A Jewish Response to Jack Verheyden: On the Christian Doctrine of God

Abstract

John Hick, in his work, God Has Many Names, has pointed out that interfaith dialogue ‘takes place on various levels and in a variety of contexts’. One level, which he entitles ‘discursive theological dialogue’, is marked in one of its forms by what Hick labels as ‘purely confessional dialogue’.¹ In defining this form for the Christian participant in interreligious discussion, Hick states the following:

Here the Christian, in dialogue with people of other faiths, speaks from within his own conviction that God has entered decisively into history in the person of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity incarnate, who has revealed the divine nature and purpose for man in a unique and unsurpassable way in comparison with which all other revelations must necessarily be secondary, in the sense of being incomplete, or imperfect, or preliminary, or in some other way vitally inferior to the Christian revelation.²