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An Autobiography
"John Hick is one of the most influential philosophers of religion in the English-speaking world. Born in Yorkshire, England, and raised within the Christian faith, he trained for the Presbyterian Ministry, taking a Philosophy degree at Edinburgh University, and subsequently a DPhil in Philosophy of Religion at Oxford University." "When his studies were interrupted during the Second World War, Hick served as a conscientious objector in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Europe. In 1953, he was ordained as a Presbyterian Minister, after which he held professorships in the United States - firstly at Cornell University and then at Princeton Theological Seminary, where his increasingly liberal theology caused some degree of controversy." Professor Hick was Chair of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham, England, for fifteen years, where he was influential both academically and in local community relations. He has lectured around the world, and is currently a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
336 pages, Paperback
First published June 25, 2003
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May 28, 2024
THE ENGLISH RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHER LOOKS BACK…
John Hick (1922-2012) was an English philosopher of religion and theologian who taught at such institutions as Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University. He has written/edited many other books, such as 'Death and Eternal Life,' 'Evil and the God of Love,' 'The Myth of God Incarnate,' etc.
He recalls in this 2002 book, “It was at [the University of] Hull that I experienced a powerful evangelical conversion to fundamentalist Christianity… what was my previous religious state? As children we had been taken to the nearby parish church… and found the services infinitely boring and totally off-putting. Granny… was into all sorts of religious explorations and I was interested in all of them with her… In these religious explorations she took me to lectures by British Israelite speakers, whom I found highly unconvincing. I must have been a visiting lecturer’s nightmare because I not only asked questions, but also sent in written questions.” (Pg. 27)
He reveals, “On the few occasions when I have had a séance with a professional medium in London… I have been quite unconvinced… I am not however in any doubt as to the reality of ESP… And I am impressed by some of the communications recorded in the early days of the Society for Psychical Research. I was a member of the Society for many years…” (Pg. 29)
He records, “One of my earliest published pieces, in the Hull students’ journal, before my conversion, was called ‘On the Importance of Heresy.’ That was about an attitude to life: heresy, I said, ‘is that salutary state of mind in which everything is seen as alive and mysterious and worth looking at.’ Reading all this now I see how my intellectual development has been surprisingly consistent apart from the interruption of my evangelical years.” (Pg. 33)
He continues, “This then was the background to my conversion experience. I believed absolutely in some sort of divine reality, though not the God of Christian orthodoxy. Clearly I was in a religiously questioning and open state… I would say now that there was a genuine impact upon me of the ultimate divine Reality and that I was conscious of this in the way then available to me. For my closest friends at Hull were members of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship… and throwing in my lot with them I accepted as a whole and without question the entire fundamentalist theological package…. I now decided, almost automatically, to switch from the Law to train for the Christian ministry… The ministry meant for me in practice the Presbyterian ministry simply because my IVF friends happened to be members… I was a wholehearted evangelical fundamentalist for the rest of my time at Hull and during my first year at Edinburgh… after the war [WWII; he was a conscientious objector]… I was still a highly orthodox but no longer fundamentalist Christian… Although I have been a critic of evangelical theology … I can nevertheless genuinely understand the evangelicals’ point of view, having once fully shared it for several years… But I hope that as well as making some evangelicals more defensive I have helped others move beyond their doctrinal fundamentalism… For there is a vast range of possibilities beyond these two alternatives.” (Pg. 33-35)
He explains “In my first year at Edinburgh, in 1941-1942… My philosophy studies went well. Real philosophers in my opinion are born, not made, and I think that I was born one. Born philosophers usually deal with the big and important issues, whilst the ones who are made often deal in highly sophisticated trivialities. They can be incredibly clever, and yet contribute nothing to our understanding of the universe and our place in it.” (Pg. 70)
He notes of the process of his ordination: “When a Presbyterian minister settles in a new place he or she more or less automatically applies to become a member of the local Presbytery, which consists of ministers and lay elders, with authority over the congregations in its area. I made my application to join… It happened that the chair of the committee was … a disciple of J. Gresham Machen, author of 'The Virgin Birth of Christ.'... [The Chair] exercised his right to ask me… if there was anything in the Westminster Confession to which I took exception… [I] regarded [the Confession] as completely out of date. I mentioned the literal interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis… and then the doctrine of double predestination to heaven and hell, and eventually arrived at the virgin birth of Jesus, which I did not deny but did not affirm and did not regard as essential to the central doctrine of incarnation, which I did affirm… Most members of the Presbytery evidently regarded this as satisfactory and… [I] was duly received as a member of the presbytery.” (Pg. 124-125)
However, the Chair appealed, and a lengthy formal appeal/review process began, which ultimately allowed Hick to remain: “The result was, so far as I was concerned, that I remained beyond dispute a professor at the Seminary and, so far as the church as a whole was concerned that it became harder for people like Clyde Henry [the Chair] to pressure students seeking ordination to profess beliefs which they did not really hold. It was thus a good outcome. But the fundamentalist brethren neither forgave nor forgot, and were able to take their revenge many years later when I went to Claremont.” (Pg. 129)
He taught at Birmingham University, and recalls of philosopher/apologist William Lane Craig: “Bill … Craig is a very bright and energetic American whose massive dissertation was published in two volumes … Bill is an evangelical Christian who later worked for Campus Crusade for Christ and---or but---who has written philosophically first-rate articles on cosmology and on ‘middle knowledge’… and other topics, including the, to me, horrific theory that in virtue of the divine middle knowledge God knows of the hundreds of millions of unevangelized people outside Christianity that they would reject the gospel if it had been brought to them, so that it is not unjust for them to remain unsaved. But his extreme theological conservatism did not affect his purely philosophical work on the cosmological argument, and has not prevented us from remaining on good terms when we have since met occasionally in the States.” (Pg. 150)
He recalls an experience while practicing Buddhist meditation: “I have once, but so far only once, experienced what was to me a startling new breakthrough into a new form or level of consciousness… normally I am here and the environment is there, separate from me, there was now no such distinction; and more importantly, the total universe of which I was part was friendly, benign, good, so that there could not possible be anything to fear or worry about. It was a state of profound delight in being. This only lasted a short time, probably not more than two minutes. But I can see that to anyone living… in such a state of mind where would be a profound serenity, and that the unselfcentered compassion, feeling with and for others, which is so central to Buddhist teaching would be entirely natural…. there are other times when meditation leaves me in some indescribable way uplifted, made deeply happy.” (Pg. 223)
He recounts the controversy over the publication of ‘The Myth of God Incarnate’: “The title was much criticized as deliberately provocative and sensationalist. And so it was---we wanted its message to be heard. But the critics failed to take in… that scholars today do not mean by myth that which is simply false, but that which expresses truth in stories or descriptions which are not literally true but which nevertheless point to some important reality, in this case Jesus’ exceptional openness to God and the embodiment in his own life of God’s love for humanity.” (Pg. 228-229) He continues, “[A newspaper] read me a statement … saying that the Myth authors ‘would, if they were honorable men, resign their professorships and divest themselves of their status as Christian ministers,’ and asking for a comment… As I kept telling people who asked, the central theme of the book is that the language of divine incarnation… is symbolic, mythological, or poetic language.” (Pg. 231) Later, he adds, “But whilst it is generally accepted, outside fundamentalist and extreme evangelical circles, that Jesus himself did not teach the doctrine of the Incarnation, controversy continues in full spate about the significance of this fact.” (Pg. 236)
In the next-to-last chapter, he suggests, “so far as one can tell there seem to be as many … remarkable individuals … within Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism and so on as within Christianity. But is this what we would expect if the traditional Christian belief system is true?... As Christians we supposedly have a uniquely close relationship to God… and the presence of the Holy Spirit… not available to others… And so it seems to me reasonable to think that the great world faiths are different but… equally effective … contexts of the salvific transformation from natural self-centeredness to a new orientation centered in God, the Transcendent, the Ultimate, the Real, a recentering which frees humans to value and love one another.” (Pg. 301-302)
This is a highly interesting book that will be “must reading” for those interested in Hick’s other books, or contemporary Christian theology in general.
John Hick (1922-2012) was an English philosopher of religion and theologian who taught at such institutions as Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University. He has written/edited many other books, such as 'Death and Eternal Life,' 'Evil and the God of Love,' 'The Myth of God Incarnate,' etc.
He recalls in this 2002 book, “It was at [the University of] Hull that I experienced a powerful evangelical conversion to fundamentalist Christianity… what was my previous religious state? As children we had been taken to the nearby parish church… and found the services infinitely boring and totally off-putting. Granny… was into all sorts of religious explorations and I was interested in all of them with her… In these religious explorations she took me to lectures by British Israelite speakers, whom I found highly unconvincing. I must have been a visiting lecturer’s nightmare because I not only asked questions, but also sent in written questions.” (Pg. 27)
He reveals, “On the few occasions when I have had a séance with a professional medium in London… I have been quite unconvinced… I am not however in any doubt as to the reality of ESP… And I am impressed by some of the communications recorded in the early days of the Society for Psychical Research. I was a member of the Society for many years…” (Pg. 29)
He records, “One of my earliest published pieces, in the Hull students’ journal, before my conversion, was called ‘On the Importance of Heresy.’ That was about an attitude to life: heresy, I said, ‘is that salutary state of mind in which everything is seen as alive and mysterious and worth looking at.’ Reading all this now I see how my intellectual development has been surprisingly consistent apart from the interruption of my evangelical years.” (Pg. 33)
He continues, “This then was the background to my conversion experience. I believed absolutely in some sort of divine reality, though not the God of Christian orthodoxy. Clearly I was in a religiously questioning and open state… I would say now that there was a genuine impact upon me of the ultimate divine Reality and that I was conscious of this in the way then available to me. For my closest friends at Hull were members of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship… and throwing in my lot with them I accepted as a whole and without question the entire fundamentalist theological package…. I now decided, almost automatically, to switch from the Law to train for the Christian ministry… The ministry meant for me in practice the Presbyterian ministry simply because my IVF friends happened to be members… I was a wholehearted evangelical fundamentalist for the rest of my time at Hull and during my first year at Edinburgh… after the war [WWII; he was a conscientious objector]… I was still a highly orthodox but no longer fundamentalist Christian… Although I have been a critic of evangelical theology … I can nevertheless genuinely understand the evangelicals’ point of view, having once fully shared it for several years… But I hope that as well as making some evangelicals more defensive I have helped others move beyond their doctrinal fundamentalism… For there is a vast range of possibilities beyond these two alternatives.” (Pg. 33-35)
He explains “In my first year at Edinburgh, in 1941-1942… My philosophy studies went well. Real philosophers in my opinion are born, not made, and I think that I was born one. Born philosophers usually deal with the big and important issues, whilst the ones who are made often deal in highly sophisticated trivialities. They can be incredibly clever, and yet contribute nothing to our understanding of the universe and our place in it.” (Pg. 70)
He notes of the process of his ordination: “When a Presbyterian minister settles in a new place he or she more or less automatically applies to become a member of the local Presbytery, which consists of ministers and lay elders, with authority over the congregations in its area. I made my application to join… It happened that the chair of the committee was … a disciple of J. Gresham Machen, author of 'The Virgin Birth of Christ.'... [The Chair] exercised his right to ask me… if there was anything in the Westminster Confession to which I took exception… [I] regarded [the Confession] as completely out of date. I mentioned the literal interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis… and then the doctrine of double predestination to heaven and hell, and eventually arrived at the virgin birth of Jesus, which I did not deny but did not affirm and did not regard as essential to the central doctrine of incarnation, which I did affirm… Most members of the Presbytery evidently regarded this as satisfactory and… [I] was duly received as a member of the presbytery.” (Pg. 124-125)
However, the Chair appealed, and a lengthy formal appeal/review process began, which ultimately allowed Hick to remain: “The result was, so far as I was concerned, that I remained beyond dispute a professor at the Seminary and, so far as the church as a whole was concerned that it became harder for people like Clyde Henry [the Chair] to pressure students seeking ordination to profess beliefs which they did not really hold. It was thus a good outcome. But the fundamentalist brethren neither forgave nor forgot, and were able to take their revenge many years later when I went to Claremont.” (Pg. 129)
He taught at Birmingham University, and recalls of philosopher/apologist William Lane Craig: “Bill … Craig is a very bright and energetic American whose massive dissertation was published in two volumes … Bill is an evangelical Christian who later worked for Campus Crusade for Christ and---or but---who has written philosophically first-rate articles on cosmology and on ‘middle knowledge’… and other topics, including the, to me, horrific theory that in virtue of the divine middle knowledge God knows of the hundreds of millions of unevangelized people outside Christianity that they would reject the gospel if it had been brought to them, so that it is not unjust for them to remain unsaved. But his extreme theological conservatism did not affect his purely philosophical work on the cosmological argument, and has not prevented us from remaining on good terms when we have since met occasionally in the States.” (Pg. 150)
He recalls an experience while practicing Buddhist meditation: “I have once, but so far only once, experienced what was to me a startling new breakthrough into a new form or level of consciousness… normally I am here and the environment is there, separate from me, there was now no such distinction; and more importantly, the total universe of which I was part was friendly, benign, good, so that there could not possible be anything to fear or worry about. It was a state of profound delight in being. This only lasted a short time, probably not more than two minutes. But I can see that to anyone living… in such a state of mind where would be a profound serenity, and that the unselfcentered compassion, feeling with and for others, which is so central to Buddhist teaching would be entirely natural…. there are other times when meditation leaves me in some indescribable way uplifted, made deeply happy.” (Pg. 223)
He recounts the controversy over the publication of ‘The Myth of God Incarnate’: “The title was much criticized as deliberately provocative and sensationalist. And so it was---we wanted its message to be heard. But the critics failed to take in… that scholars today do not mean by myth that which is simply false, but that which expresses truth in stories or descriptions which are not literally true but which nevertheless point to some important reality, in this case Jesus’ exceptional openness to God and the embodiment in his own life of God’s love for humanity.” (Pg. 228-229) He continues, “[A newspaper] read me a statement … saying that the Myth authors ‘would, if they were honorable men, resign their professorships and divest themselves of their status as Christian ministers,’ and asking for a comment… As I kept telling people who asked, the central theme of the book is that the language of divine incarnation… is symbolic, mythological, or poetic language.” (Pg. 231) Later, he adds, “But whilst it is generally accepted, outside fundamentalist and extreme evangelical circles, that Jesus himself did not teach the doctrine of the Incarnation, controversy continues in full spate about the significance of this fact.” (Pg. 236)
In the next-to-last chapter, he suggests, “so far as one can tell there seem to be as many … remarkable individuals … within Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism and so on as within Christianity. But is this what we would expect if the traditional Christian belief system is true?... As Christians we supposedly have a uniquely close relationship to God… and the presence of the Holy Spirit… not available to others… And so it seems to me reasonable to think that the great world faiths are different but… equally effective … contexts of the salvific transformation from natural self-centeredness to a new orientation centered in God, the Transcendent, the Ultimate, the Real, a recentering which frees humans to value and love one another.” (Pg. 301-302)
This is a highly interesting book that will be “must reading” for those interested in Hick’s other books, or contemporary Christian theology in general.
Displaying 1 of 1 review