Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

eligious uplift is the same... Probably the
religion of the future will succeed in
incorporating the best insights of them all.
Christian missionaries, therefore, should not
impose their views on others but should rather
sit at a round table and pool their views for
the good of all. Confucius, Lao-tse, Asoka,
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and then finally
Jews! These are the great leaders of
mankind (Heinecken, 1957:131).
John Hick endorses ‘pluralist theo-centrism,’ a concept that does not put Christ or
any other religious figure at the centre. Instead, he suggests that Christ, Allah, Brahman
and others are merely planets orbiting the real theos (i.e., god), who remains abstract to
humanity. These names are really ‘masks’ by which “the divine reality is thought to be
encountered by devotees of those religions... But none of them is ultimately true in the
way their worshippers claim” (Chris Wright, in Taylor, 2000:87). Hick argues “we
should no longer put Christ or the church at the centre of the religious universe, but only
God” (Chris Wright, in Taylor, 2000:87). To John Hick, this generic ‘God’ is like the
sun, orbited by many planets, metaphorically representing the different religious
constructs. Hick believes all names for ‘god’ -- Yahweh, Jesus, Vishnu, Allah, Brahman,
etc., -- are variations on the same personage. Thus, what pluralism does to Christianity, it
does to all religions, reducing them to meaningless claims, where none is any truer than
others. Of the Jewish voice of God, Hick said, for example:
The concrete figure of Jahweh is thus not
identical with the ultimate divine reality as it
is in itself but is an authentic face or mask or
persona of the Transcendent in relation to one
particular human community... For precisely
the same has to be said of the heavenly Father
of Christianity, of the Allah of Islam, of
Vishnu, or Shiva, and so on (Hick, 1992:130).
What is so incongruous and absurd about all this is that if one will only take the time
to compare the major religious figures, profound differences quickly become apparent.
Muhammad is called the prophetic successor of Jesus Christ, yet the tenure and focus of
their lives were drastically different. Muhammad was a man who conquered territorially
via military conquest, and forced his beliefs on others. Jesus, in contrast, healed the lame
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa