Question

1)-Why is the distinction between desirable and undesirable conceptions of After-Life so critical for Hick's argument?

Answer 1

John Harwood Hick was born in January 1922 to Mark and Aileen Hick in Scarborough, England. The Hick family history involves a Scarborough shipping trade that can be traced back at least as far as the mid-eighteenth century. Hick was a middle child, whose older brother Pentland became an entrepreneur and younger sister Shirley had a successful career in social work. Hick grew up in a working middle-class family in Scarborough, where as a shy boy he had an unfavorable time at the nearby preparatory school, Lisvane. After briefly studying at home with a private tutor, Hick spent two more favorable years (1937-38) at a Quaker boarding school, Bootham, in York. After Bootham, Hick returned to Scarborough to work as an articled clerk for his father’s small law firm, Hick & Hands.

By the age of seventeen, Hick was reading many of the major works of Western philosophy, finding especially fascinating Kant, who would shape his later philosophical pursuits. Hick’s family was not known for academics, despite two notable exceptions from his mother’s side: Benjamin Cocker, who taught philosophy at the University of Michigan in the late nineteenth century, and Hick’s great uncle, Edward Wales Hirst, who taught Christian Ethics at Manchester University and elsewhere. Hirst encouraged Hick to pursue academic philosophy and continued to correspond with him after he decided instead to study law. While still working at Hick & Hands, Hick began commuting twice a week to University College, Hull, to attend law lectures. This was shortly before the outbreak of World War II and the bombing of Britain, and by his second term Hick had moved to a hostel closer to campus in order to study full-time.

Hick’s family was not particularly religious, though his mother and grandmother had both experimented widely in a variety of religious practices, which helped develop in him a keen religious interest from a young age. He had a penchant for leftist, anti-Christian literature of the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and others; yet in the midst of the turmoil at the outbreak of the war, Hick found himself turning to evangelical Christianity under the influence of his college friends from the Inter-Varsity Fellowship. Hick writes of his experience:

As a law student at University College, Hull, at the age of eighteen, I underwent a powerful evangelical conversion under the impact of the New Testament figure of Jesus. For several days I was in a state of intense mental and emotional turmoil, during which I became increasingly aware of a higher truth and greater reality pressing in upon me and claiming my recognition and response. At first this was highly unwelcome, a disturbing and challenging demand for nothing less than a revolution in personal identity. But then the disturbing claim became a liberating invitation. The reality that was pressing in upon me was not only awesomely demanding.... but also irresistibly attractive, and I entered with great joy and excitement into the world of Christian faith.... An experience of this kind which I cannot forget, even though it happened forty-two years ago [from 1982], occurred—of all places—on the top deck of a bus in the middle of the city of Hull.... As everyone will be very conscious who can themselves remember such a moment, all descriptions are inadequate. But it was as though the skies opened up and light poured down and filled me with a sense of overflowing joy, in response to an immense transcendent goodness and love. I remember that I couldn’t help smiling broadly—smiling back, as it were, at God – though if any of the other passengers were looking they must have thought that I was a lunatic, grinning at nothing. (Autobiography, 33-34)

Though Hick now views his subsequent evangelical years as something of an anomaly on the span of his intellectual biography, at the time it had a dramatic, life-changing impact. He immediately left law to study for Christian ministry, at first still at Hull but shortly thereafter at Edinburgh. While at Edinburgh he studied philosophy under Norman Kemp Smith, who left an indelible impression on the young Hick.

Hick’s time at Edinburgh was interrupted, however, by World War II. As a conscientious objector—much to the dismay of his father—Hick declined the draft and instead served with the Friends Ambulance Unit in Egypt, Italy and Greece. Upon returning from the war, he resumed at Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1948 before going to Oriel College, Oxford, to earn his doctorate in philosophy. At Oxford Hick studied under H. H. Price, and Hick’s thesis became the basis for his first book, Faith and Knowledge.

Hick then went to Westminster College, Cambridge, in 1950, where for the next three years he studied for the Presbyterian ministry, primarily under theologian H. H. Farmer. At Westminster Hick met his soon-to-be wife, Hazel. After graduating from Westminster, he was inducted as minister of Belford Presbyterian church in the small town of Belford, Northumberland, in August 1953. Later that month he and Hazel were married in the church, where Hick served as minister for two and a half years and where the Hicks had their first daughter, Eleanor, in June 1955.

Hick left Belford for the U.S., where in the spring semester of 1956 he began an assistant professorship in philosophy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The following year he published Faith and Knowledge with Cornell University Press. At the time Cornell’s philosophy faculty included Max Black, Norman Malcolm, and John Rawls, among others, and was known as a center for Wittgensteinian thought. Hick taught at Cornell for three and a half years, but not being himself Wittgensteinian, he looked elsewhere for a teaching position. While at Cornell the Hicks had two sons: Mark, born in 1957, and Peter, born toward the end of their time in Ithaca.

In the fall of 1959, Hick moved from Cornell to the Stuart chair of Christian philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary. While at Princeton he became the center of controversy with the Presbyterian synod of New Jersey for not affirming—though not necessarily denying—the virgin birth of Christ. The case received national attention and was eventually decided in Hick’s favor, allowing him to remain in his professorship.

In 1963 Hick received the Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a one year S. A. Cooke Bye-Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where for the following year he worked on what would become his second monograph, Evil and the God of Love. During his sabbatical at Cambridge, a lectureship in philosophy of religion opened there, to which Hick was appointed. He taught one last semester at Princeton Seminary before moving to Cambridge.

During Hick’s third year at Cambridge, the H. G. Wood chair of philosophy of religion at Birmingham—previously held by Ninian Smart—opened, and Hick received the appointment. It was at Birmingham that Hick’s pluralistic outlook began to take shape, as he spent much of his time outside of class with multi-faith groups working on race issues in and around the city. He writes of his experiences:

As I spent time in mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples as well as churches something very important dawned on me. On the one hand all the externals were different.... And not only the externals, but also the languages, the concepts, the scriptures, the traditions are all different and distinctive. But at a deeper level it seemed evident to me that essentially the same thing was going on in all these different places of worship, namely men and women were coming together under the auspices of some ancient, highly developed tradition which enables them to open their minds and hearts “upwards” toward a higher divine reality which makes a claim on the living of their lives. (Autobiography, 160)

Hick subsequently became heavily involved with the group All Faiths for One Race, working on civil rights issues in and around Birmingham. He also began studying Eastern religions, traveling to India to study Hinduism, Punjab to study Sikhism, and Sri Lanka to study Buddhism. The fruit of this study would be his extensive work, Death and Eternal Life, in which he explores various Eastern and Western conceptions of the afterlife and develops an afterlife hypothesis combining elements from Eastern and Western traditions.

In 1977 Hick became embroiled in further controversy after the publication of his edited work, The Myth of God Incarnate. Hick admits that the title was intentionally provocative as an attempt to open the ideas of the book to a larger audience. In this he succeeded, as the book sold thirty-thousand copies in the first six months and was translated into various languages. During their time at Birmingham, the Hicks also had their youngest son, Mike, who at the age of twenty-four would be killed in a tragic climbing accident in the French Alps.

In 1978 Hick gave a lecture at Claremont Graduate University near Los Angeles and was subsequently offered the position of Danforth professor of philosophy of religion. For his first three years, he split his year between Claremont and Birmingham—even spending the summer of 1980 teaching in South Africa, where he met Desmond Tutu, who would become a life-long friend—but beginning in 1982 Hick moved full-time to Claremont. He spent the next ten years at Claremont teaching, organizing conferences in philosophy of religion, and developing his pluralistic hypothesis, which he would present as his Gifford Lectures in 1986-87 and publish as An Interpretation of Religion in 1989 to much critical praise, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. During his time at Claremont, Hick’s pluralism took a less theistic turn, due in large measure to his interaction with Buddhist philosophers in the U.S. and Japan, including his Claremont colleague, Masao Abe