The Multicultural Christian Church

Some may recall that in a previous Article, ‘The Irredeemably Evil BNP –An Open letter to Dr Carey’ I quoted the words of Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of  St Michael’s . Cornhill in the City of London who said, in the latest edition of ‘The Salisbury Review’ that the Church ‘has now embraced the secular agenda.  The so-called ‘progressive’ sexual and social policies, feminism, anti-sexism, anti- racism, idealistic internationalism and the dogma of universal human rights.’  ‘The Church’, he continued, ‘is now governed by people who, in the traditional sense are really unbelieving: feminised multiculturalists who see the Christianity they promised to defend as an impediment to a wider understanding based on the contradictory alliance between world religions and secular humanism.’

Well, how do they do it? Putting aside secular humanism, how do these people reconcile Christianity with other religions, say with Islam?

John Hick: a  Liberal 'Christian' theologian and belittler of Christianity.

Hick exemplifies the liberal mind set. His thinking in the theological field parallels multicultural ideas in politics. He was an evangelical Christian who came into contact with other faiths in the multicultural Birmingham in the late 6o’s and early 70’s. He had already come to believe in universalism and his favourable impression of some people of other religions compared to some Christians led him to reject the exclusive claims of Christianity (‘I am the way the truth and the life. No man comes unto the Father but by me’

A 'Christian' who denigrates Christians 

It is easy to pick out some members of another faith and to judge them better people than some Christians. Christianity does not claim to make perfect people, but does say that people can be made better than they were. And Hick judges Christians according to Christian standards and judges members of other faiths by the same standards, and  in the context of a Christian society. He does not see or set much store by the fact that it is quite another thing to judge these same people according to the standards of their own faith, and to see them in the context of their own faith communities.  For example, Moslems  who behave  in sincerely decent and friendly fashion towards non-Moslems are directly contradicting the injunctions of the Koran.

The Denigration of Christian Civilisation

And what about these communities? It isn't just a few individuals who count, but the Civilisation which a religion creates which matters. Like many liberals, Hicks denigrates the history of Christianity in comparison with other religions or with its stated mission in the world. Again he uses Christian moral standards to judge. He  fails to recognise or give due weight to the fact that Birmingham, and indeed the modern world, with all its life enhancing possibilities and achievements, is largely the creation of Christianity - of its faith in Reason and of a Loving God and his orderly universe. These brought about modern Science and Technology, Industry and Commerce and the attitudes to money and social organisation behind them.

Christianity too is responsible for just about every genuine social and political advance there has ever been since the Romans, something which Hick essentially ignores, denigrates or simply does not recognise as he should have done. In other words Hick displays a Liberal’s typical, unreasonable self hate or self-denigration.

As ever with liberals, it is our own fundamental beliefs which must first give way in order to accommodate others.

Hick’s essentially ‘Progressive’ agenda; the drive to a view of  religion as a oneness, parallelling the  ‘Progressives ‘One World’ dream, must involve a rejection of the traditional Christian view of Jesus as the Son of God.

Our beliefs defended and Hick refuted

Hick claims that Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God, or indeed any other title. But even if this is accepted, ( it can be strongly disputed), as Ben F Meyer points out in his highly important ‘The Aims of Jesus,’ Jesus proclaimed who he thought he was by his actions. Close reading of the Gospels reveals that  Jesus saw himself in the light of  Nathan’s prophesy to David about his offspring who will build God’s Temple, which shows the human nature of Jesus as well as the fact that he thought of himself as  in some sense the Son of God:-

‘when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your  offspring after you, who will come forth from your body, and I will establish his Kingdom. He will build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his Kingdom for ever. I will be his father and he will be my Son’ (2 Sam 7,12 -4)

Meyer’s case is that Jesus self-interprets, applying this text to himself and acting out the understanding that as Son, he will build the definitive dwelling place of God by gathering the nucleus of the restored Israel which will become the locus of divine presence  for the world’s salvation. Hick, though finds in Jesus merely someone ‘intensely and overwhelmingly conscious of the reality of God, so powerfully God conscious that his life vibrated as it were to the divine life. As a result his hands could heal the sick (something that even his enemies agreed he could do). The only real difference between Jesus and other people is the degree to which he incarnated a consciousness of God possible in all of us'.

Hick’s rejection of the divine Sonship of Jesus  also involves in turn the rejection of the  truth of the Resurrection – the crunch moment in the story of Jesus for Christian belief.

Unfortunately for  Hick, the truth of this story, under attack really from the moment the Women who saw Jesus’ empty tomb reported it to the disbelieving Disciples, has been confirmed in its essentials  by the most recent biblical scholarship,  such as ‘The Historical Reliability of the Gospels’ by Craig Blomberg, ‘Is the new Testament Reliable’ by Paul Barnett  and Richard Bauckham’s literary analyses of the Gospels in such offerings as ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnessess – The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony,.’ and ‘The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple’ (St John). St John was present when Jesus was arrested and at the empty tomb.

Hick argues for a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the understanding of Christianity with other faiths.. Christ and Christianity are no longer to be the centre of the religious universe with other religions revolving round them. Instead God is the centre and the other religions revolve around Him. Using Kant as a model, Hick draws a distinction between the way we know things and the way things are really like.

Kant realised that the human mind is active in all awareness, shaping the phenomenal (that is the experienced) world in the process of cognising it.  We cannot know true reality (the noumenal). So, for Hick, on the one hand there is the Ultimate Reality beyond all possible experience and rational thought and on the other, human descriptions of the Real as God or Nirvana  or Allah or whatever. These pictures are symbols of the reality about which we would not otherwise speak.

Each of the world religions represents a response to the same divine Ultimate Reality.  The reason for diversity of belief lies not in the difference in the nature of reality itself but in the different ways human beings experience the same reality. Each religion exists as a cultural whole which influences the way in which participants experience and understand the world around them. Thus, Christianity is not superior to other faiths, which are equally valid as modes of approaching the Ultimate Reality.

It will readily be seen how this scheme meshes with multiculturalism. In denying a special status to Christianity as only one of many modes, all equally valid, of approaching the Ultimate Reality, Hick’s scheme is really the religious version of multiculturalism, which denies any intrinsic superiority to any culture.

Indeed, it is a religious view which has grown out of the universalising One World idea. Although it is not necessary to bring in a universalising idea of religions to account for decency (by Christian standards) of non- Christians, Hick became enamoured with this idea and adapted his theology accordingly. In other words, he made up his mind about the  conclusion he wanted to reach and adapted his argument to suit this goal. Much the same in fact as does any liberal in a political discussion who changes or ignores or denigrates the importance of the facts of the case (take your pick) in order to reach a conclusion which he or she has already decided on.

In the case of Christian belief, these facts are those of the story of Jesus in the New Testament which, as pointed out above, are pretty much as Christians have always believed them to be, and, contrary to the views of Hick,  the glittering success of Western Christian Civilisation which has lifted untold millions out of  poverty, ignorance and disease.

And, whatever the details of Jesus’ birth, that is the message of Christmas which all may justly celebrate.