George Burman Foster

1858-1918. Baptist scholar. Born in West Virginia, he graduated from West Virginia University and Rochester Theological Seminary, he taught at McMaster University before becoming one of the early members of the “Chicago School of Theology,” where he was named professor of systematic theology in 1897, and of the philosophy of religion in 1905. For his views on the relation between Christianity and such subjects as Darwinian evolution, comparative religion, and relativistic physics, he was “excommunicated” by fellow Baptists in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century. He even wrestled with the “death of God” as voiced in the thought of F.W. Nietzsche,* despite criticism from conservatives.