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Religious Pluralism and the Divine: a Response to Paul Eddy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John Hick
John Hick
Affiliation:
144 Oak Tree Lane, Selly Oak, Birmingham B29 6HU
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Abstract

In ‘Religious Pluralism and the Divine: Another Look at John Hick's Neo-Kantian Proposal’ [Religious Studies, xxx, 1994) Paul Eddy argues against the ultimate ineffability of the Real, and claims that a neo-Kantian epistemology leads to a Feuerbachian non-realism. In response I stress (a) the impossibility of attributing to the Real the range of incompatible characteristics of its phenomenal (i.e. experienceable) manifestations, so that it must lie beyond the range of our human religious categories, and (b) the distinction, which Eddy fails to observe, between grounds for believing in the Divine, and reasons for thinking that the Divine can be differently conceived and experienced.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 417 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Thomas, StSumma contra Gentiles, I, 14, 2.Google Scholar

2 Thomas, St, In librum de Causis, 6.Google Scholar

3 This is made clear, as Eddy notes, in an article reprinted in my Problems of Religious Pluralism (London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin's Press, 1985), p. 105.Google Scholar

4 Though possibly William Alston's terminology is to be preferred when he distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic attributes (Divine Nature and Human Language, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 40).Google Scholar

5 Ward, Keith, ‘Truth and the Diversity of Religions’, Religious Studies, XXVI (1990), p. 10.Google Scholar

6 St. Anselm's Proslogion, trans. M.J. Charlesworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 121Google Scholar (ch. 5).

7 Ibid. p. 137 (ch. 15).

8 One of Eddy's sub-arguments should be noticed at this point. He asks (p. 478) what ‘information’ the transcendent input to religious experience supplies or could supply. But I have used the term ‘information’, not in the sense of ‘items of information’, but in its cybernetic sense, as any impact of our environment upon us. In the case of religious experience the ‘impact’ is the universal presence to us of the Real, or the Divine, as the ground of our being, and this comes to consciousness in the ways shown to us in the history of religions. (John Bowker was, so far as I know, the first to apply the cybernetic concept of information to religious awareness in The Sense of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).)Google Scholar

9 That Paul Eddy counts himself as an exclusivist believer is evident from his contribution to ‘a much needed evangelical critique of John Hick's religious pluralism’ in The Challenge of Religious Pluralism: An Evangelical Analysis and Response, being the Proceedings of the Wheaton Theology Conference, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, 1992, p. 36.Google Scholar

10 Hick, John, An Interpretation of Religion (London: Macmillan, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar