Christian Theology and Religious Pluralism

The question of religious pluralism is the most significant yet thorniest of issues in theology today, and John Hick (1922–2012) has long been recognized as its most important scholar. However, while much has been written analyzing the philosophical basis of Hick’s pluralism, very little attention has been devoted to the theological foundations of his argument. Filling this gap, this book examines Hick’s theological attempts to systematically deconstruct the church’s traditional incarnational Christology. Special attention is given to evaluating Hick’s foundational theses “that Jesus himself did not teach what was to become the orthodox Christian understanding of him” and “that the dogma of Jesus’ two natures . . . has proved to be incapable of being explicated in any satisfactory way.” By elucidating the ways in which Hick’s arguments fail, David Nah demonstrates that Hick was unwarranted in breaking away from the church’s incarnational Christology that has been at the core of Christianity for almost two thousand years.