It was in 1973, in his book God and the Universe of Faiths, that Professor John Hick argued for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions. His argument met quite a lot of criticism, and it is fairly widely thought that the debate is today a dead one. How true is this?
In his book he characterised as “Ptolemaic” the view which has been allegedly held for at least the last “fifteen centuries” which proclaims that “all men, of whatever race or culture, must become Christians if they are to be saved”. He cites the Decree of the Council of Florence (1438—1445) which upheld the traditional Catholic position, summed up in the axiom, extra eeclesiam nulla salus—there is no salvation outside the Church. He maintains that Vatican II and modem theologians such as Karl Rahner propound further epicycles of the same Ptolemaic view, as they still assume “without question that salvation is only in Christ and through incorporation into his mystical body, the Church”. He feels that there is little difference between Roman Catholics and Protestant positions on this issue.
The Ptolemaic system held that the earth was at the centre of the universe and explained the movement of the planets (which did not conform to the theory) through “epicycles”. The increasing number of epicycles rendered the Ptolemaic view less and less plausible until finally the Copernican view, in its simple explanation of the facts by the theory that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the universe, replaced it.