Lee, Bernard. The Becoming of the Church: A Process Theology of the Structure of Christian Experience. New York: Paulist Press, 1974.

Abstract

Today we talk about how we can put life together rather than asking: What is man? What is human nature?  Bernard Lee takes this new kind of focus for our questions to seek a new understanding of the Church and its structures. The Church, for Lee, does not first exist and then have members. The process of men interacting with each other and the Jesus event is a reality of the Church. He uses the same kind of process inquiry to throw new light on the Sacraments which are or should be an immense part of how the Church becomes. His approach to Church and Sacraments, moreover, attempts to restore the place of human emotion in the metaphysics of religion. He does all this by bringing to bear within the Roman Catholic Christian tradition the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. And he does it with a clarity and a pastoral orientation rare in any theological writing but especially needed in work that attempts to clarify the exciting world of process thought.