Ultimately, the "law" of God DOES lose its fixed, lawlike character by the incarnation of Christ. ... Thus the "New Covenant" does not demand the following of laws, but rather the acceptance of the Spirit of Christ

This is much closer to what James think religion should be than the idea of following explicit divine commands. As we've seen, the surrender of the self into the "willingness to be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God" is the basic religious act for him. However, it's important for James that religion continue to base itself on this *personal* experience of surrender to the divine, which can certainly affect our judgments and actions, but which cannot presume to dictate the nature of religion to other people, much less to directly lay down rules for their behavior. (This gets back to James's denigration of religious institutions of all kinds as less significant than individuals' direct experiences of the divine.) Not to put too fine a point on it, but James would not approve of, say, today's Religious Right trying to translate specific biblical commandments into laws that apply to everybody.

A related issue is the status of religious scripture for James. He doesn't say much about scripture in the Varieties, but I think he would agree with what Emerson says, in his essay "The Poet," about all inspired texts:

[A] book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. [...] If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. [...] How mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream[.]

[...]

The quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. [...] The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Inspired texts, for Emerson, are significant not because what they say is literally true, but because, by using symbols that the authors find to hand, they bring us to the gates of deeper experiences that cannot be comfortably lodged in language. "Dream delivers us to dream" by way of language, and it's a mistake to focus on the literal language rather than the only semi-communicable experience behind it. Emerson sees the bible in this way, as a kind of inspired scaffolding that helps people approach religious experience but whose particularities fall away once the experience is truly grasped -- and this is one of the views that cost him his Unitarian ministry and sent him down the road of freelance prophesy.

Fruits typically come from roots...so I'm wondering why James is focused on the fruits but not that interested in the roots? Does he ever try to define God or recognize him as being at the roots of all good fruits?

You could say that what pragmatism *is* is the elevation of fruits over roots. That's one of the bedrock claims for James. He arrives at it not by an arbitrary decision, but by noting the inadequacy of the quest for solid roots, especially regarding ultimate questions. From "What Pragmatism Means":

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material or spiritual? – here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.

In that essay he introduces his famous squirrel example, about whether a man has gone around a squirrel or not:

The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel?"

A roots-based approach would look to the past, to the origins and accumulated meanings of the word "around." What does "around" *truly* mean, the root-seeker asks; what is its fundamental significance? Clearly this approach is hopeless here. James can only resolve the dispute by dismissing the question of roots and asking the disputants to unstiffen their use of the word "around" and tie it to specific practical outcomes. They can make the word mean something that implies the man did go around the squirrel, or something that implies he didn't. They have had a specific experience, and they must adjust their ideas to that experience if they want to understand it and talk about it. Now, if this goes for a simple idea like "around," it goes even more for a big idea like "God."

(The second author is from Glastonbury...someone you know?? : ) )

No, I didn't even notice that! Crazy, small world.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 9:23 PM, Ruth Raubertas <ruthraubertas@gmail.com> wrote:

Of course, you could follow a good "law," such as the command to love one another (for instance, refusing to kill someone in war) and end up in jail or worse. So you wouldn't have "freedom" in the literal sense, but you would be free in a spiritual sense. (I believe Victor Frankl writes about this.)

Ultimately, the "law" of God DOES lose its fixed, lawlike character by the incarnation of Christ. Jesus is the fulfillment of the law. God sent us (who are in the Jewish tradition) the Law and the Prophets, but we didn't get it, so he send his own flesh and blood to teach us and to die in our (deserved) place. Thus the "New Covenant" does not demand the following of laws, but rather the acceptance of the Spirit of Christ (for some reason the image of "swallowing God" comes to mind) within which creates in us the desire and ability to do what is right. (I know that's a lot right there, and not well explained...)

Fruits typically come from roots...so I'm wondering why James is focused on the fruits but not that interested in the roots? Does he ever try to define God or recognize him as being at the roots of all good fruits?

Regarding the "Euthyphro Dilemma," both of the articles you quoted ended up resolving the "dilemma" satisfactorily to my mind. (The second author is from Glastonbury...someone you know?? : ) )

Some of this makes my head spin around and am tempted to just plead Psalm 131 (the second shortest chapter in the Bible):

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.
Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and for ever.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Jesse Raber <jesse.raber@gmail.com> wrote:

"The Psalmist seems to have encountered some kind of "law" that, rather than restrict freedom, actually BESTOWS it."

I think James would be sympathetic to this idea. But he'd probably insist that the law is good *because* of the fruit of freedom that it bestows ... meaning that if it stopped bestowing that fruit, it would no longer be good. If the fruit of freedom is really paramount, we therefore have to allow ourselves the possibility of abandoning the law in the name of that fruit. Once this caveat is admitted, the law loses its fixed lawlike character.

This train of thought is related to Plato's famous "Euthyphro dilemma." Many Christian apologists have addressed Euthyphro's dilemma; one example is here.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Ruth Raubertas <ruthraubertas@gmail.com> wrote:

I just realized I made a significant typo a few days ago in posting this:

(me)...Just wondering what folks think about whether James successfully shows that religion is "wholly debunked by science."

...I do understand that James is NOT trying to debunk religion, quite the opposite, but anyway the conversation continues.... Sorry for the confusion.

(Jesse) Religion, too, must accept the common standard of judging beliefs by their fruits. According to that standard one can never be bound by eternally fixed commandments or creeds. ... You might say, then, that for James science and religion humble each other (or "unstiffen" each other, to use a Jamesian word.)

Can fruits inform commandments, and can commandments produce fruits? For instance, Jesus said "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:12) One could argue which came first, love or the commandment to love, but can't it still be an "eternally fixed commandment"?

I like the idea that science and religion can "humble" or "unstiffen" each other. The word "commandment" perhaps turns people off because it does have a "stiff" sort of sound to it. But listen to Psalm 119:45-48:

I will walk about in freedom,
    for I have sought out your precepts.
^{I will speak of your statutes before kings}    and will not be put to shame,
for I delight in your commands
    because I love them.
I reach out for your commands, which I love,
    that I may meditate on your decrees.

The Psalmist seems to have encountered some kind of "law" that, rather than restrict freedom, actually BESTOWS it. He goes on and on, for 176 verses, singing the praises of the "law" of God. In James 1:25 we also read: "But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do." So, again, it is possible for "law" to produce freedom (whereas "freedom" to do whatever we like can sometimes lead to enslavement, another subject).