ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief account of Andover Theological Seminary’s founding and provides a selective survey of Austin Phelps’s nineteenth-century context in order to give readers a sense of the pressing social changes, political issues, religious developments, and intellectual challenges that Phelps was attempting to engage through his sacred rhetorical pedagogy. It concludes with brief descriptions of Phelps’s theology of vocation, theology of regeneration, and theology of Christian experience—theological perspectives that animated Phelps’s sacred rhetorical pedagogy in generative ways. This chapter provides the contextual grounding necessary for understanding Phelps’s theological motives and his approach to rhetorical education.
