Hick, John Harwood

(b. 1922)

   Theologian.

   Hick was educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. He has taught philosophy of religion at Cambridge and Birmingham and at the Claremont School of Graduate Studies in California and he is an ordained minister of the United Reform Church. He is a prolific writer, and his books include Evil and the God of Love, The Second Christianity and The Metaphor of God Incarnate.

   Probably the most significant philosopher of religion of his generation, he is remembered for his defence of ‘eschatological verification’ against Antony flew’s argument that religious claims are intrinsically neither verifiable nor falsifiable (and therefore meaningless). The Myth of God Incarnate, of which Hick was an editor, caused a minor sensation within the Church with its suggestion that the doctrine of the incarnation may not be literally true. In recent years he has turned to the vexed question of the relationship of Christianity with other faiths and he is a leading proponent of the pluralist position – that salvation may not be exclusively found through the person of Jesus Christ.

   John Hick and P. Knitter (eds), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (1987);

   C. Gillis, A Question of Final Belief: John Hick’s Pluralistic Theory of Salvation (1989);

   H. Hewitt (ed.), Problems in the Philosophy of Religion: Critical Studies of the Work of John Hick (1991).