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By the time "Donald" was 16 years old, he had ten years of Christian influence through his foster parents. Yet, although he was thoroughly conversant with Scripture, his adolescence was dominated by drugs. He broke into his foster parents' house in search of some money he had hidden, got into a fight with his foster mother, and bludgeoned and suffocated her to death. Now serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, he makes weekly calls—"trying to figure out what happened and who he is"—to Ellen Charry, a longtime friend who was also a friend of his foster mother.

In her professional life Charry teaches systematic and historical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and is coeditor of of the journal Theology Today. Her book By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine is dedicated to Donald.

Although Charry's book was published fairly recently, it has already assumed the status of a contemporary classic, one of those books that influence a generation of students. The suggestion of the subtitle—that Christian doctrine ought to shape one's living—may seem unremarkable, even banal. But at a time when the gap between theology and the life of the church is wider than ever before, Charry offers a powerful corrective. Academically rigorous and informed by a deep knowledge of Christian tradition, her book never forgets about Donald.

Charry was reading Aquinas when she noticed statements with a pastoral intent in the midst of his theological formulations. As she worked backward through various theologians, she realized that this pattern was no happenstance; classical theologians actually believed that God forms us to be excellent persons by our knowing him. Moreover, classical theologians believed that happiness is tied to virtuous character.

As a result, Charry undertook a more thorough study of what motivated these theologians to formulate doctrine. Along the way, "a constructive thesis emerged: when Christian doctrines assert the truth about God, the world, and ourselves, it is a truth that seeks to influence us." To support this thesis, she selected Matthew, Paul, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, and John Calvin—"precisely," as she puts it, "the most distrusted of Christian theologians. … who are now widely regarded as useless or harmful." (Here one must recall the setting in which Charry is writing.) In each case, a multitude of citations will demonstrate that their theological creativity pulsated with pastoral urgency.

For instance, Matthew's Gospel contains an intricate portrayal of Christ as the fulfillment of various Old Testament hopes and constructs a new understanding of righteousness radically opposed to that of the Pharisees. Yet the purpose was not academic: Matthew wanted Jews to be God's chosen people in terms of living the Beatitudes, not relying on Jewish birth. Hermeneutically, they were to follow Jesus Christ, rather than the Pharisees, as the authoritative interpreter of the Torah. Thereby they would believe righteousness to be accessible, they would learn how to extrapolate from the Torah for a variety of situations, and they would gain dignity by leading other-centered lives.

To take an extracanonical example, Athanasius's dogged commitment to defeating Arianism was no mere intellectual exercise. For Athanasius, God called humanity to live in accord with the beauty and order of his creation. But, bound by sin and its effects, we are unable to do so; therefore, Christ must break through our fear to reveal God and his ordered goodness. Without the truth of incarnation—God breaking through—we could not experience God's vision as Athanasius saw it; hence, Arianism had to lose, and Athanasius had to fight.

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