ABSTRACT
Professor Hick has made it clear that before he came to Birmingham he had not encountered or been challenged by a truly pluralistic religious situation, and that his earlier thought had paid scant regard to the issues arising from the existence of a variety of religious systems. In Hick's essay on the 'Copernican revolution' there is an interesting quiet transition from rejecting the proposition that there is no salvation outside the church to setting aside, as if it were the same thing, that salvation is through Christ alone. The claustrophobic atmosphere of Hick's Universe of Faiths arises in part from his definition of religion: An understanding of the universe, together with an appropriate way of living within it, which involves reference beyond the natural order to God or gods or to the Absolute or to a transcendent order or process.
