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John Harwood Hick (20 January 1922 – 9 February 2012) was an English-born philosopher of religion and theologian who taught in the United States for the larger part of his career. In philosophical theology , he made contributions in the areas of theodicy , eschatology , and Christology , and in the philosophy of religion he contributed to the ...
First edition. The Myth of God Incarnate is a book edited by John Hick and published by SCM Press in 1977. James Dunn, in a 1980 literature review of academic work on the incarnation, noted the "...well-publicized symposium entitled The Myth of God Incarnate, including contributions on the NT from M. Goulder and F. Young, which provoked several responses."
John Hick has expressed the premise as an allegory of a quest to a Celestial City. In this parable, a theist and an atheist are both walking down the same road. The theist believes there is a destination, the atheist believes there is not.
The "doer" in deification is the Holy Spirit, with whom the human being joins his will to receive this transforming grace by praxis and prayer, and as Gregory Palamas teaches, the Christian mystics are deified as they become filled with the Light of Tabor of the Holy Spirit in the degree that they make themselves open to it by asceticism ...
Theosis (Ancient Greek: θέωσις), or deification (deification may also refer to apotheosis, lit. "making divine"), is a transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God, as taught by the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Church; the same concept is also found in the Latin Church of the Catholic Church, where it is termed "divinization".
John Hick's argument has been notably criticized in the declaration Dominus Iesus by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. To a pluralist such as Hick, Christianity is not the absolute, unique, and final way to God, but one among several. While pluralists assert the validity of all religions, they also deny the finality of all religions.
Hick defines his view as "the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real or the Ultimate." [ 92 ] For Hick, all religions are true because they all allow us to encounter the divine reality, even if they have different deities and conceptions of it.
To Hick, calling Jesus the Son of God was a metaphor used by Jesus' followers to describe their commitment to what Jesus represented. [34] Hick believed that demythologising the incarnation would make sense of the variety of world religions and give them equal validity as ways to encounter God. [35]