A careful reading of this book compared to your favorite Bible verses about the Personage of God shows how misbegotten is the whole enterprise to refashion deity into a palatable, preferable,processistic being with little resemblance to the Biblical God of Truth. If you're looking for a finite, multi-present, penultimate, quasi-eternal, reductionist deity, you've come to the right place. No matter your position on process or openness or free-will theism, as Clark Pinnock once said, 'theological novelty and a high view of Biblical authority do not fit well together'. 'use of process thought cannot be explained in terms of Biblical reflection, but in terms of the influence of secular modernity.' What God hath been wrought?

I loved this book! It is an excellent layperson's introduction to an intellectually honest approach to faith. Process theology doesn't pit science against religion, or try to proclaim the supremacy of one particular path to salvation. Even so, it is largely consistent with Christian teaching, as long as one doesn't subscribe to the literal truth of the Bible.

I won't attempt to summarize the author's arguments here, as I am bound to do them an injustice. I will just say that if you are looking for a theology that is optimistic, inclusive, internally consistent, and consistent with what we know to be true about the natural world, then this book is for you. It won't answer all your questions, but it will probably give you more satisfying answers to most of them than you've found anywhere else.

I would say that process theology is not for everyone. It appeals mostly to people, like me, who want religious beliefs that are consistent with what they know about science, or at least do not outright contradict science. That would amount to only few hundred million people, nowadays.

But, there has been a pretty big problem with our efforts to fully comprehend this vision of theology. Most of the books about process theology seem to be written for the professional theologians and philosophers.

Now, C. Robert Mesle has distilled the subject down to an understandable read. It's the first book of its kind as far as I know and undoubtedly a classic. Thanks to Mesle, this approach to theology is accessible to general readers.

Everyone who wants to better understand theology in the context of our scientific world needs to read this book, whether or not she or he agrees with process theology.

A nice companion to this book would be "What is Process Theology?" by Robert B. Mellert. It's a little more traditional and it's also harder to find because it's out of print, but very readable and enjoyable. I found Mellert's little book about a year after reading Mesle's.