Religious Pluralism and the Divine: Another Look at John Hick's Neo-Kantian Proposal

This study focuses upon the heart of John Hick's pluralistic philosophy of religion – his neo-Kantian response to the problem of conflicting inter-religious conceptions of the divine. Hick attempts to root his proposal in two streams of tradition: (1) the inter-religious awareness of the distinction between the divine in itself vs. the divine as humanly experienced, and (2) a Kantian epistemology. In fact, these attempts are problematic in that his hypothesis introduces a radical subjectivizing element at both junctures. In the end, I contend that Hick's neo-Kantian proposal undermines his decades-long effort to defend some form of religious realism.