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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 ...
Theologian Mark Scott has argued that John Hick's theodicy is more closely aligned with Origen's beliefs than Irenaeus' and ought to be called an "Origenian theodicy". Origen used two metaphors for the world: it is a school and a hospital for souls, with God as Teacher and Physician, in which suffering plays both an educative and healing role.
In the 20th century, John Hick collated the ideas of Irenaeus into a distinct theodicy. He argued that the world exists as a "vale of soul-making" (a phrase that he drew from John Keats), and that suffering and evil must therefore occur. He argued that human goodness develops through the experience of evil and suffering.
John Hick used the term "soul-making" in his theodicy Evil and the God of Love to describe the kind of spiritual development that he believes justifies the existence of evil. This defense is employed by Michael Murray, [31] who explains how, in his view, divine hiddenness is essential to soul-making. It may seem that it is not hard to imagine a ...
Erik J. Wielenberg draws upon Lewis's broader corpus beyond The Problem of Pain but also, to a lesser extent, on the thought of two other contemporary proponents of the soul-making theodicy, John Hick and Trent Dougherty, in an attempt to make the case that Lewis's version of the soul-making theodicy has depth and resilience. [153]
The Irenaean (or soul-making) theodicy is named after the 2nd-century Greek theologian Irenaeus whose ideas were adopted in Eastern Christianity. [23] It has been modified and advocated in the twenty-first century by John Hick. [23] Irenaen theodicy stands in sharp contrast to the Augustinian.
John Hick criticised the Augustinian theodicy when he developed his own theodicy in 1966. Hick supported the views of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher , which he classified as Irenaean, who argued that the world is perfectly suited for the moral development of humans and that this justifies the existence of evil.
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."