ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Austin Phelps’s incarnate rhetorical pedagogy, specifically its emphasis on the centrality of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching in discovering and articulating sacred truths. In tracing the ways Phelps’s theology of Christian experience and view of incarnation motivated him to adapt Emersonian rhetoric in order teach pulpit orators the power of writing from lived experience, the chapter shows how Phelps challenged formalist teaching practices, pedagogical approaches that relied primarily on the rote and mechanistic study of superficial correctness in textbooks, and the managerial view of invention that prevailed during much of the nineteenth century. It also demonstrates the significance of Phelps’s contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical education by calling attention to the ways Phelps’s incarnate rhetorical pedagogy emphasized the importance of the unconscious in writing and the fusion of human learning and divine inspiration in processes of rhetorical invention.
