This dissertation explores the influence of the Fundamentalist movement on Southern Protestantism during Fundamentalism's formative period. While Southern Baptists were fearful of Fundamentalist institutions that sought to compete with established Southern Baptist missionary and educational organizations, the Southern Baptist Convention was significantly impacted by Fundamentalist theology. During Fundamentalisms first wave (1919-1925), Southern Baptist leaders sought to lead their constituents to support the Seventy-Five Million Campaign, a program of fundraising and institution building that sought to bring the Southern Baptist Convention in line with emerging, Progressive-era methods of organization and fundraising and to position it to compete with the ill-fated Interchurch World Movement. Because of fears of Modernism among many Baptist ministers and laypeople, however, denominational leaders sought to demonstrate that the Southern Baptist Convention, because of its exceptional regional nature, was immune to Modernism and therefore a trustworthy administrator of funds dedicated to missionary and educational activities. In fact, campaign director L. R. Scarborough was able to use the language of Fundamentalism to create a new identity for Southern Baptists, a Scarborough Synthesis, that redefined financial support for the denomination as a fundamental of biblical faith, while rejecting hard-line Fundamentalist rejection of the Campaign as a form of Modernism. Thus, Scarborough and other leaders were able to turn anxieties about Modernism in Southern Baptist ranks toward the end of strengthening the institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention. Having established the orthodoxy of the Campaign, leaders worked to enforce its acceptance within the limits imposed by Baptists congregational polity. Those supportive of the Campaign were promised higher salaries and crop yields, while critics were threatened with job loss, decline in income, or divine condemnation. Leaders also charged Southern Baptist educational institutions, now recipients of denominationally-raised funds, with responsibility for ensuring the denominational loyalty of their graduates. Although critics raised objections to the strengthening of the denomination and its leaders on the basis of anxieties about polity, theology, or both, these criticisms were either ignored or dismissed.

This project is concerned with the development of the scene of sermon invention in the field of homiletics. In this dissertation, I trace the development of the ways in which homiletic theory and pedagogy has treated the process of creating sermons. I then critique what becomes a hegemonic consensus that tends to promote an introspective understanding of invention that excludes embodied processes and spatial dynamics. This exclusion has curtailed sustained critical attention to the incarnational and eschatological potential of sermonic creation in both theory and pedagogy. I attempt to theologically reconsider the scene of sermonic invention with careful attention to these dynamics and then offer pedagogical practices that would bring consideration of the actual body of the preacher and the space in which the preacher creates a sermon into the homiletic classroom.

One of the notable lacks in current homiletic literature is a paucity of reflection on the work of the Holy Spirit and the relationship between that work and the task of preaching. This is true even in postliberal homiletics, despite the emphasis this model places on forming individuals and communities. Postliberal homiletics, such as that of Charles Campbell, ground preaching in an extreme christocentrism that relegates the Spirit to a secondary role. <p> This dissertation draws on the pneumatological ecclesiology developed by Reinhard Hütter to describe the work of the Holy Spirit as it relates to doctrine and the core practices of the church, and it develops the implications of that model for preaching. I suggest that, in such a model, preaching functions as a mode of practical theology that aims to form communities for the eschatologically-oriented praxis of doxology. Doctrine and the core practices are described in terms analogous to the Incarnation as the enhypostases of the Spirit. Doctrine mediates the promises of God that are implicit in the narrative of Christs life, death, and Resurrection. Christian practices are developed according to a sacramental logic as doxological acts in which the community is brought into communion with God through its own participation in the Christ event. <p> Preaching functions as an intermediary between these two poles in the role of that Hütter attributes to theology. Preaching as practical theology performs three key activities which correspond to three modes of the Spirits work. First, it discursively unfolds the economy of salvation and the promises of God. Second, it performs hermeneutical acts of theological judgment utilizing a phenomenology of the Spirit and the analysis of contextual challenges to doxological praxis. Third, preaching engages in ad hoc catechesis, an activity whose practical aspects are examined in light of John McClures Four Codes model of homiletic rhetoric.

This dissertation seeks to strengthen the relationship between preaching and adolescents. I begin by narrating a critical homiletic history of adolescence in North America, showing how a once fruitful relationship deteriorated. I then examine the contemporary period through three related but non-conversant literatures: the homiletic guild which largely neglects youth, youth ministry literature on preaching which does not engage homiletic theory, and critical youth studies which does not address preaching. These preliminary surveys show how the contemporary homiletic disposition marginalizes the voices of young people. In this context, I propose a new theological and ethical disposition characterized by a dialectic between liberation and formation. The liberation of a youthful homiletic requires attentive listening to communicative practices of adolescents, which can offer correctives to preaching and to Christian faith/practice. The formation of a youthful homiletic requires adults to maintain a carefully focused interest in young peoples formation as theological communicators, grounded in prior listening. In order to put this disposition into practice, I develop a method of rhetorical analysis that listens to adolescents preaching and religious communication, and subsequently assess where they offer correction to adult assumptions and practices as well as where further formation might be warranted.

This study considers the category of religion, the phenomena ostensibly contained therein, and the cultural forces that often manage to evade or insulate themselves against critique by positioning themselves (or by being positioned) outside it. Like any organizing fiction, animating concern, or web of signification, religion itself is treated as a neutral social fact even as religion, as a category, is deployed as a critical tool to problematize unavowedly religious forms. I am here afforded a point of leverage by the term sacramental poetics which names the practice of religious creativity, those initiatives of conscience (whether in story, public action, image, or lyric) which posit an apocalyptic and therefore inescapably social witness within, against, and in spite of dominant forms of religiosity. James Joyce, Ursula Le Guin, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Daniel Berrigan are examined as self-conscious practitioners of sacramental poetics, those for whom human interest questions of marketing strategies, natural resources, state-sponsored violence, and national borders are treated as unavoidably religious questions. As I understand them, these figures occupy and, to some extent, conjure a public commons where, as Derrida has it, literature functions as an institutionless institution, calling into question institutionalized forms, and religion will be understood as responsibility or nothing at all. Their witnessing work of interrogation is framed as the task of critical-prophetic consciousness which voices, again and again, the possibility of right religion which, like true worship, good government, or the hope of environmental sustainability, is alive and signaling in discourses deemed political, economic, and artistic. In this sense, I posit the witness of sacramental poetics as the primary, renewable resource of the ethical imagination.

This dissertation examines the issue of Lukan economy (oikonomia) which creates tensions and ambivalence under the reality of the Empire. The economy (oikonomia) in the Gospel of Luke emerges from the oikos (e.g., Luke 12:13-21; 14:15-23; 15:11-32; 16:1-9, 16:19-31), a place to where the prodigal returns as he is still prodigal" (Luke 15:25) and where dishonest steward is praised for his shrewdness" (16:8). The economy embodied in Lukes oikos discourse may not be merely or essentially comprised of wealth and property; rather it serves as the impetus that encourages the subject to cross over the constructed boundary between center and periphery, metropolis and marginsin effect, the imperial and the colonial. Its pervasive interdependence from with-in and with-out embraces the voiceless and spurns the Empire (Luke 15:32). In this regard, the engagement in, and reflection of, political economy in the Gospel of Luke shall become a prophetic statement for the world today.

This dissertation takes its lead from the neglect in the field of pastoral theology to reflect on and respond to the role and ambiguities of everyday sexual experience in human suffering, healing, and flourishing. I speculate that part of the crisis of sexuality in Christian faith communities stems from lingering fear and anxiety with regard to sexual pleasure. I justify the use of a pastoral theological approach because sex is a universal human experience, and sexual pleasure can be a gift to enhance that experience. Pastoral theology prioritizes human experience and recognizes it as the crucial resource for understanding and responding to human brokenness and fulfillment when the goal is to provide resources for care. Subsequently, I use a revised critical correlational method to analyze and compare discourses on sexual pleasure in Christian theology, including pastoral theology, historical theology, and feminist theology, as well as influential cultural discourses in modern psychology, philosophy, and feminism. I bring all of these discourses to bear on the recent inclusion of sexual pleasure into a framework for contemporary Christian sexual ethics. I argue that the addition of pleasure has been uncritically accepted and promoted without thorough consideration of the critiques and suggestions of these theological, social scientific, and cultural discourses. I conclude that the current scholarship informing Christian sexual ethics 1) essentializes sexual pleasure in ways that are reminiscent of the tradition, 2) places an undue burden on sexual pleasure insofar as it must necessarily transcend the personal to the political, and 3) ironically reinscribes -- albeit with a wider circle -- sexual practices and pleasures that are acceptable, while delineating those which are not. As a result, contemporary Christian sexual ethics risks participating in the ongoing production of a sexual regime that regulates and controls specific sexual acts and pleasures, as opposed to their stated aim of focusing on the nature of the relationships in which sexual activities occur. I offer an in depth feminist pastoral theological exploration and charge pastoral theology with critically analyzing the discourse around pleasure in Christian sexual ethics.

This dissertation argues that the postliberal ecclesiologies of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas fail to account for Christian implication in the secular in part because they collapse the kingdom of God into the visible church. Inferring that an alternative lies in locating the kingdom both in church and society, it proposes that the Byzantine ideal of symphonia, which seeks to balance church and state under the revelation of the kingdom, presents a framework for a more consistent account of the intersections between church and secular. I conclude that formal societal refusal of the divine is inconsequential to a church that understands the Word to be the driving force of human cultural development on its way toward the kingdom of God. Even this present secular moment can be potentially revelatory, a perspective that not only warrants but even mandates creative ecclesial engagement with the secular insofar as it conforms to the revelation of the Word incarnate in Jesus.

In this dissertation, I endeavor to bring to life Kathryn Tanners way of framing theology as a cultural practice within which ad hoc, context specific modes of Christian discourse (everyday theologies) and more specialized, coherent, systematic modes (academic theologies) compete and cooperate with each other. To bring this model to life in practice, I develop a form of self-implicated ethnography, grounded in the reflexive ethnographic methods of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant. This self-implicated form of ethnography offers a complementary alternative to the traditional ethnographic modes of participant observation that have typically been used by theologians. In particular, I contrast my theological ethnographic methods with those employed by Mary McClintock Fulkerson.<p> The form of self-implicated ethnography I develop here deployed a loose, performative integration of my own competing and cohering roles as both minister and academic theologian within my community of study (First Baptist Church, Nashville). Specifically, in order to perform this loose integration of my competing and cohering roles, my fieldwork primarily consisted in teaching two adult education theology courses: Topics in Theology: Jesus Christ and Salvation and Topics in Theology: God as Trinity. By teaching these two courses, I sought to guide a process by which everyday and academic theologies were brought together in a shared conversational process. And this conversational process was comprised of a community of people speaking various theological fluencies in order to pursue wisdom together.

This project offers comprehensive theory to explain the origin of certain Pentateuchal passages that though few in number contrast sharply with the dominant traditions regarding the divine revelation at Mt. Sinai/Horeb. In the exegetical analyses of the germane passages, literary-historical and redactional models have been brought to bear and situated within the current international Pentateuchal debate. The research has both confirmed problems with wide-ranging redactional models and affirmed their necessity in explaining complex interweaving of contrasting viewpoints. Traditional notions of Pentateuchal authorship have left unsolved literary and literary-historical problems, especially with respect to the developmental stages apparent in the book of Deuteronomy, a text of critical importance for this study. This dissertation has explored the connections between the prophetically linked tradition of the Plenary Reception of Revelation (PRR; Israelites received direct, unmediated revelation from God as a community) and non-elite levitical priest-prophets based outside of urban centers. The research has shown that they supported this tradition and negotiated with elite priestly supporters of the dominant tradition (the Israelite community did not receive direct but rather mediated divine revelation) in behalf of its survival among the received tradition. In addition to literary analyses, the application of social (including archaeological), political, and legal theories have revealed a close working relationship between these Levites and lay leaders. Through their involvement in the making of Israelite literature, Levites saw to the inclusion of marginalized, popular traditions in the Hebrew Bible, which otherwise comprises a repository of traditions that affirms official perspectives. I have found the following popular traditions advocated by the Levites to be closely interconnected: the PRR, positive and perhaps repeated experiences of direct encounter with the divine, an expansive notion of Israelite sanctification, and a pronounced openness to alien integration. My research has provided a window through which both the scholars and general readers of the Hebrew Bible can better view the contributions of local, non-elite priests and their lay constituents to the culture and religion of ancient Israel.