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John Hick, a renowned British philosopher of religion began to be interested in the world religions and dialogue with their followers after moving to Birmingham in 1967 to take up the H.G. Wood Chair in Theology at Birmingham University. In this city, he became deeply involved in community relations organisations. He frequently visited the places of worship of Muslims, Jewish, Sikhs and Hindus and realised that

although the language, concepts, liturgical actions, and cultural ethos differ widely from one another, yet from a religious point of view basically the same thing is going on in all of them, namely, human beings coming together within the framework of an ancient and highly developed tradition to open their hearts and minds to God, whom they believe makes a total claim on their lives.772

This realisation and his further face-to-face relations with people of other faiths forced him to deal with a range of theological problems, which emerged during that process. Within this context, he called first for a “Copernican Revolution” in the Christian theology of religions. Then he reinterpreted the doctrine of Incarnation in the light of this “Copernican Revolution” and the doctrines of the Trinity and the Atonement. In so doing, he published the following significant books and essays: God and the Universe of Faiths [1973]; “Jesus and the World Religions” [1977]; God Has Many Names [1982]773 ; “The Non-Absoluteness of Christianity”[1987];774 Problems of Religious Pluralism [1989];775 An Interpretation of Religion [1989]776 ; The Metaphor of God Incarnate [1993]; and The Rainbow of Faiths [995].

We turn now to explore Hick’s understanding of the status of Jesus with special reference to Christianity’s relationship with other religions. While doing this, we will not reflect all his views on Christology, since others have already done so.777 Nor do we need to follow his writings according to their chronological order, since, as Chester Gillis has shown in his A Question of Final Belief 778 [1989], there has been no essential change in Hick’s views on the question of the status of Jesus after his move to Birmingham and the beginning of his interest in dialogue with people of other faiths.

In his God and the Universe of Faiths [1973], Hick stressed that it is time to take a shift from a “Ptolemaic [i.e. one’s own religion-centred] to a Copernican [ i.e. a God-centred] view of the religious life of mankind”.779 He maintains that just as the Copernican revolution represented a shift from the ancient, long standing Ptolemaic dogma that the earth is the centre of the revolving universe to the realisation that the sun is the centre, with all the planets, including the earth, revolving around it, modern Christian theology of religions needs a Copernican revolution which “involves a shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that it is God who is at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve and revolve around him”.780 He states that the Christian version of Ptolemaic theology puts Christianity at the centre of the universe of faiths, and regards all other religions as epicycles, revolving, to one degree or another, around it. Hick argues that this kind of centrality of Christianity is due to the claimed uniqueness of Jesus which depends on the doctrine of divine incarnation. He says

If God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus, all other revelations are thereby marginalised as inferior and secondary. Indeed, their effect can only be to draw people in a different direction, away from God’s direct self-disclosure in Christ. For if the Creator has personally come down to earth and founded his own religion, embodied in the Christian Church, he must surely want all human beings to become part of that Church. Indeed it would seem to follow that sooner or later they must become part of it if they are to participate in the eternal life of the redeemed. Thus the doctrine that Jesus was none other than God himself – or, more precisely, that he was the Second Person of the divine Trinity living a human life – leads, by an inevitable logic, to Christian absolutism, a logic that was manifested historically in the development of the dogma Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.781

As can be seen from this passage, Hick asserts that the results of a “Ptolemaic theology of religions” are unacceptable for our present day circumstances, since it entails that Christianity was founded by God in person. Also, he says that the belief that the second Person of the Trinity has revealed himself as a human inevitably leads to Christian exclusivism and absolutism.782 For that reason, Hick argues for the necessity of a reconsideration and reinterpretation of the traditional Christian doctrine of Incarnation to determine the status of Jesus anew.

As has been observed so far, Hick’s call for a “Copernican Revolution” in the Christian theology of religions challenges the uniqueness and normativeness of Jesus, since it requires a readjustment in the Christian’s appropriation of his own tradition, forcing him to reconsider the Christological doctrine regarding the identity of Jesus. This is, Hick states, “the most difficult of all issues for a Christian theology of religions”. He adds, “but before adopting the new picture [God centred model] a Christian must be satisfied that his devotion to Jesus as his personal Lord and Saviour is not thereby brought into question or its validity denied”.783

Hick takes the consciousness of Jesus as a starting point and interprets the doctrine of Incarnation and the Trinity according to this consciousness. In his essay “Jesus and the World Religions” [1977], Hick deals with the issue of the status of Jesus by considering him as a human being who was open to God’s presence and upheld by an extraordinary intense God-consciousness that made God real to others and revolutionised the lives of those who followed in his footsteps. So, what makes Jesus significant for Hick is his consciousness of God. It is this heightened consciousness of God that accounts for Jesus’s use of the word abba for God; his openness of spirit and response to God; his power to heal and bring new life; and the impact he had on those who met him. He further maintains that to come into Jesus’s presence was in some sense to come into God’s presence. Just as Jesus encountered the totality of God’s claim, so too, those who encountered Jesus experienced “the absolute claim of God”. Hick clarifies the issue of how one encounters God when one comes into Jesus’s presence as follows: ” . . . in Jesus’s presence, we should have felt that we are in the presence of God – not in the sense that the man Jesus literally is God, but in the sense that he was so totally conscious of God that we could catch something of that consciousness by spiritual contagion”.784

After all these points, Hick concludes that Jesus was “a Spirit-filled prophet and healer” who considered “his own role as that of the final prophet, proclaiming the imminent coming of the kingdom on earth”.785 In short, the foundation of Hick’s Christology totally depends on the consciousness of the historical Jesus. What made Jesus significant, what constituted him as mediator, and what accounted for his impact was his heightened consciousness of God’s presence.

This understanding of Jesus led Hick to rethink the Christian doctrine of Incarnation and the Divinity of Jesus. In his recent work The Rainbow of Faiths [1995], Hick mentions three main problems with the traditional doctrine of Incarnation: (1) Jesus himself did not teach that “he was God, or God the Son, the second person of a Holy Trinity, incarnate”; (2) Christian authorities and theologians have never explained the meaning of the traditional dogma that Jesus was truly God and truly man in an intelligible way, since the following questions are still awaiting their answers from Christian authorities: “How could Jesus be at the same time divinely omnipotent and humanly weak and vulnerable; divinely omniscient and humanly ignorant; the eternal, infinite, self-existent creator of the universe and a temporal, finite and dependent creature?” (3) The literal meaning of the doctrine of incarnation does irreparable damage to Christians’ relations with people of other faiths.786

After pointing out the problems of the traditional understanding of the doctrine of Incarnation in this way, he moves to examine the historical development of this doctrine. He argues that it was the early community that attributed deity to Jesus, not Jesus himself or his immediate disciples. The deification of Jesus occurred when the language of divine sonship was transferred from a Jewish context to a Roman culture. He states that before Jesus, the Jews already were familiar with “Son of God” language from the Old Testament’s psalms.787 When this language was used referring to someone, it was understood metaphorically that that person “was close to God, served God, and acted in the spirit of God”. In this sense, Hick maintains that “Jesus as a great charismatic preacher and healer, should be thought of as a son of God”.788 When this sort of understanding of Jesus moved to the Gentile world, its metaphorical meaning started to change, and thus Jesus gradually was deified in the minds of Christians. Finally, Jesus became “the literal God the Son, the Second Person of a divine Trinity”.789 Thus, says Hick, the eschatological human prophet was gradually elevated to a divine status.

As has been observed so far, according to Hick the traditional Christian doctrine of Incarnation neither was thought of by Jesus himself nor developed by his first disciples, but emerged in the mind of the early Church in the course of time. By arguing thus, Hick makes a distinction between the self-understanding of the historical Jesus and “the understanding of Jesus which eventually became orthodox Christian dogma acknowledging him as God the Son incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity living a human life”.790 Thus, he means that if the historical Jesus did not consider himself to be God Incarnate, then he cannot be regarded as such, and statements of this kind are to be understood metaphorically not literally.

To uphold this argument, Hick points out that there is some agreement among both conservative and liberal New Testament scholars that the exclusive statements of the Gospels which are used to support the traditional doctrine did not belong to the historical Jesus but, on the contrary, were “put into his mouth some sixty or seventy years later by a Christian writer expressing the theology that had developed in his part of the expanding church”.791

In the light of these explanations, it can be concluded that the incarnation of Jesus should be understood not as a theological hypothesis, but as a myth.792 For it represents the “application to Jesus of a mythical concept whose function is analogous to that of the notion of divine sonship ascribed in the ancient world to a king”.793 It is also myth, because it has no literal meaning; it is a mystery with no explanatory power. Hick also adds that the mythological character of the doctrine of incarnation can also be found in non-theological language. He explains that the very concept of a “divine incarnation” is itself “metaphorical”. Even in secular usage, he writes, the notion of “incarnation” functions as a “basic metaphor”. In this secular sense, “incarnation” is understood to be “the embodiment of ideas, values, insights in human living”.794 Briefly, he concludes that the Christian doctrine of Incarnation should not be regarded as a divinely formulated and guaranteed proposition, but rather as human attempts to grasp the religious meaning of the Christ event.

Hick stresses that this kind of understanding of the traditional doctrine of Incarnation can lead to a fruitful dialogue between Christians and people of other faiths, since it eliminates one of the major obstacles in the dialogue between Christianity and other religions which is the assumption that Christianity has a unique position among religions because of its foundational claim about the uniqueness of Jesus. This doctrine of a unique divine incarnation in Jesus “has long poisoned the relationship both between Christians and Jews and between Christians and Muslims, as well as affecting the history of Christian imperialism in the far East, India, Africa, and elsewhere”.795 Hick also points out that the metaphysical deification of Jesus is not only self-contradictory, but is also dangerous from the point of view of the theology of religions. A metaphysically understood doctrine of the Incarnation “implies that God can be adequately known and responded to only through Jesus” and that “the whole religious life of mankind, beyond the stream of Judaic-Christian faith is thus by implication excluded as lying outside the sphere of salvation”.796

After expressing the negative effect of the traditional doctrine of Incarnation in this way, Hick suggests that his metaphorical understanding of the doctrine of Incarnation can overcome all exclusive approaches to the world religions by leading Christians to consider Jesus as a Saviour among many. He states that if Christians

see the incarnation as a mythological idea applied to Jesus to express the experienced fact that he is our sufficient, effective, and saving point of contact with God, we no longer have to draw the negative conclusion that he is man’s one and only one effective point of contact with God. We can revere Christ as the one through whom we have found salvation, without having to deny other points of reported saving contact between God and man. We can recommend the way of Christian faith without having to discommend other ways of faith. We can say that there is salvation in Christ without having to say that there is no salvation other than in Christ.797

This new interpretation of the doctrine of Incarnation and the status of Jesus naturally leads Hick to advocate that there are other saviours and tools for salvation apart from Jesus and the Christian faith. This means that people of other faiths can attain salvation by following their own religious traditions. Hick clarifies this point by maintaining that there is a contradiction in the traditional Christian understanding of salvation, since, according to him, Christians, on the one hand, believe that God’s love and God’s plan of salvation are universal, but, on the other hand, they argue that there is only one way to salvation and it is the Christian way.798 Hick stresses that there is a loving Creator who ultimately wants all of humankind to share in the fullness of their created nature, and that salvation itself is universal. 799

Hick argues that Christians cannot claim that Christianity or Jesus Christ is the tool for salvation because there are other faiths and religious figures through whom their followers gain salvation. By moving away from self-centeredness to reality-centeredness he makes the following three points concerning this transformation. Firstly, each religious tradition achieves this human transformation in its own way.800 Secondly, this transformation is essentially the same in all traditions.801 Thirdly, this human transformation occurs to the same extent within each of the religious traditions, since the religious life and thought of none “constitutes a manifestly more efficacious context of salvation than the others”. In other words “none of them, taken as a totality, has been markedly more successful or markedly less successful than the others in bringing about the redemption of human life in self-giving to God”.802 Thus, Hick shifts from a theology based on a special revelation to a theology based on plurality of revelations in the sense that “there is a plurality of divine revelations, making possible a plurality of forms of saving human response” to the Transcendent Reality. 803

In the light of this pluralistic understanding, Hick concludes that the Christian doctrine of Jesus being God incarnate has no literal meaning, but is metaphorical in the sense that He “was so open to divine inspiration, so responsive to the divine spirit, so obedient to God’s will, that God was able to act on earth in and through Him”. Within this context, he suggests that Christians consider Jesus as a man who has made God real to them, who has shown them how to live as citizens of God’s kingdom, who is their revered spiritual leader, inspiration and model without denying that the spiritual and religious figures of other religious traditions act in the same way and to the same extent for their followers.804

Evaluation: As has been observed, Hick is a philosopher of religion whose critical standpoint takes into account the plurality of religions. He has seen the traditional Christian perception of the status of Jesus as problematic for a fruitful dialogue between Christians and people of other faiths and has attempted to redetermine the status of Jesus by reinterpreting the doctrine of Incarnation in the light of modern scholarship and current interreligious dialogue. The majority of Christians today have not shared his views on this issue. On the contrary, they have been criticised and objected to by a number of Christian theologians.805 He has been accused of underestimating the New Testament accounts and the Christian tradition, since, according to those theologians, Hick urges Christians to abandon the uniqueness of Christ for the sake of dialogue. We will not go into detail about this intra-Christian debate here because of our specific purpose. We will rather discuss Hick’s interpretations from the perspective of Christian-Muslim dialogue in order to see whether they contribute to its development.

Firstly, coming to know people of other faiths in the process of dialogue can lead one to rethink one’s own beliefs where these imply that one’s own faith is superior. Hick realised during his meeting with people of other faiths that just like Christians, they also try to open their hearts and minds to God, and there are good and ethical people among them. Then, he questioned the traditional Christian understanding that Jesus Christ is in the centre, and all other faiths revolve around him by calling for his “Copernican Revolution”, in which he put God in the centre instead of Jesus and argued that all religions including Christianity revolve around God. Although this theory challenges all religious traditions, in our opinion, its employment in the process of dialogue can lead one to accept one’s dialogue partner on an equal status. It indicates that the ultimate objective of dialogue is not to manipulate others to a particular religious tradition but to God, or in Hick’s case to the Transcendent Reality. For example, if Muslims put the meaning of Islam namely, submission to God at the centre instead of the institutionalised religion of the Prophet Muhammad, they could rescue themselves from absolutising their own religion by excluding others.

Secondly, Hick reinterpreted the traditional Christian belief about Jesus as God the Son incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity, living a human life. He concluded that Jesus was a human being who made God real to those who follow Him through His God consciousness, His openness to God’s presence and divine inspiration. With this interpretation of the incarnation, it seems that Hick puts Christian claims on the status of Jesus on the same level with claims of people of other faiths about their own religious figures such as Buddha and the Prophet Muhammad. He emphasises that it is possible to see “God’s activity in Jesus as being of the same kind as God’s activity in other great human mediators of the divine”.806 It would seem that Hick wants to replace Christocentric Christian understanding of other religions with God-centred or reality-centred understanding without giving up the central significance of Christ for Christians. He emphasises that what he has in his mind is a clarification of Christian language about the status of Jesus, rather than a change of actual Christian belief in Jesus.

From the Muslim point of view this conclusion seems to remove one of the greatest obstacles of Christian-Muslim dialogue, since the Qur’an rejects the divinity of Jesus which is upheld by the central Christian doctrines of Incarnation, Trinity and Atonement, not Christians and their faith.807 So, this conclusion implies that there is an affinity between Hick’s metaphorical understanding of the doctrine of Incarnation and the Qur’anic understanding of Jesus, since both of them consider Jesus to be no more than a human prophet. However, there is also a difference between them. For while Hick rejects the virgin birth of Jesus by claiming that it is contradictory to the natural way of birth, the Qur’an strongly defends it. The logic of the Qur’an here is that Jesus was the Word of God, a divine message like the Qur’an, and for that reason the human vehicle of this divine message must be pure and untainted.808

Although this affinity seems to contribute to the development of Christian-Muslim dialogue, it raises some problems. For, when we consider how Hick arrived at some of his conclusions, it becomes obvious that he expects followers of other faiths to do the same thing for their own ontological claims. We may suggest that he wants Muslims to understand metaphorically the uncreatedness of the Qur’an and the finality of the Prophet Muhammad. In this sense, as D’Costa rightly observes, by mythologising the traditional Christian perception of the status of Jesus, Hick “equally mythologizes all other ontological claims about the nature of ultimate reality, rendering them disfigured and often portraying them in a fashion contrary to their own truth”.809 Because of this implication, Hick’s and other like-minded theologians’ views have been considered by some other theologians as a “new kind of Western imperialism”.810

Further, this demand of Hick could increase the anxieties of the dialogue partners. Committed and sincere Christians and Muslims may think that if they enter into dialogue with each other, they may lose their own beliefs. By taking this point into account, we may conclude that we need not abandon or even question our own traditional beliefs for the sake of better relations with people of other faiths. Or as D’Costa correctly states, we cannot abandon our own traditional beliefs to please those who disagree with them.811 Because of this danger of Hick’s views for dialogue, it would be better to consider him not a practising dialogue partner, but an academic theologian.

Thirdly, it is obvious that by considering the idea of Divine incarnation as a metaphor Hick went beyond the official views of the Roman Catholic Church and the WCC which acknowledged Jesus as unique, definitive, absolute, and the normative revelation not only for Christians but also all humankind. Because of this point, Pope John Paul II implicitly condemned Hick’s understanding of the status of Jesus in his encyclical Redemdoris Missio, as has been observed in chapter two.

However, Hick’s understanding of the status of Jesus seems to go a long way in contributing to the development of interreligious dialogue in general and dialogue with Muslims in particular. With a very good intention, he has boldly tried to solve some significant theological problems which Christians face both because of modern scientific developments and interreligious dialogue.812