Hick's view of the nature of God and religion

• In his early years, Hick was a conservative evangelical, but gradually moved away from that position to religious pluralism
• His starting point on pluralism is his view that the religion of a individual is almost always an accident of birth
• The relationship between humans and what he thought of as ultimate reality is shaped by history and culture
• It is a mistake to understand salvation in terms of the sacred writings of one particular religion and to adopt an exclusivist position
• He rejected the concept of hell as incompatible with belief in an omnibenevolent God
• Hick distinguished between the concept of ultimate reality and the widely differing views that humans have of that reality
• He thought that religion was about self-transformation rather than about believing certain teachings and practices are true. This means that differences and so-called incompatibilities between religions are insignificant