John Hick was arguably the most influential philosopher of religion of the 20th century. A man of monumental intellect, he was perhaps best known in the United States where his religious pluralism provided a provocative antidote to Christian fundamentalism.
He originally intended to follow the family tradition of law, but having enrolled in the University of Hull he experienced a strong evangelical conversion leading him to study philosophy at Edinburgh. There he came under the influence of Norman Kemp Smith and, through him, the philosophy of Kant. The distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal became crucial to Hick’s understanding of religion, the view that reality exists independently of experience. With the war’s outbreak, Hick, as a conscientious objector, enrolled in the Friends Ambulance Unit, serving in Egypt and Greece.
Resuming his studies at Edinburgh in 1945 he found himself in a brilliant year, including a future professor of divinity, three future Moderators of the Church of Scotland, a professor of philosophy, and a Scottish law lord. He quickly made his mark when, having cofounded the University Philosophical Society, a young newly arrived lecturer found the philosophical teachings of John Macmurray hard to comprehend and asked to borrow Hick’s notes on the subject. With a first-class honours degree under his belt, he proceeded to Oxford where after two years he received a DLitt with a dissertation that formed his first book, Faith and Knowledge. Proceeding as an evangelical Christian to turn more directly to divinity he underwent theological training at Westminster College, Cambridge, where he met and fell in love with Hazel Bowers, marrying her in 1953.
After a short spell as Minister at Belford, Northumberland, Hick took up a teaching post at Cornell, Ithaca, New York, the first of several teaching positions in America, before returning briefly to Cambridge, followed by the H. G. Wood chair at Birmingham for 15 years and then ten years at the Claremont Graduate University in California.
Although his teaching was widely influential, it is his writing that continues to make the greater impact.
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Philosophy of Religion sold more than 600,000 copies and has been translated into many languages. Apart from this basic introduction, the breadth of Hick’s interests were reflected in his output, covering epistemology, theodicy, metaphysics, religious experience, mysticism, world religions and eschatology. Altogether, he published more than 20 books, more than 50 academic dissertations, and nearly 300 articles in learned journals.
The problem of evil in a Christian world where God is good was one that Hick tackled by developing what he called the “Irenaean theodicy”, named after St Irenaeus. Suffering is regarded as an essential part of Man’s spiritual development, a view he analysed and expanded in Evil and the God of Love.
During the course of his life Hick became increasingly antipathetic to Christian conservative fundamentalism, leaning more towards religious pluralism. This led to his being twice subject to charges of heresy but, more importantly, persuaded him to enrich and extend his knowledge of the phenomenal God, as worshipped and believed in by religions other than Christianity. He spent time with Hindus in India, Sikhs in the Punjab, and in understanding Theravasa Buddhism and meditation techniques which he examined first-hand in Sri Lanka, influenced and instructed by a remarkable monk, Nyanaponika Mahathera, originally a German Jew.
In 1986-87 Hick was honoured to be awarded the Gifford Lectures, delivered in Edinburgh, which, together with his sub-Asian journeys, culminated in An Interpretation of Religion, in which religious pluralism makes sense of the variety of religious forms by postulating what the author calls “an ultimate ineffable (or transcategorical) Real” whose universal presence, he argues, is experienced in a variety of ways. In 1977 Hick was a contributor to a book, The Myth of God Incarnate, which generated much publicity, some critical, some laudatory. The Orthodox Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, for example, said that the book had “fallen prey to an opposition of a demonic character”. The book sold 30,000 copies in the first six months and was translated into several languages, including German and Arabic. Hick developed the topic further in his The Metaphor of God Incarnate, which appeared in 1993. Towards the end of his life, he condensed his personal faith in The Fifth Dimension. He was happiest and at his best when writing, and his books have been translated into 17 languages including Mandarin, Japanese, French, German and Egyptian.
Hick’s cultural as well as religious pluralism naturally led to his being involved in a variety of religious and interracial organisations. He was a vice-president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and of the World Congress of Faiths; at Birmingham he was the founder and first chairman of All Faiths for One Race. He received doctorates from Oxford and Edinburgh, honorary doctorates from Uppsala, Glasgow and Birmingham and was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences, Birmingham.
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He received the Grawemeyer Award for Religion in 1991; an autobiography appeared in 2002; and most recently the John Hick Centre for the Philo- sophy of Religion was established in his honour at Birmingham University.
Apart from the clarity of his writing, Hick had the rare ability, even among notable scholars, of engaging in profound disputation without the interference of passion, and being always prepared to reconsider any of his own thinking which such argument might have brought into question.
Although his life was essentially of the mind, his serenity sometimes mistaken for austerity, his warmth and positive outlook on life endeared him to a wide variety of friends.
His wife Hazel died in 1997. He leaves a daughter and two sons. A third son died in an accident when young.
The Rev Professor John Hick, philosopher of religion, was born on January 20, 1922. He died on February 9, 2012, aged 90