ABSTRACT
Karl Barth was certainly no Stoic, but his theology does manifest an analogous concern to affirm both a high view of Providence and the freedom and ethical responsibility of the creature. The novelist Gustave Flaubert observed that Real life is always misrepresented by those who wish to make it lead up to a conclusion. Hick notes that most of the world's population has lived in 'a condition of life so degrading as to insult human dignity'. Furthermore, the traditional Christian focus on the span of the earthly life as the environment within which human salvation is realized is, Hick insists, unrealistic both as regards what is to happen before death and as regards what is to happen after death. Hick arrives at his preferred account of the patterning of human existence, an account which draws consciously upon, but is quite distinct from, certain Eastern models of reincarnation.
