Presbyterians Reject Theologian Amid Fear of Schism

An internationally known theologian at Claremont Graduate School has been turned down in his renewed bid to be accepted as a Presbyterian minister, concluding a 4-year-old controversy in which opponents said the doctrinal standards and unity of the denomination were at stake.

The Rev. John Hick, still a member of a related church body in England, was admitted in 1983 as a member of the San Gabriel Presbytery, a regional body of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), but the vote was later challenged successfully on procedural grounds.

The case became a cause celebre in Presbyterian circles. Though Hick maintained that his studies showing that “God is at work within other great religions” call for a rethinking of traditional doctrine about the nature of Christ, opponents insisted that Hick’s deviation from Presbyterian statements of faith made him ineligible for membership. Hick’s writings, including the controversial 1977 book, “The Myth of God Incarnate,” which he co-edited, were frequently cited.

Presbytery officials announced this week that their committee on ministry voted 8 to 7 on Feb. 20 to recommend against Hick’s membership. After that, the committee voted 10 to 4 to ask Hick to “withdraw his application for membership in order to preserve the peace, unity and purity of the church,” and the theologian “graciously agreed to do so,” said officials of the Azusa-based regional body.

Hick, 65, chairman of the religion department at Claremont Graduate School and Danforth professor of the philosophy of religion, declined to comment specifically on the committee action.

In a brief statement, Hick said the central issue was “my view of the other great world religions as (additional) spheres of salvation and my consequent diminution of the traditional absolute and exclusive claims of Christianity. I believe our contemporary experience of people of the other world faiths leads us to see those faiths as different but authentic parts of salvation.”

Such a viewpoint has “great practical importance in the Los Angeles area, where there is the third-largest Jewish community in the world, a large and growing Muslim population, and sizable Buddhist and Hindu communities,” he said.

The Rev. James Angell, pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church, said he was very disappointed with the presbytery’s action. “I think the Presbyterian Church needs great creative minds like John Hick. I think we are impoverishing ourselves by taking such a narrow view of what is orthodox,” Angell said.

If Hick had been admitted to the 3-million-member denomination, there would have been repercussions nationally, conservative Presbyterians said.

‘There would have been real trouble; it would have disturbed the entire church,” said George Booker of Springfield, Pa., managing editor of a 560,000-circulation newspaper for the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee.

One of the San Gabriel Valley ministers who brought the original complaint against Hick claimed that if Hick had been accepted, some conservative congregations in the South might have pulled out of the reunited denomination. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was formed in 1983 from the Southern Presbyterian Church and the United Presbyterian Church, but the long-sought merger of the main “northern” and “southern” branches of Presbyterianism involved delicate negotiations.

“A large number of Southern congregations who have the right, up until mid-1988, to leave the denomination and keep their property indicated they would begin to exercise that right if, in fact, we had admitted Hick here,” said the Rev. Richard L. Spencer, an associate pastor at Arcadia Presbyterian Church.

“We were very concerned to protect the unity of the church,” Spencer said.

However, Spencer said the main issue for him was that Hick, though “obviously an able scholar,” was “more like a Unitarian Universalist minister in his faith than ours, as I understand it.” Hick is a minister of the United Reformed Church in England, which has designated him an “overseas missionary.” The Reformed tradition, which includes Presbyterians, “affirms that God was uniquely incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth,” Spencer said.

On Sept. 13, 1983, Hick was admitted as a clergy member by the San Gabriel Presbytery on a 98 to 92 vote, but Spencer and four others, including Paul Jewett of Fuller Theological Seminary, objected that there had not been sufficient time to examine Hick’s theology. On Jan. 18, 1986, the church’s permanent judicial commission affirmed a synod-level ruling that there were procedural errors and remanded the case back to the presbytery.

If the committee on ministry had recommended Hick as a member to a meeting of the full presbytery, Spencer said he thinks the presbytery would have voted “no” by a substantial margin.

The San Gabriel Presbytery extends from Los Angeles’ Chinatown on the west to Claremont on the east; from the San Gabriel Mountains on the north to Hacienda Heights on the south.

Angell, the Claremont pastor, lamented the loss to the denomination of a renowned thinker. Hick, who has written or edited 18 books, was chosen last year to give the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland, which Angell said is “probably the most distinguished lectureship in the world for theology.”

Angell concedes that Hick’s case may have been regarded by some Presbyterians as a test of orthodoxy in the church merger. “It does seem to me that we have been trying to make a lot of accommodations to protect our fragile reunion,” he said.

The presbytery action also exemplified the conservative mood in the country, Angell claimed.

In his book, “God Has Many Names,” published in 1980, Hick wrote that the Christian concept of the Incarnation--that Jesus was God in the flesh--cannot be treated as a factual hypothesis or one that has a literal meaning. “It is a mythological idea, a figure of speech, a piece of poetic imagery,” Hick wrote.

Angell said that when many people hear that Hick considers the idea of Incarnation a myth, “they don’t want to hear any more (because to them) he is someone who denies the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.”

But Angell maintained that Hick’s view of the Incarnation is very similar to that of Presbyterian theologian Donald Baillie, whose book “God Was in Christ” Angell called one of the best books written on the meaning of the Incarnation.