John Hick, a world-renowned theologian and philosopher of religion, is currently a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at University of Birmingham. (For his books I've read, click on his name.)

His honors include the Gifford Lectures in 1986-7 and the Grawemeyer Award for significant new thinking in religion in 1991. In 2007 Amazon.com listed ten books by him. (See also Wikipedia’s discussion of his extensive work on religions.) I agree emphatically with what Huston Smith says about this book: “A splendid summation of the life work of one of our generation’s important religious philosophers. It has the clarity of light and the solidity of stone.” Smith’s The World’s Religions 17 introduced me to religious pluralism. Hick’s The Fifth Dimension includes a deeper, more philosophical, discussion of this topic.

Hick's Preface spells out well the contents: “This book is addressed to anyone interested in such questions as the nature of this mysterious universe of which we are a part; the meaning of our human existence with its unpredictable mixture of good and evil, happiness and misery; the significance of religious experience and the extraordinary individuals called saints and mahatmas; the prospect of death and the possibility of further life beyond it. In response to these questions I argue for the radical insufficiency of a purely naturalistic, or humanist, understanding of life, and for the reality of a fifth, spiritual, dimension of the universe.” This fifth dimension is not an extra one added to the four dimensions of space-time, but is a spiritual dimension that encompasses space-time and much more – it is a transcendental dimension.

Drawing on mystical and religious traditions ancient and modern, and spiritual thinkers as diverse as Julian of Norwich and Mahatma Ghandi, Hick presents a tightly argued and very readable case for a bigger, more complete, picture of reality. In Ch 9 – The Real Experienced as God – he embraces pluralism: “This means that the different world religions – each with its own sacred scriptures, spiritual practices, forms of religious experience, belief systems, founder or great exemplars, communal memories, cultural expressions in ways of life, laws and customs, art forms and so on – taken together constitute different human responses to the ultimate transcendental reality to which they all, in their different ways, bear witness.” John Hick's 26 Chapters and Conclusion cover exceptionally well all I’ve learned about the world’s response to God. For a book of this length (with footnotes at the bottom of the page), I’ve set a new record of underlining important statements. This book is a superb successor to Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. I give it my very highest recommendation. (Think six stars!)