Abstract
It is a great honour to be chosen to deliver the Gifford Lectures, which are arguably the most prestigious lectureship on religion in the English-speaking world. One immediately thinks of past publications of lectures that have now achieved classic status — William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny of Man, to name just two. These lectures often represent the culmination of a career of scholarship. But many Gifford Lectures are period pieces that are remanded to obscurity and distant memory. Only the test of time will judge the fate of John Hick’s 1986–7 Gifford Lectures, titled An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. My attempt to interpret, appreciate and criticize them comes at the time of their publication, making me one of the first to offer an assessment of the contribution this work makes to scholarship.
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Notes
Chester Gillis, A Question of Final Belief: John Hick’s Pluralistic Theology of Salvation (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 59–66.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) p. 64.
Marshal G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, I. The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) p. 336ff.
Ariel Glucklich, Religious Jurisprudence in the Dharmaśāstra (New York: Macmillan, 1988) p. 39ff.
Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965) passim.
Augustine, On True Religion, in Earlier Writings, tr. John H. S. Burleigh, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953) p. 218ff.
H. Pinard, “La théorie de l’expérience religieuse. Son évolution, de Luther á W. James”, Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique, xvii (1921) 63–83
David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking through Confucius, SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987)
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© 1991 The Claremont Graduate School
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Gillis, C., Ernst, C.W., Hick, J. (1991). An Interpretation of An Interpretation of Religion. In: Hewitt, H. (eds) Problems in the Philosophy of Religion. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21547-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21547-8_2
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