Poor John Hick

This is for my missionary friends, now Di can sarcastically say, "Poor John Hick." I'm writing a paper about him that is due on Friday (today) in about 14 hours, so when the folks in Poland roll out of bed, around 11AM I'll still be up working on this paper.

John Hick is currently one of the most vocal advocates for religious pluralism. Perhaps the most interesting fact about Hick is that he once was an evangelical. As a law student at the University College, Hull, Hick underwent as he described, “a powerful evangelical conversion under the impact of the New Testament figure of Jesus.” Hick experienced a higher truth and sensed the presence of a greater power. Eventually Hick accepted what he calls the evangelical package of theology: “the verbal inspiration of the Bible; Creation and Fall; Jesus as God the Son incarnate, born of a virgin, conscious of His divine nature, and performing miracles of divine power; redemption by His blood from sin and guilt; Jesus’ bodily resurrection, ascension, and future return in glory; heaven and hell.”

After serving in World War II with an ambulance unit, and upon returning to the University of Edinburgh to finish his philosophical studies, Hick had a crisis of faith. He didn’t have any answers as to how the sun stood still for a day according to the biblical passage in Joshua 10:13. The creation account in Genesis appeared to be contradictory with respect to what we know about evolutionary biology. He didn’t know how an all-loving God can send people to Hell for eternal torment. According to Hick, there didn’t seem to be any good answers to these questions.

For Hick, his first departure from the orthodox faith was when he questioned whether belief in the Incarnation required a belief in the historicity of the virgin conception. Hick claims that it’s actually beneficial for other young people to undergo an evangelical conversion similar to his, in order to jolt the younger generation out of the “secular humanism of our culture.” Although, a conversion like Hick’s is only beneficial so long as one is able to later remove the evangelical bent of one’s religious beliefs at a later date.

Hick now claims that anyone who is a thinking person can’t possibly accept a form of exclusivism

Just so everybody knows, exclusivism is that there is only one truth.

I also should let everybody know that I don't agree with Hick, I actually argue against him.