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Scott Bullard is an American theologian, theology professor, and academic administrator known primarily for his work on the sacraments, especially the Lord's Supper, or eucharist. Bullard is particularly unusual in that he is a Baptist who writes on the sacramental nature of the eucharist, focusing on the unity created in this ancient practice and taking a sacramental reading of 1st Corinthians 10:16-17. He is Senior Vice President and Academic Dean at Judson College in Marion, AL.

Bullard's work is particularly influenced by James William McClendon, Jr., a 20th century Baptist theologian. McClendon, an often overlooked theologian in his own Baptist denomination but required reading at Ivy League seminaries, called the Supper a "re-membering sign" in his work beginning in the 1970s. McClendon differentiates between "sign" and "symbol" in his work, emphasizing that signs "do something" and re-sourcing philosopher J.L. Austin in order to make this point.

Education Bullard received the Bacheolor of Arts from Campbell University in Buies Creek, NC in 1999. He majored in Religion and minored in Sacred Music at this Baptist-related university in eastern North Carolina.

Bullard attended and worked at Duke University from 1999-2003, graduating from Duke University with a Master of Divinity in 2002. Bullard first encountered McClendon at Duke, reading him with Stanley Hauerwas, who at the time was considered the preeminent theologian in North America. In his "Hauerwas Among the Baptists," Bullard notes his astonishment that he could have gone through four years of undergraduate education at a Baptist university as a Religion major without reading McClendon, but upon arriving at Duke he began hearing that McClendon was one of the most important theologians of the 20th century. In a particularly important moment, Bullard narrates, Hauerwas began weeping while informing an Introduction to Christian Ethics class of McClendon's death. The class was reading McClendon's Ethics at the time.

While Hauerwas focused his students' upon McClendon's treatment of Christian pacifism in the Ethics class, Bullard would continue to read McClendon with Hauerwas in upper-level seminars, particularly in a carefully sequenced set of seminars entitled "Wittgenstein" (Fall 2001) and "Theology After Wittgenstein." In the latter, Bullard began paying particularly close attention to McClendon's use of Wittgenstein, Austin's speech-act theory, and the way he employed these philosophers to inform his reading of Scripture -- particularly 1 Corinthians 10:16-17: "we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf."

It was this section of McClendon's Systematic Theology in particular that would form the basis of Bullard's doctoral dissertation, "A Re-membering Sign," which he would write at Baylor University while taking the PhD there from 2003-2009. Bullard wrote with Barry Harvey and was the teaching assistant for McClendon's old friend Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Religion and Literature at Baylor and author of Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.

Early Life Bullard was born in North Carolina, and grew up primarily in Laurinburg, North Carolina. As a student, he was average, focusing his energies widely in athletics and the fine arts. Bullard lettered in Basketball, Tennis, and Soccer, earning awards from his coach in Basketball at the 1998 Scotland High School athletic banquet, and All-Conference awards in tennis and soccer. Bullard would go on to play NCAA Division 1 tennis at Campbell, his love for the sport fading as he began to take seriously his studies in Philosophy and Theology. Bullard often credits Dean Monroe Martin, his primary teacher at Campbell, for inducing his love of classic philosophical and theological texts in Martin's Introduction to Philosophy class at Campbell. Bullard often notes that that Philosophy class -- in which he was reading much Plato and Augustine -- was contemporaneous with a British Literature class in which the authors were employing Aristotelian, Platonic, and Augustinian themes.