Religion within the limits of language alone Book

Despite several poor analyses of Christianity, Alfred North Whitehead's 'Religion in the Making' is a further elucidation of Whitehead's genius system of philosophy which he has developed.

The book is a series of four lectures Whitehead gave at the King's Chapel in Boston in 1926. In the first he offers an analysis of the history and development of religions, in the second he analyzes dogma as a concept and dogmas of particular religions, in the third he describes the contribution of religious knowledge to metaphysics and elucidates something of his process ontology, and in the fourth he critiques religion and refines the Doctrine of God.

The first lecture can be largely ignored. It is full of Historical-Critical speculative conclusions circa the late 19th century. It is also prior to the re-interpretations of Christianity given for the 'modern man' by neo-orthodoxy and the 'demythologization' project. Whitehead therefore stands over 'religion' and gives analyzes it in terms of 'progress' and completely botches the application of his system to Christianity. In short, even the non-Christian has a biblical theology, and Whitehead's is deficient.

The second lecture is more useful, but the particular historical errors which evidence the failure of his analysis in the first lecture become even more apparent in the second. Characteristic of all these errors is the dating required for his analysis of the book of Job. According to his paradigm, the book of Job represents a later stage in the development of religion; it is characteristic of the beginnings of the rational stage. However, Job is easily seen to be one of the earliest compositions in the entire Old Testament. If his analysis be true, Judaism has been in the rationalizing stage since its inception. On the other hand, his analysis of dogma is somewhat useful. He contrasts the respective abilities of Buddhism and Christianity to deal with the problem of evil, but he defines evil, also, in terms of his progressive process. He does give the occasional deep insight, such as when he says that, "Any proof [for God] which commences with the consideration of the character of the actual world cannot rise above the actuality of this world" (69, though he later defines God as an actual entity). Finally, he attempts to show how the emergence of dogma occurs in a 'purified' or 'rational' religion. This analysis shares some harmonies with Christianity, but in the end will likely prove to be foundation ally dissonant.

His third lecture is his best. In it he outlines the contribution of religion to metaphysics. That contribution, he says, is primarily the 'bigness' of the view religions take on the world. They attempt to see the whole in light of the one. From this he describes a metaphysic in the rest of the chapter that was quite enjoyable to read, though it was written in Whitehead's typically impenetrable style. The only obvious problem (and it is an unacceptable doctrine), was his definition of God as one of the formative principles for the actual temporal world. God, for Whitehead, is the third of these formative principles, and is an actual entity which is the limitations placed on the first formative principle, creative force, which prevents absolute freedom in creativity, and thus prevents purely arbitrary consequents to their respective grounds among causal processes and produces a 'novelty' among consequent world states. This is a clearly non-Christian doctrine of God, and should be entirely disregarded by the theologian.

In the final lecture, Whitehead critiques the doctrines of religion and refines the doctrine of God. He defines God as di-polar, the ideal in which each causal process finds its 'novelty,' either unto a lower form or a higher one. In this way he overcomes objections which reason from the already established nature of Classical Theism, by arguing that, since God is creative direction, those who believe that Classical Theism's doctrine of God has any 'finality' to it are simultaneously arguing that Greek Philosophy is 'final,' and are therefore idolatrous. He defines idolatry as the belief that one has 'arrived' at a final doctrine, showing again his penchant for progression.

Whitehead's philosophy of religion here explained is immensely valuable. He is an extremely perceptive thinker who offers the Christian theologian valuable critiques that they must avoid falling into. He is a useful conversation partner for developing rigor and accuracy in theology. However, this work contains two fundamental errors which merit its 3-star rating. First, Whitehead anachronistically analyzes theistic theories in terms of immanence and transcendence. In this way he completely misses the important Trinitarian shape of Christian theology. His conception of Christian theism collapses simply back into 'Semitic Theism.' He allows only the Apostle John the space for conceiving of Christianity as more immanent than transcendent, before he sees the Church Fathers lapsing back into a 'Semitic theism.' This is an entirely poor account of Christian theism and cannot be taken seriously except in reference to a general monotheism. Second, Whitehead's accounts of history are repeatedly poor. His handling of the history of religions does little to shake the faith of even the layman believer today, though at the time it may have done more. His accounts of the formation of Christianity from Judaism are simplistic an in many cases simply wrong. Therefore, while his metaphysical system is useful and he provides important critiques for the philosophy of religion, his tale of how religions form should be more or less disregarded and his criticisms of Christian theism in particular should found lacking apart from philosophical problems presented by the concept of theism in general.