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Paul Eddy's careful critique ("Religious Pluralism and the Divine: Another Look at John Hick's Neo-Kantian Proposal", Religious Studies, xxx, 1994) requires a response. The religious pluralism in question is a hypothesis about the relationship between the world's religions. It is a form of religious pluralism in that it is conceived from within the basic faith that religious experience is not in toto human imaginative projection but, whilst involving human conceptuality and imagination, is also a cognitive response to what Eddy calls the Divine and I (to avoid the theistic connotation of "divine") generally prefer to speak of as the Real. The hypothesis is that the great world faiths are different contexts of the salvific transformation of men and women from natural self-centredness to a new orientation centred in the Real or the Divine. They constitute different ways of conceiving and therefore of experiencing the Real, expressed in correspondingly different historical forms of life. The Kantian, or neo-Kantian, or Kantian-like distinction between the Real in itself, which lies beyond the scope of our human religious concepts, and the Real as humanly thought and experienced in terms of those concepts, is central to this hypothesis.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230283978_5

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