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Characteristic of Hartshorne's discussions of "religion" is a distinction between what is essential and valid in religion and other things that are inessential if not also invalid. Thus Hartshorne can say, for example, that "every religious tradition is shot through with human – -- all too human – -- error. Yet no nonreligious scheme of thought really makes sense of life" ("The Ethics of Contributionism": 106). Or, again, he can say that "religion is much more than worship," because religion is "the particular, social-historical-institutional form of worship found on this planet, and in various countries and cultures." Thus in religion "immensely important empirical factors enter, entirely additional to worship merely as such, and to God merely as such" (NTOT: 102, 103). In the case of this second passage, to be sure, his main point seems to be the distinction between all that is properly "metaphysical," i.e., "God merely as such" and even "worship merely as such,'' and religion as necessarily "empirical," insofar as it has to do with "the noneternal and accidental aspect of God" and with our specifically human relation to God. But even when Hartshorne's point is not so much the difference between metaphysics and religion as rather the nature of religion itself, he characteristically distinguishes between the essential and the inessential, and the valid and the invalid.

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