eventually produce disintegration of his earlier formative Christian commitments.

“This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’ There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” – Acts 4:11-12 NRSV

As one reads Hick’s thoughts about religious pluralism, it becomes clear why there were numerous refutations against his views. His written work is often found as companion books about liberation theology and feminism from currently active authors. Hick came to reject a number of basic doctrines from the apostolic and prophetic witness as given by the authority of Scripture. Rather than place himself under the authority of Scripture and the inner conviction of the Holy Spirit about who God is, he chose to set himself outside of what God has revealed in His Word to align with humanistic approaches to religion. Secular institutions where he studied had a significant bearing upon his withdrawal of exclusive faith in Christ.

There is an unsettling underlying thread through Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis. Rather than approach truth, or “the Real,” to explain divine Reality from the perspective of God (which he says we can’t by faith know), he attempts to set up categories of human-centered reason to engage in idolatry through the acceptance of other religions as having salvific merit. He thoroughly infers that people who do not accept as true the doctrines and traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddism (whether of personae or impersonae divinity), will have no choice to affirm a pluralistic religious experience (i.e., it becomes inevitable). So as to also infer that the same shared God, to who or what he refers, would have no bearing on the matter. Hick’s ruminations are exploratory across religions as an eventual outworking of religious departments among secular universities today.

Once private and public universities and colleges removed the academic discipline of theology and replaced it with “religion” they sought aggregate, or lump together belief systems antithetical to naturalist pursuits. Religion as a term is a secular recasting of the historical meaning of theology from a secular worldview as it has abandoned the pursuit of revelatory spiritual truth. The worldview that cannot comprehend or explain human consciousness and where it comes from attempts to hold itself out and produce speculative thinkers such as Hicks. This is specifically the fruit that is meant to appear among bad trees (Matt 7:18) where the true faith of Christianity eventually becomes diluted, marginalized, and dismissed as illusory.

Hick’s rationale is spiritually vacant as he sets up arbitrary categories of personal subjective thought around the religious beliefs of billions. That is, to somehow converge them and assign commitments with doctrines as having equal or distributed weight while they contradict. Hick’s use of Aquinas, Calvin, and Maimonides as sources to proof-text his rationale on isolated points of support for plurality leaves out the context that these early writers and philosophers spoke within. Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis, taken as a whole, contradicts the body of their work to include many others. Moreover, it is Creator God who insisted, “thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:1-2) and “for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Ex 34:14). God, whom we worship, does not contradict Himself or lie. His Word is true.