Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy

The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Adnan Aslan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136110108
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The philosophy of religion and theology are related to the culture in which they have developed. These disciplines provide a source of values and vision to the cultures of which they are part, while at the same time they are delimited and defined by their cultures. This book compares the ideas of two contemporary philosophers, John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, on the issues of religion, religions, the concept of the ultimate reality, and the notion of sacred knowledge. On a broader level, it compares two world-views: the one formed by Western Christian culture, which is religious in intention but secular in essence; the other Islamic, formed through the assimilation of traditional wisdom, which is turned against the norms of secular culture and is thus religious both in intention and essence.

Chapter One

Intellectual Biographies

In this opening chapter I would like to present comprehensive intellectual biographies of both John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. I consider such an account to be of value since there is an interesting correlation between their life experiences and their thought. As will be pointed out, Hick's ‘Birmingham experience’ and Nasr's education in America have played an important part in their intellectual oudook.

In Hick's biography, I shall highlight certain events which influenced Hick's intellectual development. I will also mention some of the prominent thinkers from whom Hick derived his ideas and inspiration. The major publications of Hick and Nasr will be referred to as important landmarks in their life. I will conclude the first part of this chapter by citing a long paragraph through which Hick himself eloquently summarises his attitude toward the major traditions of humanity.

As far as Nasr is concerned, this chapter will draw attention to the impact his traditional as well as ‘modern’ education has had upon his thought. There were three major events which marked Nasr's career. The first was his move to America when he was thirteen. This provided him with an opportunity to acquaint himself with Western thought. The second is Nasr's return to Iran from America after gaining a Ph.D. at Harvard. This event helped him to realise his intellectual potential which he acquired in America. The third is the political turmoil in Iran in 1979, which forced Nasr to leave his home country. This event, strangely enough, played a significant part in establishing Nasr's international reputation as a philosopher. I will conclude this chapter by citing a long passage that summarises his quest for the eternal sophia.

JOHN HICK

John Harwood Hick was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire on 20 January 1922. As a child, he was taken to the local Anglican parish church. He was not impressed by his early religious education; the services, as he remembers, were ‘a matter of infinite boredom’.¹ Although dissatisfied with what the Church offered him in his spiritual quest, Hick always maintained the belief in a father strong sense of the reality of God as the personal and loving lord of the universe’.²

When he was eighteen years old, he had already started pursuing a more meaningful spirituality outside Christianity. When he read The Principles of Theosophy – a book about a Western version of the Hindu vedantic philosophy – he thought that he had encountered the first comprehensive and coherent interpretation of life. Although initially impressed, Hick later, rejected the book on the ground that it was ‘too tidy and impersonal’.³

Hick was in his late teens when he realised that he was in a 'state of spiritual searching’ which led him to conclude: ‘The eastern religious world, in the form of theosophy, was attractive, but not sufficiently so for me to enter it. The western religious world of Christianity was all around me but seemed utterly lifeless and uninteresting’.⁴

From his early youth Hick began to realise the value of possessing ‘an independent and questioning mind’. It was this ability that set Hick off on an intellectual journey to find a more satisfying and spiritually accommodating religious outlook in which he would feel at home.⁵

Hick began his university education as a law student at the University of Hull where his intellectual life was marked by a very important event, a religious conversion by which ‘the whole world of Christian belief and experience came vividly to life’, making him a ‘Christian of a strong evangelical and indeed fundamentalist kind’.⁶ He describes his conversion experience (which took place on the top deck of a bus) as follows:

As everyone will be conscious who can themselves remember such a moment, all descriptions are inadequate. But it was as though the skies opened up and light poured down and filled me with a sense of overflowing joy in response to an immense transcendent goodness and love. I remember that I couldn't help smiling broadly – smiling back, as it were, at God – though if any of the other passengers were looking they must have thought that I was a lunatic, grinning at nothing.⁷

Hick's conversion experience which occurred through the power of ‘the New Testament picture of Jesus Christ’ was not a sudden and easy one. It was, rather, a result of a ‘period of several days of intense inner turmoil’.⁸ This disturbing demand became a liberating invitation leading him to the world of Christian faith with great joy. As a result of this, he accepted ‘as a whole without question the entire evangelical package of theology – the verbal inspiration of the Bible; creation and fall; Jesus as God the Son incarnate, born of a virgin, conscious of his divine nature and performing miracles of divine power; redemption by his blood from sin and guilt; his bodily resurrection and ascension and future return in glory; heaven and hell’.⁹

By instinct ‘conservative, cautious and timid’¹⁰ but intellectually liberal, high-spirited and daring, Hick was eventually to reach the conclusion that this package of evangelical theology required reinterpretation and needed to be modified to a certain degree.¹¹

In 1942, Hick joined the Presbyterian Church of England with the intention of entering the Christian ministry. In the same year, Hick's quest for truth and a more comprehensive and coherent Weltanschauung convinced him to pursue a degree course in philosophy.¹² For this purpose he enrolled at Edinburgh University where he came to know Norman Kemp Smith, an idealist Kantian scholar who made the best contemporary translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into English. Smith's impact upon Hick's thought is quite remarkable. As Hick also acknowledges, the main ideas of his D.Phil, thesis were inspired by the philosophical teachings of Kemp Smith. ¹³

From then on, Hick established a Kantian attitude in his philosophy of religion, reading Kant through Kemp Smith. Kant has always remained one of the most important sources of his ideas. The substantial Kantian ingredients can be first seen in his theory of faith, in which faith is denned as an interpretative element within religious experience, which is the major theme of Faith and Knowledge. Kantian influence has also played a major role in constituting his hypothesis of religious pluralism.

At Edinburgh University, Hick was a keen member of the Christian Union ‘attending virtually all its Bible studies, prayer meetings and talks, and engaging in such evangelistic activities’.¹⁴ But unfortunately, his education was interrupted by the Second World War,¹⁵ which forced him to leave Edinburgh. During the war, he went to the Middle East, Italy and Greece to serve in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit.¹⁶ In 1944, during a calm winter in Italy, Hick started to fill a note book with the oudine of his theory of religious cognition, which was the first sketch of his D.Phil, thesis.¹⁷ This was published as his first book, Faith and Knowledge.

Although Hick spent many months in Muslim Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, and a short time in Palestine during the war, he ‘had no appreciation whatever of Islam or Judaism as religions’.¹⁸ After the war, Hick returned to Edinburgh to continue his education. Although he was ‘as emphatically a Christian as before’,¹⁹ he did not rejoin the Christian Union.

With the help of his training in philosophy and his fresh experience of the war, Hick came to notice that there was little sympathy for the questioning mind in the circle of Christian fellowship. He began to feel some discomfort in such an environment and instead looked for a place where he would feel more intellectually at home. However, his evangelical background helped him to enter imaginatively into the mind of the evangelical Christians:

… I believe that anyone who is either born or ‘born again’ into the conservative evangelical thought world, and who has a questioning mind, will find that he has to face challenges to the belief system within which his Christian faith was first made available to him, and will almost certainly be led by rational or moral considerations to modify or discard many of its elements. His response to Jesus Christ as his lord, and as his saviour from alienation from God, may remain the same; but the body of theological theories associated with it in his mind will usually change, and surely ought to change, in the light of further living, learning and thinking.²⁰

In 1948, having graduated from Edinburgh University with first class honours, Hick began a research programme at Oriel College, Oxford, with the help of a Campell Fraser scholarship under ‘the benign but penetrating critical supervision of H. H. Price’,²¹ whose implicit influence on Hick can be discerned in his writings.

In 1950, Hick completed his doctoral thesis, and then went on to Westminster Theological College, Cambridge. There he undertook his first formal study of theology. This comprised courses of Old and New Testament studies, Christian Doctrine and Church History.²² In 1953, after qualifying as a minister, Hick moved to Belford Presbyterian Church, Northumberland, to take up his only parish appointment which he held until 1956. There he wrote the manuscript for his first book, Faith and Knowledge.²³

In 1956, Hick moved to America to take up the post of Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, where he worked until 1959. After being appointed to the Stuart Professorship of Christian Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary (1959–1964), two major events which affected Hick's intellectual development took place.

The first was the publication of his book Faith and Knowledge in 1957 by Cornell University Press.²⁴ The book has played an important role in Hick's philosophy of religion.²⁵ In it, Hick introduced his revolutionary theory of faith as a total interpretation of the universe which functions as the interpretative element within religious experience. This theory is revolutionary because it asserts that faith is not an affirmation of certain ‘revealed’ propositions, but is a way of looking at or interpreting the things that we encounter.²⁶ However, when faith is defined as a total interpretation of the universe, the emphasis upon believing the revealed propositions of a particular religion is minimised. Hence it opens the way by which one can acknowledge the value of other religions. In Faith and Knowledge although Hick makes no explicit reference to other traditions such as Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism as alternative ways of seeing things, his view of faith is a basis for a kind of extrapolation which can embrace the great religions of humankind.

Two terms, ‘interpretative element’ and ‘religious experience’, employed in his view of faith, give us a clue about the source from which Hick derived this theory. The term ‘interpretative element’ connotes Kant; ‘religious experience’, William James. As Hick himself acknowledges, a Kantian notion that the mind plays an active role in experience is reformulated within the religious context, and therefore faith is recognised as the interpretative element within religious experience.²⁷ Kant's impact upon Hick has prevailed as one of the essential features of his intellectual development. In this respect, however, one thing must be pointed out whenever Hick borrows ideas or concepts from Kant. What he does is extrapolate from them in order to use them for his purpose, which often goes beyond what Kant meant by those concepts. For example, contrary to Hick, Kant would not have sanctioned any attempt to account for experience of God, because Kant did not think it was possible. Hick's application of the noumena and phenomena distinction to the experience of the Real and its manifestations is also meaningless as far as Kant's philosophy is concerned....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Intellectual Biographies
• Chapter Two Religion and Tradition
• Chapter Three Knowledge and the Ultimate
• Chapter Four The Need for a Pluralistic Approach in Religion
• Chapter Five The Ultimate and Pluralism
• Chapter Six Christianity and Islam: Manifestations of the Ultimate
• Notes
• Appendix: Religions and the Concept of Ultimate
• Bibliography
• Index