John Hick facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
John Hick
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 20 January 1922 |
| Died | 9 February 2012 (aged 90) Birmingham, England
|
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
|
Main interests
|
Philosophy of religion, theology |
|
Influences
|
|
John Harwood Hick (born January 20, 1922 – died February 9, 2012) was an important thinker from England. He was a philosopher and theologian. He spent most of his career teaching in the United States.
John Hick studied big ideas about religion. He looked at how different religions understand God. He also explored why bad things happen in the world.
Contents
John Hick's Life Story
John Hick was born in Scarborough, England, on January 20, 1922. His family was middle-class. When he was a teenager, he became very interested in philosophy and religion. His uncle, who was a teacher, encouraged him.
He first studied law at the University of Hull. But he changed his mind after becoming an Evangelical Christian. In 1941, he decided to study at the University of Edinburgh.
During World War II, he was supposed to join the military. However, he chose to be a conscientious objector. This means he refused to fight because of his strong moral beliefs. Instead, he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit. This group helped people during the war without fighting.
After the war, he went back to Edinburgh. He became very interested in the ideas of a philosopher named Immanuel Kant. John Hick started to question some of his earlier, strict religious beliefs.
He earned his first master's degree in 1948. This work became his book Faith and Knowledge. He then got his PhD from Oxford University in 1950. Later, he received another advanced degree from Edinburgh in 1975. In 1977, he got an honorary degree from Uppsala University in Sweden.
In 1953, he married Joan Hazel Bowers. They had four children together. For many years, he was part of the United Reformed Church. In 2009, he joined the Quakers. He passed away in 2012.
His Career and Work
John Hick held many important teaching jobs. He was a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California. He also taught at the University of Birmingham in England.
While at Birmingham, he helped set up groups that brought different communities together. Many people from different religious backgrounds had moved to the area. These groups helped people from Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh faiths connect.
John Hick helped start a group called All Faiths for One Race (AFFOR). He also led committees that worked on community relations. He even helped create new lessons for religious education in schools.
He also taught at famous universities like Cornell University and Cambridge University. While teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, he began to change his religious views. He started to wonder if believing in Jesus as God meant believing in the story of the Virgin Birth exactly as it was told. This led him to think more deeply about how different religions relate to each other.
John Hick was also a leader in several important religious groups. He was Vice-President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. He was also Vice-President of The World Congress of Faiths.
In 1987, he gave the famous Gifford lectures. In 1991, he won the important Grawemeyer Award for Religion.
John Hick faced some challenges because of his ideas. Twice, he was part of "heresy proceedings." This means some people thought his beliefs went against traditional church teachings. In one case, he questioned parts of a church statement from 1647. After some debate, he was allowed to remain a member of his church group.
John Hick's Ideas About Religion
Many people see John Hick as one of the most important religious thinkers of the 20th century. He is best known for his idea of religious pluralism. This is a very different idea from the traditional Christian teachings he grew up with.
He started to think this way because he worked with people from many different faiths. He noticed that people who were not Christian often showed the same good values and actions as his Christian friends. This made him wonder: How could a loving God send good non-Christians to hell? He then tried to find a way for people from all religions to find salvation.
John Hick was criticized by Joseph Ratzinger (who later became Pope). Ratzinger believed that Hick's ideas led to relativism. This means the idea that all truths are equally valid, which can be seen as a problem for traditional religious beliefs.
How He Saw God and Reality
John Hick was influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that our minds shape how we see reality. Hick used this idea to explain how we understand God.
Hick said that we can only know God (or what he called "the Real") as we experience it. Our experiences are shaped by our culture and history. So, what we say about God is really about our perceptions of God. This means that no single religion has the complete, absolute truth about God.
This idea was important for his argument against exclusivism. Exclusivism is the belief that only one religion (like Christianity) offers the full truth and the only way to salvation.
Religious Pluralism: Many Paths to One Goal
To understand Hick's idea of religious pluralism, think about how he compared it to the solar system.
Before Copernicus, people believed the Earth was the center of the universe. The sun and stars revolved around it. This was called the Ptolemaic system.
Copernicus showed that the Earth and other planets actually revolve around the sun. The sun is the center. All planets follow their own paths around the sun, but they all share the same central star.
John Hick said that traditional Christianity was like the Ptolemaic view. It believed Christianity was the only way to God. He, like Copernicus, suggested a new view. He thought that all major religions might be different paths leading to the same one true God. Each path is different, but they all aim for the same goal.
Another way to understand this is the story of the blind men and an elephant. Three blind men touch different parts of an elephant. One feels the leg and thinks it's a tree. Another feels the trunk and thinks it's a snake. The third feels the side and thinks it's a wall. Each man describes the elephant differently, and each believes he is right. But they are all touching the same elephant.
John Hick believed that different religions are like the blind men. They experience and describe God in different ways. But they are all trying to understand the same ultimate reality.
Hick's View of Jesus
In his book God and the Universe of Faiths, John Hick tried to find the main idea of Christianity. He said that the Sermon on the Mount shows how Christians should live. He believed that being a Christian means living like Jesus did: helping the hungry, healing the sick, and creating fairness in the world.
He also looked at how Jesus came to be seen as God. Hick questioned if Jesus himself believed he was God.
Hick suggested that we should think of Jesus's Incarnation (God becoming human) in a new way. He said Jesus was not literally God in human form. Instead, Jesus was so open to God's spirit that God could act through him. This means Jesus was a perfect example of God's presence on Earth.
Hick believed this "metaphorical" view of incarnation helps avoid difficult ideas. For example, it avoids the idea of Jesus being both fully God and fully human at the same time. It also helps make sense of the Trinity (God being one and three).
He wrote that it's hard to explain how someone who was truly human could also be truly God.
The Problem of Evil
John Hick also thought a lot about why bad things happen if God is good. This is called "theodicy". He supported an idea called "Irenaean theodicy" or the "Soul-Making Defense."
This idea says that suffering exists to help people grow spiritually. God allows suffering so that human souls can become stronger and more mature. For Hick, suffering is not truly bad in the end. It can be seen as a way to make our souls better.
So, Hick believed that pain and suffering serve God's good purpose. They help imperfect humans grow in faith and love. He also thought that even if this process doesn't always work in this life, God will eventually help everyone reach Him in the afterlife.
However, some thinkers disagreed with Hick. They questioned if his ideas fully explained the huge amount of suffering in the world. They also wondered if everyone would truly reach God-consciousness.
Major Books by John Hick
- Faith and Knowledge (1957)
- The Existence of God (editor) (1964)
- Evil and the God of Love (1966)
- Philosophy of Religion (1970)
- Death and the Eternal Life (1976)
- The Myth of God Incarnate (editor) (1977)
- An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (1989)
- The Metaphor of God Incarnate (1993)
- A Christian Theology of Religions (1995)
- The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience and the Transcendent (2006)
See also
In Spanish: John Hick para niños
