American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Foster was unique, though, in recognizing the full implications of welcoming Nietzsche into his thought. Once moderns could find in Nietzsche reasons to doubt the absoluteness of Christianity as well as an antidote to disenchantment accompanying that doubt, it would be difficult to return to Jesus as rock and refuge: “we cannot lead [our] age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him.”82 George Burman Foster stands out among religious thinkers, in that he accepted Nietzsche’s ideas of a fully de-divinized Jesus.83 Trained in Berlin and Göttingen, Germany, he spent his years in Chicago teaching a radicalized ver sion of the historicist theology he had learned abroad and preaching it from pulpits in both Baptist and Unitarian churches. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Foster adopted what he would come to identify as a “functionalist” view of religious belief and practice. In his scholarly books, he sought to move Christianity away from its history as an “authority-religion,” which understood itself as the sole and final arbiter of meaning and truth. For Foster, the “conviction of the finality [that is, absoluteness] of the Christian religion” could no longer be reconciled in a world “where the fixed has yielded to flux, being to becoming, absoluteness to relativity, force to ideals.”