God and the Universe of Faiths

John Hick

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780749280
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Hick addresses many of the major issues posing challenges to contemporary Christian belief, and offers his much-debated proposal for a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Christianity and the wider religious life of humanity.

1. Theology’s Central Problem

BY THEOLOGY, in this chapter, I mean primarily the theology of the main religious option in our own culture, namely Christianity. Almost all that I say will also in fact apply to Judaism, for the problem I want to describe affects the judaic-christian tradition as a whole. It does not however affect the eastern religions in the same way, and I have neither the space nor the competence to discuss it in its eastern as well as in its western forms.

From time to time in the past, different topics have come to the fore as theology’s central problem; but hitherto it has always been an internal or domestic issue. It was always a particular debate within theology, such as the struggle of monotheism versus polytheism fought by some of the great prophets of the Old Testament; or the question of the relation between God the Father and God the Son worked out in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.; or in the sixteenth century the problem of the reformation of the church; or in the nineteenth century the task of digesting the implications of the discovery of the evolution of the forms of life. Today however – and this is a new situation – theology’s central problem is not so much one within theology as around theology, enfolding it entirely and calling into question its nature and status as a whole.

This issue, at once central and all-embracing, presents itself to the philosopher as a problem concerning religious language. In a sentence the issue is whether distinctively religious utterances are instances of the cognitive or of the non-cognitive uses of language.

In its cognitive uses language is employed to state or assert or indicate facts or alleged facts. It conveys information (or misinformation) by making statements which are true or false. But it has always been clear that this is not the sole use that we have for language. Poetry, for example, does not typically operate in this way. Nor is it the function of such everyday locutions as ‘Shut the door’, or ‘Damn’, or ‘How do you do’ to state facts. Indeed commands, exclamations, greetings, congratulations and suggestions, and also performative utterances such as occur in the naming of a ship, the christening of a baby, the declaring of a verdict and the making of a promise, are all examples of familiar and established non-cognitive or non-indicative uses of language.

Of course the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction is not the only axis that can be driven through the realms of religious and theological language. Indeed for the detailed exploration of religious language it is too blunt an instrument, and one needs a network of distinctions such as was developed by the late J. L. Austin. In his later work he distinguished a variety of illocutionary forces – commissive, verdictive, behabitive, etc. – all of which can be detected within the range of religious utterances, and none of which is directly assessed in terms of truth value. But fully granting the rich and legitimate variety of the uses of human speech, still the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction gives rise to the first and most basic question that we have to ask concerning religious language. Although there are undoubtedly many aspects of religious meaning to which the true-false dichotomy does not apply, it nevertheless remains a question of prime importance whether such sentences as ‘God loves mankind’ belong to the class of sentences that are either-true-or-false.

We must see presently what kind of non-cognitive use or uses distinctively religious language might be supposed to have. But we can first narrow down a little the area of discussion. It is agreed by all that there are plenty of statements made in a context of discourse concerning religion that are straightforwardly indicative: for example all reports about what is believed or done within the different religions, such as ‘Muslims believe that Mohammed was the prophet of Allah’, ‘Hindus accept the idea of reincarnation’, or ‘Christians claim that Christ was divine’. But although the sentences I have just quoted are about religion they are not themselves examples of the religious use of language; they are descriptive statements in anthropology or in the historical or comparative study of religion. Again, within the creeds and theological systems of a given religion there may be non-problematically declarative components: for example the historical affirmations that Jesus of Nazareth lived in the first century A.D. in what is today Israel, and that he was crucified by order of the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. These are propositions that have been established by the ordinary methods of historical research and that might be found in a secular work of history dealing with that period. But however important these historical facts may be to Christianity, to state them is still not to be making distinctively religious statements. Religious doctrines are based upon these historical assertions, but go beyond them not only in what is claimed but also in the nature of the claim that is made. Thus ‘God was at work in the life of Jesus of Nazareth’ is related to ‘Jesus of Nazareth lived in the first century A.D. in what is today Israel’ in such wise that the religious statement cannot be true unless the historical statement is true, but that on the other hand the historical statement can be true without the religious statement being true. The cognitive/non-cognitive issue centres upon the metaphysical surplus, namely the reference to God, by which the religious statement exceeds the purely historical one. It is as an item of God-talk (which is the literal meaning of ‘theology’) that a religious utterance is problematic. It is God-talk, whether infiltrating historical discourse or not, that provokes our problem. For we are not troubled in the same way by grammatically similar sentences with no transcendent component. Compare, for example, ‘The Prime Minister was acting through the Foreign Secretary’ with ‘God was acting through Jesus of Nazareth’, and ‘Tom loves Mary’ with ‘God loves mankind’, and ‘Human character is determined by genes’ with ‘The universe is divinely created’. The relevant difference between the first and second members of each of these pairs is that whereas there is general agreement about how to determine or at least try to determine the truth value of statements about the Prime Minister, Tom and genes, there is no such agreement about how to determine the truth value of statements about God. Hence the inevitable suspicion that they have no truth value, being neither true nor false, and that their proper function must be one quite other than that of making assertions.

This contention came to the fore in the 1920s and 1930s in the discussions initiated by the school of logical positivism. The focus of philosophical discussion has moved on a long way since then, but its progress has benefited from an increment of understanding gained in the course of the debates provoked by the positivists. For it is thanks to them that we have come to see clearly that there can only be any point, and in that sense only any meaning, in the statement that x exists or is real – whether x be an electron, a human being, a quarsar, God or anything else – if it makes an appropriate experienceable difference whether x exists. If x is so defined that it makes no difference within human experience, past, present or future, whether it be there or not, then the apparent assertion by one human being to another that it exists does not really assert anything. On the basis of this principle it has been claimed that God-talk is logically hollow in that it does not lay itself open to experiential confirmation or disconfirmation and is accordingly without indicative meaning. If it has any meaning at all – that is, any systematic use – this can only lie within the wide range of the non-cognitive functions of language.

Let me now mention some of the main non-cognitive uses which have been assigned by different philosophers to religious language. According to vintage logical positivism as it was proclaimed a generation ago in A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, religious language, like the language of ethics and of aesthetics, is a form of emotive expression. Its function is to give vent to the speaker’s emotional state, and perhaps also to try to induce a similar state in his hearers. So the language of religious thanksgiving expresses euphoria; the language of penitence and confession expresses a state of depression and self-criticism; and so on. But taken literally and at their face value the religious man’s utterances, referring as they profess to do to a systematically unobservable entity called God, are meaningless.

A far more sophisticated and interesting non-cognitive theory of religious language is, to my mind, that of Professor J. H. Randall of Columbia University. Religious language, on his view, is the language of myth and symbol. ‘What is important to recognize [he says] is that religious symbols belong with social and artistic symbols, in the group of symbols that are both non-representative and noncognitive. Such noncognitive symbols can be said to symbolize not some external thing that can be indicated apart from their operation, but rather what they themselves do, their peculiar functions’.¹ According to Randall the main (though not the only) function of religious symbols is to point to aspects of the world which affect the human mind by evoking in it the feelings of numinous awe, cosmic dependence, and so on, which our religious vocabularies have been developed to express, just as other aspects of the natural world evoke in us the feelings which are expressed in aesthetic language. He says,

The work of the painter, the musician, the poet, teaches us how to use our eyes, our ears, our minds, and our feelings with greater power and skill. . . . It shows us how to discern unsuspected qualities in the world encountered, latent powers and possibilities there resident. Still more, it makes us see the new qualities with which that world, in co-operation with the spirit of man, can clothe itself. . . . Is it otherwise with the prophet and the saint? . . . They make us receptive to qualities of the world encountered; and they open our hearts to the new qualities with which that world, in co-operation with the spirit of man, can clothe itself. They enable us to see and feel the religious dimension of our world better, the ‘order of splendor’, and of man’s experience in and with it. They teach us how to see the Divine; they show us visions of God.²

This is in some ways an attractive form of religious naturalism. It is religious in that it expresses a positive appreciation of religion as a valuable aspect of human life; but it is naturalistic in that it recognises no element of transcendence. For it is to be clearly understood that when Randall speaks of the Divine and of God he is not referring to an alleged transcendent Mind. He is using traditional religious symbols to point to aspects of the world itself and of our human response to it.

But non-cognitive interpretations of religious language do not come only from outside the churches, and as we have already seen in the case of J. H. Randall they are by no means always motivated by the hostility to religion that was evident in logical positivism. Indeed it is precisely because non-cognitive religion (as I shall call it) has become a live option in the minds of many people within the churches that theology’s central problem today is also a crisis in the self-understanding of Christianity. From within the churches we have, for example, the clearly defined theory of R. B. Braithwaite, of Cambridge, assimilating religious language to the language of moral commitment.³ According to Braithwaite a general ethical statement, such as ‘Lying is wrong’, is really a disguised expression of the speaker’s intention – in this case his intention not to tell lies. And a religious statement, such as ‘God loves mankind’, is a disguised ethical statement, namely ‘Love of mankind is supremely valuable’, which in turn expresses the speaker’s intention or policy of loving mankind. But taken literally and without this reinterpretation God-talk would be meaningless.

These philosophers (and many more whom I have not mentioned) are quite clear about the negative implications of their theories. On the basis of some form of verifiability or falsifiability criterion they have ruled out as meaningless belief in the reality of a transcendent personal God and have thereby ruled out also the traditional cognitive understanding of religious language. But there are a number of writers in the theological world who are attracted by the non-cognitive conception of Christianity without, as it seems to me, having counted and accepted the cost. I am thinking here of a number of recent writers of popular theology, such as Paul van Buren, Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, Alistair Kee. These seem to me to be flirting with the idea of non-cognitive Christianity without having sufficiently considered what it would entail.

Yet another non-cognitivist response to the challenge to the meaningfulness of religious language has come about under the inspiration of the later thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The starting point for this development is the concept of a language game, or a relatively autonomous realm of speech activity with its own rules and criteria, occurring within some coherent pattern of human activity or, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, form of life. There is, for example, the life and language of the law courts, or of biological research, or of the stock exchange, or of literary criticism, or of musical appreciation. Each of these has criteria for the appropriateness and reasonableness of what is said in its own sphere. We do not, for instance, rule out a pronouncement in the realm of musical criticism because it cannot be supported in the way in which a conclusion in low-temperature physics ought to be supported. Each language-game, it is said, has its own logic, and one is not to be criticised from the standpoint of another – for the rules and criteria appropriate to the one will not be appropriate to the other.

Now as well as all these secular forms of life, each generating its own distinctive linguistic activity, there is religion as a mode of human existence, a form of life which includes the use of religious language. This latter employs special religious concepts such as God, the will of God, salvation, eternal life, and many more. The religious man talks to God and about God; he joins in the traditional liturgical speech of his church; he takes upon his lips its credal declarations. And to be religious, or to have faith, or to be a believer, is to have a use for this realm of language, to want to participate in it.

Thus far this sounds straightforward enough. Naturally the religious believer uses religious language; this is what we would expect. The paradox appears when the Wittgensteinian philosopher explains that these religious utterances constitute an autonomous language game. This means that the realm of religious discourse has its own internal criteria determining what is properly to be said, or in other words what is true. This in turn means that religious statements carry no implications outside the borders of their own realm, and therefore can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed, supported nor challenged, by reference to what is known or believed in other spheres. For example, the statement that ‘God loves mankind’ does not entail that God exists in any sense that would permit there to be evidence for or against divine existence either in the facts of the world or in the results of philosophical reflection. This comes out clearly in a work from a Wittgensteinian point of view by D. Z. Phillips. Discussing atheism he says that the only sort of atheism that is philosophically in order is ‘the recognition that religion means nothing to one; one is at a loss to know what to make of prayer, worship, creeds and so on. It is the form of atheism summed up in the phrases, ‘I shouldn’t call myself religious’, ‘Religion has no meaning for me’.⁴ Phillips is here ruling out equally the negative claims that there are no adequate grounds for believing in the reality of God, or that it is extremely improbable or even logically impossible that there is a God; and the corresponding positive claims that there are good grounds for believing in a divine reality, or that there is a high probability that God exists, or that given certain religious experiences it is rational to believe this.

In considering this Wittgensteinian suggestion we must be clear about the implications of what is proposed. For when we attend to the language of judaic-christian faith in its natural sense, as we find it in the scriptures, in liturgies, in creeds and confessions, in sermons and in works of theology, we cannot doubt that the God-talk within it has always been meant by its users to operate as cognitive discourse. We cannot doubt that the great prophets of the Old Testament, or Jesus of Nazareth himself, or St Paul, or Augustine, Aquinas or Luther, when they spoke about God believed that they were referring to a real being who exists independently of ourselves and with whom in the activities of worship we may enter into personal relationship. Not only do their words express such a conviction but their lives bear witness to their sincerity in it. They believed in the reality of God as strongly as they believed in the reality of the material world and of other human beings; and their belief in God affected their lives as profoundly as did these other more universally held convictions. And what the great primary religious figures have believed with an intensity that determined the shape of their lives, ordinary believers down to and including ourselves today have also believed in our own varyingly weak and wavering fashions.

Thus from the point of view of one whose faith forms part of a history going back through the generations of the church’s life to the faith of the New Testament, and behind that to the insights of the great hebrew prophets, the non-cognitivist is not offering an objective analysis of the language of faith as living speech but is instead recommending a quite new use for it. For the non-cognitivist theories are not descriptive but radically revisionary. They are not accounts of the meaning of religious language as the speech of actual religious communities, but proposals about the meaning that it ought to be given in the future. And their negative premiss is that religious language cannot mean what its users have in fact always meant by it. When, for example, they speak of God, intending thereby to refer to an infinite creative Mind which is ultimately responsible for the existence of the physical universe and of ourselves as part of it, this intention of theirs is, according to the various non-cognitivist theories, to be rejected. It is to be rejected broadly on the positivist ground that the proposition intended would be meaningless because not open to empirical verification or falsification. Thus the non-cognitivist philosopher, who was called in as a consultant to analyse the operation of the old-established firm of God-Talk, Ltd., having examined the books has decided to make his own take-over bid, proposing under the old name to carry on a different trade altogather. He is of course perfectly entitled to seek to take the business over as a going concern. But equally the old firm is entitled to calculate the gains and losses in prospect and to come to its own conclusion. And my advice is not to accept the bid; for I believe that the loss would considerably outweigh the gain.

The principal loss would be the irreversible retreat of religious discourse within the borders of its own autonomous language-game, where it must renounce all claim to bear witness to the nature of the universe, and must cease to interact with other departments of human knowledge. Religious language would become a protected discourse, no longe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the 1993 Reissue
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theology’s Central Problem
• 2 Religion as Fact-asserting
• 3 Religious Faith as Experiencing-as
• 4 God, Evil and Mystery
• 5 The Problem of Evil in the First and Last Things
• 6 God as Necessary Being
• 7 The Reconstruction of Christian Belief
• 8 The Essence of Christianity
• 9 The Copernican Revolution in Theology
• 10 The New Map of the Universe of Faiths
• 11 Christ and Incarnation
• 12 Incarnation and Mythology
• 13 Towards a Theology of Death
• Index