Abstract
It was in 1973, in his book God and the Universe of Faiths, that John Hick argued for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religion. This article focuses mainly on this revolution, a theocentric and Realocentric model of world religions, and it questions the sense of such a revolution as well as its existence. The essence of Hick’s idea basicaly states that the need for a Copernican revolution in theology involves an equally radical transformation in our conception of the universe of faiths and the place of our own religion in it. It involves a shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realization that it is God who is at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve him and revolve around him. In Hick’s later work, the term ‘God’, being too religion-specific, was replaced by ‘the Real’. This led to the statement that all religions are best understood as different phenomenal experiences of the one divine noumenon: the same Real(ity) and are equally valid ways of salvation for their followers.
Even though Hick kept changing and developing his idea of the Copernican revolution, he never changed his basic framework of the centrality of God or the Real at the universe of world religions. Nevertheless, Hick could not exceed the idea of God in the Christian sense and, even in his take on eschatology, the Real again appears as the God having Christian characteristics. As the result, Hick’s Copernican revolution has never stepped out of the Ptolemaic circle from which he desperately tried to escape. It is difficult then to ground the sense and the existence of such a revolution in theology.
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