The Unacknowledged Exclusivism in John Hick's Pluralistic Hypothesis — Epoche C2
The hypothesis, stated as Hick states it In An Interpretation of Religion (1989), the published form of his Gifford Lectures, John Hick asks his reader to accept one substantive claim supported by one distinction. The claim is that the major religious traditions are each authentic human responses to a single transcendent reality, which he calls the Real, and that none of them is more veridical than the others. The distinction is imported from Kant and then altered: between the Real an sich — as it is in itself, independently of any encounter with it — and the Real as humanly experienced and thought. Hick's alteration is that the categories through which the Real is apprehended are not the universal structures of any rational mind but culturally and historically particular schemata, which is why the resulting apprehensions differ so much. The apprehensions sort into two families. The Real experienced through the category of deity yields what Hick calls the divine personae : Yahweh, the heavenly Father, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva. Experienced through the category of the absolute it yields the metaphysical impersonae : Brahman, the Tao, Nirvāṇa, the Dharmakāya. Neither family is the Real an sich , of which Hick holds that no substantial predicate is true: it cannot be said to be one or many, personal or impersonal, good or evil, a substance or a process. Only what he calls purely formal properties apply — being such as to be referred to, being the ground of the religious experience in question. That last commitment forces the criterion of authenticity out of the metaphysics and into ethics, and Hick supplies one. A tradition is an authentic response to the Real to the extent that it effects "the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness", detectable in the moral quality of the lives it produces. This is the load-bearing element of the whole structure, and everything argued below turns on it. The thesis of this essay is not that Hick's hypothesis is one contested position among others. He answered that charge, as the next section shows, and the answer is good. The thesis is more specific: the hypothesis is Christian in its architecture — in the criterion just quoted, in the two-category grid, and above all in the operation it requires each tradition to perform on its own central claims. It therefore fails to deliver the reciprocity it promises, and it fails for reasons internal to it rather than by mere failure of authorial tact. The charge Hick answered, and why it is not the charge here Alan Race's Christians and Religious Pluralism (1983) fixed the vocabulary this debate still uses. Exclusivism holds that salvation is available only through one tradition; inclusivism holds that other traditions may mediate a salvation whose ground is nevertheless the one tradition's; pluralism holds that several traditions are independently adequate. Hick's hypothesis is the paradigm of the third. The obvious retort is that pluralism is itself a fourth exclusivism: it makes a claim about all religions that most religious people reject, and it consigns their self-understanding to error. Gavin D'Costa put this in its strongest form in 1996, arguing that a pluralist view of religions is impossible as such, because any pluralism must adjudicate among traditions by criteria drawn from somewhere, and there is no unsituated somewhere for them to be drawn from; pluralism is therefore a tradition-specific position, which is to say a species of the very exclusivism it opposes. Alvin Plantinga, in Warranted Christian Belief (2000), presses the same point from the epistemological side, together with a second objection: if literally no substantial property is true of the Real, then the Real cannot be what makes one response authentic and another inauthentic, since it has no character for the responses to be adequate or inadequate to. Hick's reply to the first objection is available and should be stated fairly, because it is often ignored. His hypothesis, he insists, is not a religious claim competing with Christian or Buddhist claims on their own level; it is a second-order philosophical hypothesis about the relation between religious experience and its object, offered as the best explanation of a body of data. That a philosophical explanation is contested, and is rejected by many of the people whose behaviour it explains, is no objection to it; the same is true of every theory in the human sciences. On its own terms the reply works, and the D'Costa–Plantinga charge, taken as the charge that Hick is just one more partisan, does not land cleanly. The argument of this essay accepts that reply and then denies its application, on the ground that the hypothesis is not level-neutral in the way the reply requires. A second-order explanation is entitled to be contested; it is not entitled to demand a first-order revision from its subject matter as the price of being true. Hick's does demand one, as the third argument below shows. Three features of the hypothesis carry the demand. First: the criterion of authenticity is a soteriological one Hick's test of authenticity requires that a tradition be construed as fundamentally soteriological — in the business of moving individuals out of a defective condition into a better one — since only such a tradition can be measured by how far it effects the transformation. Hick knows this restricts the field, and he says so: the hypothesis is offered about the traditions that arose in or after what Karl Jaspers called the axial age, the traditions Hick reads as concerned with personal salvation or liberation, and not about the archaic religion he takes to be concerned with the maintenance of a cosmic and social order. The restriction is stated openly, which is to Hick's credit; but stating a restriction does not make it neutral. It means the hypothesis defines its own field by a criterion some religion fails, and what it fails is not a test of authenticity but