ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the final critical question to be faced by Hick’s pluralist hypothesis: ‘Does it work?’ The issue at hand here is whether or not Hick’s pluralist hypothesis is actually successful on its own terms. John Hick’s neo-Kantian proposal represents a complex attempt to allow for a pluralist interpretation of religions, while still safeguarding his realist core belief that religious experience, ultimately, is a non-illusory experience of transcendent Reality. On one hand, there are those who are concerned that Hick’s neo-Kantian hypothesis and its noumenal Real that salvifically orients the religious adherents of the world sounds suspiciously like “a Western conception of a personal God.” On the other hand, some critics continue to suggest that important aspects of his pluralist model betray “a strong affinity with Eastern pantheistic conceptions of reality,” and are thus “antagonistic to the core principles of Christianity.”
