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Some Thoughts After Re-Reading Religion In The Making_ One_ More Time

Wiki Markup1. If I ever had any doubt about it, I'm now convinced that Whitehead understands religion, quite precisely, as a world view, in just the sense in which Bultmann, for one, and Wesley, for another, strongly protest that it \ -\- or, at any rate, Christian faith \ -\- isn't. In fact, if one keeps in mind Wesley's portrait of "the almost Christian," one can say, not too unfairly, that the person Whitehead portrays as religious is, as it were, only "almost" religious. For the closest he comes to recognizing what either Bultmann or Wesley, or I myself, would think of as real religion is to define it, "on its doctrinal side," as "a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended." As he presents it, "\[y\]our character is developed according to your faith," in the sense that both "your character and your conduct of life depend upon your intimate convictions." But, then, religion may be said to be "the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things" (15 f.).

2. The curious notion that it's not before Whitehead came to write Part V of Process and Reality that he thought and wrote of God as anything more than "the principle of concretion," or "the primordial appetition," is completely negatived by what he actually says several times over in RM. The following are some of the more important passages: 

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