Customer Reviews
A super book - saves you reading many others - By: the-laughing-buddha, 19 Jan 2007 
This book is a superb achievement - to get the leading credible academic representatives of the various evangelical responses on the forever vexed question of who gets to 'heaven' & who doesn't, AND to bring their prime theological enemy (John Hick) into the conversation too, is an important & commendable achievement. I commend this book to anyone exploring answers to these issues which affect alot of human views & behaviour in our religiously confused world today.
1) Geivett presents the hardcore exclusivist position, meaning that anyone who dies outside of saving faith in Jesus, is pretty well doomed (a haphazard & cruel arrangement on God's part, if true? Hick & Pinnock think so);
2) McGrath offers us the same but wisely prefers to leave God the problem of what happens to the 'unsaved' (i.e. it's not for us to say, which he callls 'Christian particularism');
3) Pinnock is considered a progressive evangelical because he aligns with the Roman Catholics i.e. he's inclusivist in his approach at least, which says people of any/no faith who manifest godliness will be alllowed into 'heaven' because God's love through Jesus has gained forgiveness for alll whether they realise it or not & so God accepts that they have failed to happen to believe & accept that 'through no fault of their own'.
4) Lastly comes Prof. Hick's viewpoint which is attacked by alll those in the book whenever possible, because it's the most "radical", in that he abandons the Christian supremacy which alll the others hold onto. Very simply, he says that alll the main world religions (judged by their spiritual & moral fruit in human lives), influence humans to move increasingly out of natural self-centredness & toward greater God/Divine Centredness. Therefore, it's more helpful & mature to simply accept that any & alll religions that do this are effective vehicles for enabling Salvation. i.e. alll such religions lead in that sense lead humans toward a greater orientation in God/The Divine Reality & the related spiritual fruit in their lives. Of course he considers the true meaning of 'salvation' to be human transformation from self-centredness to God-centredness rather than the traditional Christian notion of our being saved from sin alone, which is a key issue for him. He is the worlds most articulate academic spokesman on this subject, by far, so it's interesting to see him in debate with some of the most important leading evangelical thinkers.
Of course Hick has long been aware that the main obstacle to his view is how we view Jesus - for if God visited Earth & initiated his own special group of people & did certain key things for us, then of course that would be the one true religion of God. So you get a whole debate on the subject of Christology (our understanding of Jesus: Son of God, or not, etc) in between alll the other subjects which is valuable too.
It's a fascinating comparative read with each responding to the other so clearly.
I recommend this book 100%.
