In light of his Kantian influences, Hick claims that knowledge of the Real (his generic term for Transcendent Reality) can only be known as it is being perceived. For that reason, absolute truth claims about God (to use Christian language) are really truth claims about perceptions of God; that is, claims about the phenomenal God and not the noumenal God. Furthermore, because all knowledge is rooted in experience, which is then perceived and interpreted into human categories of conception, cultural and historical contexts which inevitably influence human perception are necessarily components of knowledge of the Real. This means that knowledge of God and religious truth claims pertaining thereof are culturally and historically influenced; and for that reason should not be considered absolute. This is a significant aspect of Hick’s argument against Christian exclusivism, which holds that although other religions might contain partial goodness and truth, salvation is provided only in Jesus Christ, and the complete truth of God is contained only in Christianity.

Perhaps the simplest manner in which to understand Hick’s theory of pluralism of religions is to share the comparison he makes between his own understanding of religion and the Copernican view of the Solar System. Before Copernicus disseminated his views of the solar-centred universe, the Ptolemaic system ruled in which the stars were painted in the sky, and the Sun rose and set around the Earth. In short, the rest of the universe existed for and was centred on Earth. On the other hand, Copernicus asserted that the Earth, and other planets as well, circled the Sun, which in fact, did not move, but only appeared to move due to the revolution of Earth. Copernicus introduced the understanding that other planets took similar paths around the Sun; while each path differed, all served the same purpose and generated the same result: every planet makes a full path around the Solar System’s central star. Rotation of a planet about its axis creates day and night for that planet, just as day and night occur on Earth. Although the time frames for a full trip around the Sun and for a full day-night cycle differs on a planet-by-planet basis, the concept remains constant throughout the Solar System.

Similarly, Hick draws the metaphor that the Ptolemaic view of religion would be that Christianity is the only way to true salvation and knowledge of the one true God. Ptolemaic Christianity would assert that everything exists and all of history has played out in specific patterns for the glory of the Christian God, and that there is no other possible path that will lead to salvation. Hick appears as Copernicus, offering the belief that perhaps all theistic religions are focused toward the one true God and simply take different paths to achieve the same goal.^[16]

A speaker on religious pluralism, Keith E. Johnson, compares Hick’s pluralistic theology to a tale of three blind men attempting to describe an elephant, one touching the leg, the second touching the trunk, the third feeling the elephant’s side. Each man describes the elephant differently, and, although each is accurate, each is also convinced of their own correctness and the mistakenness of the other two.^[17]

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John Harwood Hick (20 January 1922 – 9 February 2012) was an England-born philosopher of religion and theologian who taught in the United States for the larger part of his career. In philosophical theology, he made contributions in the areas of theodicy, eschatology, and Christology, and in the philosophy of religion he contributed to the areas of epistemology of religion and religious pluralism.^[3]

John Hick was born on 20 January 1922 to a middle-class family in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England. In his teens, he developed an interest in philosophy and religion, being encouraged by his uncle, who was an author and teacher at the University of Manchester. Hick initially went to Bootham School in York which is Quaker, and then pursued a law degree at the University of Hull, but, having converted to Evangelical Christianity, he decided to change his career and he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1941.

During his studies, he became liable for military service in World War II, but, as a conscientious objector on moral grounds, he enrolled in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit.

After the war, he returned to Edinburgh and became attracted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and began to question his fundamentalism. In 1948 he completed his MA thesis, which formed the basis of his book Faith and Knowledge.^[3] He went on to complete a D. Phil at Oriel College, Oxford University in 1950^[4] and a DLitt from Edinburgh in 1975.^[5] In 1977 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University, Sweden.^[6] In 1953 he married Joan Hazel Bowers, and the couple had four children. After many years as a member of the United Reformed Church, in October 2009 he was accepted into membership of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. He died in 2012.^[4][7]

Robert Smid states that Hick is regularly cited as “one of the most – if not simply the most – significant philosopher of religion in the twentieth century”.^[14] Keith Ward once described him as “the greatest living philosopher of global religion.”^[15] He is best known for his advocacy of religious pluralism,^[3] which is radically different from the traditional Christian teachings that he held when he was younger.^[5] Perhaps because of his heavy involvement with the inter-faith groups and his interaction with people of non-Christian faiths through those groups, Hick began to move toward a pluralistic outlook. He notes in both More Than One Way? and God and the Universe of Faiths that, as he came to know these people who belonged to non-Christian faiths, he saw in them the same values and moral actions that he recognized in fellow Christians. This observation led him to begin questioning how a completely loving God could possibly sentence non-Christians who clearly espouse values that are revered in Christianity to an eternity in hell. Hick then began to attempt to uncover the means by which all those devoted to a theistic religion might receive salvation.

Hick has notably been criticized by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope between 2005 and 2013, when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ratzinger had examined the works of several theologians accused of relativism, such as Jacques Dupuis and Roger Haight, and found that many, if not all, were philosophically inspired by Hick. Therefore, the declaration Dominus Iesus was seen by many at the time as a condemnation of Hick’s ideas and theories.