Faculty

E. Frank Tupper - Email

E. Frank Tupper is a Professor of Theology in the founding faculty of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. In 1973 he began a distinguished career teaching theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1997 he arrived at Wake Forest University as a visiting professor in the Department of Religion.

A native of the Mississippi Delta, Tupper did his undergraduate work at Mississippi College, finishing the year after a summer as a Baptist Student Union missionary to South Korea. His theological studies at Southern Seminary included a year of doctoral research at the University of Munich with Wolfhart Pannenberg, a pivotal experience in discerning his vocation as church theologian. Sabbatical leaves at Oxford University in England and the University of Tubingen in Germany provided occasions to explore doctrinal formulations in the framework of narrative theology. Ordained at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville in 1967, Tupper pastored the Baptist Church in Edmonton, Kentucky for six years. He continued to serve churches as interim pastor after he began teaching at Southern Seminary.

For nearly a decade after becoming a single parent in 1983, he sharply curtailed his preaching and teaching schedule to be at home and in church with his children, Elgin and Michelle. A well-known lecturer and author, Tupper is notable for his books, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg and A Scandalous Providence: The Jesus Story of the Compassion of God. The latter, published in 1995, reflects more than fifteen years of academic research, theological reflection, and the biographical pondering into a narrative rendering of the providence of God.