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AGE
52

POSITION
Margaret W. Harmon Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary; associate editor, Theology Today

NOTABLE BOOKS
By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford, 1997)

When I told various scholars that I would be visiting Ellen Charry at Princeton Seminary, they invariably brightened: "Oh, you'll like Ellen." Charry possesses a passionate intellect and an incandescent personality. She is a pert wom-an whose words seem to come out of her mouth entangled with her whole life. You can't listen to Charry for long without noticing that she is very smart, but not showoff smart. She seems to care about everything and everybody—especially about how God helps people.

Her past has something to do with this. She was already the mother of two children when she embarked on theology as a second career. Well, no, that is not quite right: Charry never planned a second career. She discovered it while searching for God.

Charry came to Christ as an adult and with no Christian upbringing. She was a social worker in New York and Philadelphia who became dissatisfied with the purely practical nature of her work. Searching for a way to "put my feet and my head together," Charry found her way to Temple University's Department of Religion. She must be one of the very few persons in all the modern world won to Christ through the reading of theology.

Charry's lack of Christian background made her read theology as a life option, not as a set of theories. She began with Karl Barth. "Barth just undid me . …Barth said God is at the top and at the center. Barth enabled me to first taste that God is a reality and not an idea. I couldn't argue for that. I may still not be able to argue it, but I tasted it."

From Barth she worked backward in time, to read Calvin and Luther. While studying the Augsburg Confession she made an unexpected discovery: "Justification by grace through faith … justification by grace through faith—what are they talking about? So I decided to try it on. I lifted my arms up and I put it over me like a dress, the doctrine. I tried it on myself. I tried it out. It wasn't just words; I tried it. And I fell off the chair. It was in July, it was very hot; I was on the third floor in my study." Charry laughs at the memory. "I tried it on like a dress, and I just fell over.

"It wasn't, 'Oh, that's how it works. Isn't that terrific.' But that if I trusted enough in God's love and mercy, that I wouldn't worry about things so much. I could just do what I thought I needed to do without being worried so much about the consequences. This seemed to have immediate practical value."

For both Charry and her husband, a psychiatrist, "God" had been a concept so high he could never be pulled down into living. "My husband and I watched the movie The Milagro Beanfield War, and there was a worker in the field who had a Jesus T-shirt on. My husband said, 'That's really demeaning. Why would you put God on your T-shirt?' And I said to him, 'No, you don't understand. God is close to that man. That's why he has a picture of Jesus on him while he is working out in the field. Because God is nearby.' I was struggling to find a way to this utterly transcendent God, and I realized that Christians had God close, in the nitty gritty, on the mudflaps of trucks. That was the most awesome. On the mudflaps of trucks."

A concern for the "immediate practical value" of theology has made Charry an unusual and sometimes controversial scholar. Distinguished professor of systematic theology she may be, but motherhood remains a large part of her identity. At one time in our conversation she rapped on her desk while saying emphatically, "I am interested in the flourishing of people because I am a mother! That's all I have to say."

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2