The Ocala banner. (Ocala, Marion County, Fla.) 1883-194?, 1909-07-09
WHY PROFESSOR FOSTER WAS
EXPELLED FROM THE BAPTIST
MINISTRY

/
Prof. George Burnam Foster, one OF
the professors in the University Of
Chicago, wrote a book"-a bad thing
to do-and that book has caused his
expulsion from the Baptist ministry.
Following are some of the objec-
tionable passages which the more or
thodox Baptists pronounce heretical.
Theology is beginning to think OF
religion and of God after the analogy
of the thought of consciousness and of
the soul as cherished by the psychol-
ogist. p. 13.
Il have the impression that when
the collective consciousness becomes
thoroughly habituated to modern sci
ence our words, soul and body, as well
as matter and spirit, will drop out of
our language. There is no
such thing as a self-dependent soul
freely active or interactive within an
organism we call the body, just as
similarly there is no self-dependent
soul freely active or interactive with
in that larger body which we call the
cosmos. All this is survival of prim-
tive animism, which populated the
whole world with spirits, demons and
hobgoblins. | mean that
soul and body are not two beings con-
fronting each other as Independent
and interoperative, but that they are
one being giving account Of itself in
two-fold manner."-P. 81.
Nowhere is there such a thing as
creation out of nothing.
God works to bring things to pass
works hard and ploddingly as we do,
aye, experiences need and pain and
failure in work, as we do.
Strictly speaking, he makes nothing,
but lets things grow. Certainly he
lets man grow."-Pp. so, 81.
''The great trouble with us is that
our God is no longer ours. He is the
church's. We inherited him. He is
in no dwelling place that we have
built. We have him only by tradi-
ton. p. SO.
Modern experience would not Gre
ate the TTinity-God Of the church any
more than it would create the Mes
5iah of the primitive Christian COM
munity. Your righteousness is not ;
hat you have a God, it is your God I
making capacity. And in a world i
'trewn with dead gods the question is I
whether modern humanity has, like I
he ancient, that religious need and {
from which the bright con- ?
flower of the divine can I
,row. p. 81 f
1T was not Ingersoll, but Feuer- 2
zach, in 1916, nay, in substance it was 7
4ucretius long ago., and, earlier still, 7
who said that the great T
discovery of this generation was not p
hat God made man in his own image, r
tut that man made God in his (man's)
mage. Psychologically speaking, that
S quite true" p. sc. I
Against this professionalism of ex- h
ernal authority, the Independents, ap- I
'ealing to the internal authority of S
he inner light or the 'indwelling Y
pirit,' to the competency of the soul f
n religion, protested. OF these the L
Saptists were the chief. But subse- b
uently, even the Baptists fell upon f
vii days, were catholicized and out C
oped the pope himself in the deifica- b
ion Of an external authority. In our a
ay, however, a few men, unafraid Of L
he culumny and ridicule-hoary wea- d
ons, these-hurled at them by inso- n
7nt and quarrelsome ecclesiastics. are a
eeking to recover the Baptist posi- v
ion of the autonomy of the human S
oul. for which our. Baptist fathers o
ought, bled and died."-Pp. 70, IA.
What is fatal to orthodoxy today
) that in sticking to it's truths It has Fl
ost its truthfulness. Regard for the r
acred Scripture is a duty of the Il
'hristian; but to require assent to its r
thoughts and commandments IS To lv
cad into sin; and such requirement t.
) itself sinful Grievous Il
loral injury is inflicted today by the Il
hurch in its insistence that men shall n
old those views to be true in relig- e
IN which have become false in sci RI
nee. p. n. e
SONS TRIBUTE TO HIS FATHER e