James Foster (Baptist minister)

James Foster (6 September 1697, Exeter – 5 November 1753, Pinners' Hall, Middlesex) was an English Baptist minister.

Foster was born and baptized at Exeter, 6 September 1697. Most of our biographical knowledge of him comes from memoirs attached to a sermon preached at his funeral by his friend and colleague, Caleb Fleming. His grandfather had been a conformist minister at Kettering in Northamptonshire, and his father, James Foster, was a successful Devonshire dissenting businessman (a fuller). James the younger went to Thorpe's free school in Exeter from 1702, where he learned his Latin grammar; he then attended the Presbyterian Joseph Hallett II's academy for dissenting ministerial students, also in Exeter. There, he met other radicals, including Hubert Stogdon, and achieved a reputation for rejecting human authority in matters of religious controversy, belief, and practical piety, privileging what he believed to be the indubitable consequences of reason and argument over passive faith and received wisdom.

In the late 1710s, a controversy over the nature of the Trinity broke out in Exeter, between Stogdon, Hallett and James Peirce on the one hand, and Lavington, another Exeter minister, on the other. The Exeter Assembly of ministers, siding with Lavington and with the trustees of the Exeter dissenting meeting-houses, demanded that Peirce's supporters sign a declaration of faith and subscribe to a set of largely unambiguously orthodox doctrines. Foster, with Stogdon and other students at the Academy, was a non-subscriber. His decision contributed to his departure from Exeter. He moved shortly afterwards to Milborne Port, Somerset, where he preached to a sympathetic but still relatively orthodox congregation. Frustrated, he soon left Milborne to live in the Presbyterian minister Nicholas Billingsley's house, at Ashwick, near Shepton Mallet. Also a lodger with Billingsley was Hubert Stogdon; all three were considered heterodox. Foster and Stogdon then jointly served the chapels at Colesford and Wookey, near Wells, but both remained poor. Foster's combined salary amounted to only £15 a year and he considered learning a trade to supplement his income and enable him to continue his dissenting ministry. Apparently, his chief consideration was to become, like Billingsley, a glover. But at about this time, a gentleman in the region called Robert Houlton took him on as chaplain in his house, relieving his financial pressures.

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