This Is a Complete Transcript of the Oral History Interview with Philip Ross Foxwell (CN 442, T2) for the Billy Graham Center Archives

This is a complete transcript of the oral history interview with Philip Ross Foxwell (CN 442, T2) for the Billy Graham Center Archives. No spoken words that were recorded are omitted. In a very few cases, the transcribers could not understand what was said, in which case [unclear] was inserted. Also, grunts and verbal hesitations such as “ah” or “um” are usually omitted. Readers of this transcript should remember that this is a transcript of spoken English, which follows a different rhythm and even rule than written English.

. . . Three dots indicate an interruption or break in the train of thought within the sentence of the speaker.

. . . . Four dots indicate what the transcriber believes to be the end of an incomplete sentence.

( ) Word in parentheses are asides made by the speaker.

[ ] Words in brackets are comments made by the transcriber.

This transcript, created by Grace Gardziella and Paul Ericksen, was completed in January 2019.

Please note: This oral history interview expresses the personal memories and opinions of the interviewee and does not necessarily represent the views or policies of the Billy Graham Center Archives or Wheaton College.

Collection 442, T2. Oral history interview with Philip Ross Foxwell by Paul Ericksen on May 17, 1991.

ERICKSEN: Okay. Then you com…when you completed your master’s work here. Then you went to Northern Baptist [Seminary].

FOXWELL: Not quite. It was like this. I would go [clears throat] to Northern in the morning and work on a B.D., and then I’d come out to Wheaton in the afternoon—I lived in Wheaton— and [sound somewhat muffled] work on an M.A., so I was going to Wheaton and Northern grad schools simultaneously. And [clears throat] I had worked for the Chicago Aurora and Elgin [Railroad], so I had a pass so I could, you know, go into 30…40 West Washington Boulevard. So, I was really working on an M.A. out here and a B.D. at Wheaton in the same…in the same time frame really.

ERICKSEN: Now, as you were piecing these…these parts of your education together, what were you looking at concretely to do? What did you see yourself doing?

FOXWELL: I didn’t foresee myself as an educator on the mission field, but I think I saw that as a possible option, and I was heading toward a country that has a higher level of education in many respects than we do. You are much less…much more…much less likely to find an uneducated person [laughs] in Japan than you are in this country. In fact, one of the odd experiences of my life was to find a Japanese one day who couldn’t write his name. He was a chimney sweep, and I’d never ever had that happen before.

ERICKSEN: Now, as far as your thesis at…at Wheaton, what was…what was that on?

FOXWELL: Obedience. The single efficacious criteria…oh, oh, the single criterion of efficacious faith. And one day I was reading my Greek Testament, and it said, “He that believes on the Son has the life and he that disobeys the Son shall not see life but the wrath of God abides on him.” [John 3:36] Now, there’s a very good Greek word for disbelieve. You just take pisteuo, the word to believe, and you put the alpha privative, a negative, in front of it. So, when I say to myself this is a kind of an interesting oddity. Why doesn’t it say, “He that believes on the Son has the life, and he that disbelieves....” You know. And so that little quirk started me on the track that led to a master’s thesis. And I…the master’s thesis was very good for me, and in a sense it shed a light on a great deal of Scripture and took…resolved a lot of, oh, the stuff in James’ “faith without works is dead.” [James 2:20] Ins…an epitome of my thesis is this: that trust is the root and obedience is the fruit. And these are interchanged in the Bible as though they are synonyms though in actuality they aren’t synonyms, but they’re treated as synonyms because of the close relationship that they have with each other. And I worked this fairly well through and it was a…it was an excellent experience…it was an excellent experience for me. I said that trust is the root, obedience is the fruit, and…and I worked my way through on that. And I…later, Dan Fuller at the Fuller Seminary wrote…wrote a paper, which became a book that pretty well takes a similar position. And I felt good about that thesis, and the head of the Bible department liked it, and I feel that it enriched my…me at least, and…and so on.

ERICKSEN: Now, what did you...did you need to do another thesis when you were at Faith [Theological] Seminary?

FOXWELL: At Northern, I wrote a thesis on miracles and the modern mind for a B.D. thesis, and I read about a hundred books to do that. I…I started doing that with a sort of feeling of apprehension. I don’t have the brain power of the guys that I’m going to be looking at and what is this going to…what is this going to do to me? I mean, the faith-obedience thesis, that was a Bible research and linguistics study. But miracles and the modern mind—now I’ve got to expose myself to all of the…all of the non-Christian views of miracle and so on, but that also proved to be a…an enriching experience. And I…I got…. Oh, oh, Carl Henry said to me, “What are you going to write your thesis on?” I said, “Well, I make my living with miracles, so I’ll write on miracles.” He was teaching at Northern Baptist, and he looked at me and he says, “You don’t know the first thing about miracles.” [laughs]. Well, you know, a year or more, or two years later and a hundred books, you know, he was right. He and I have become personal friends by the way. If he’s out in Pasadena, he may turn up at the door without telling me whether he’s going to. But having men like Carl Henry and Lindsell, and they were not only teachers but became friends. That was enriched life, of course.

ERICKSEN: What about when you got out to Faith [Seminary] to work on your TSM [Master of Sacred Theology]?

FOXWELL: The…I was a graduate of Northern Baptist Seminary, and now I am engaged to a woman who’s under the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. So, we come to a time when I say, “Look, I will submit my views to the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. If they’re acceptable, I’m happy to go with them because I’m a separatist at heart, but if not, then you’ve got to pull out of there and we will go and hunt ourselves a Baptist board.” So, whether or not with reluctance, I don’t know, but I was accepted by the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions after having finished a B.D. at Northern. And…however, I had gone down to…I had gone down to Faith Seminary, and I…I felt…I felt good down there. And….

ERICKSEN: Was that a Presbyterian school?

FOXWELL: Yeah, that was essentially Presbyterian, so I got a Master of Sacred Theology or…a four-year degree down there at Faith Seminary. I was… [Don] Hoke and [Ken] Hansen and I, we really were, I mean, what you call the…the rebellion of the later years or whatever. In us it took the form of looking at maybe the…the old-line denominations and saying, “Hey, you know, we’re not really…we’re not really well satisfied with what we were seeing in some of the old-line denominations.” And that made it easier for me to get over into the Independent Board, which I did.

ERICKSEN: So, the motivations were…for that was your association, to put it mildly, with your wife?

FOXWELL: Yeah. I’m already moved over there where we’re…we’ve got these different things and we’ve got to fit them together now. And so, it was agreed that if…she agreed that if I was not acceptable over here in this camp, that she would leave. And on my part I said I will honestly set forth my views and if they accept them, why, I’ll go with the Indep…. I was a separatist at heart at that time, and so I didn’t have any trouble with the Independent Board’s position because, you know, we…we appreciated Pearl Buck as a writer, but we didn’t…. I say we. I’m thinking of Don and Ken. We didn’t, you know…we understood her theology was not Wheaton’s theology and so on. And so, yeah, it was…. Now, I’m coming into the…I’m coming into the situation where…which way are we going to move. I had a great deal of appreciation for Oliver Buswell before I had a relationship with him. I thought of him as a scholar and a Christian statesman. I mean, he was very effective when he moderated at synod and so on, and I thought, “Well, you know, if I fit with them, why, that’s good.” So, having graduated from Northern Baptist Seminary, I became the chairman of the Japan Presbyterian Mission. A little bit of a…a little bit of a switch, I guess.

ERICKSEN: Do you remember being interviewed by the Independent Board?

FOXWELL: Yes, and I’m sure that I was somewhat of a…of a burden to them. I would say something like, “Look, I don’t think the unbaptized kid’s any worse off than the…than the baptized one,” and so on. So I…I may have been a little difficult. I had no…I would have no trouble with a Presbyterian who doesn’t hold to some kind of baptismal regeneration, but if there was any leaning toward baptismal regeneration, why, you know, I would have been at odds…I would have been at odds with them, and…. I would argue s…I would…not argue, but I said something…once I’m talking to my father-in-law and he said, “Well, you know that there is no internal benefit which is necessarily connected to some external rite.” And I would discuss things with him sometimes. Out in Japan one time I’m having an argument with a friend, a Baptist. I said, “Freddy, if I was arguing the Baptist position, I could do a better job than you’re doing right now.” I did have the privilege of going to Northern Baptist Seminary in a time when Harold Lindsell, Carl Henry were on the faculty, and [Charles W.] Koller, who was the president at that time, he was absolutely tops in the…what you would call homiletics. I…I mean he was way…. By some odd freaky set of circumstances, in the course of my life, I must have had seven or eight teachers of homiletics and Charles Koller was tops of them all. And so I had him for homiletics and Carl Henry was in Northern for theology. Oh, one of the little things that shifted me from the baptism over, you know, to Presbyterian position…I’m sitting in this Baptist seminary and Carl Henry’s saying, “Now, Strong, the Baptist theologian—he’s all balled up in this. You’d better go and read Hodge.” And I’m sitting in there thinking, “Hey, how come a professor of theology in a Baptist seminary is knocking the…the Baptist theologian and telling me I should go over and looking at a Presbyterian?” And we had a wonderful church history teacher at Northern Baptist named Peder Stiansen. And he was most scathing in his indictment of infant baptism and then he would go on for a few minutes, and then he would talk about Philip Schaff like almost next to heaven itself. And I’m sitting there thinking, you know, “If this infant baptism is such horrible stuff, how can this saintly Philip Schaff be suckered in by it?” and so on and so on. So, I…I’m somewhat prepared by my experience in Northern listening to, especially Carl Henry maybe…I’m especially…I’m prepared to go over and submit my position to the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and say, you know, “I don’t believe this.” Anyway,

ERICKSEN: Now, I didn’t check the dates on when the Independent Board was established. [Unclear] you by then?

FOXWELL: I think about 1933. And you remember then that there were men who were defrocked by the Presbyterian church because…they were defrocked because they were told that giving to the denomination was the same part of their, you know, in other words…in other words, diverting money to the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions was a…a…a no-no, and men were defrocked for that relationship that they had with the…. So, I went out under what was called the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. And my father-in-law was an active member of that board, and it cannot be said what kind of helpful influences that, you know…. I suppose…I suppose if your father-in-law is on the board that may grease the skids for…for things. I still had to raise…. It did…it did grease the skids. I mean, anyone that had J. Oliver Buswell for a father-in-law, he had indirect fringe benefits of various kinds that…that came along, but more his example and…and his theology. He was a wonderful man. I never had mother-in-law problem or a father-in-law problem. But as I told you, as I got acquainted with my father-in-law, I thought, “This guy’s been reading good stuff when other people are reading comic books.” You had that feeling about him.

ERICKSEN: What kind of orientation or pre-field training did you get?

FOXWELL: Good question. I had the fortune of going to Wycliffe in the summer, and this was very…this was very good. I would commend that to anyone. However, they had Indian informants in, and we persuaded Wycliffe the summer of ’46, “How about letting…bringing in a Japanese informant?” and they did. And I wrote a Foxwellian grammar of the Japanese language before I ever saw any…any Japanese books. But that summer I formed a friendship with men like Ken Pike and…and Gene Nida, and.... No, no. I mean, you know, the Bible-translation Nida, that’s Gene, yeah. Clarence was the chaplain. That was…that was good.

ERICKSEN: So, when you were at Wycliffe, was that principally language work or cultural work as well?

FOXWELL: This was principally language, but inevitably you’ve got a strong cultural element there. But that was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me. I…I mean…I…I mean, that kind of a program of linguistics, and I can still see, you know. They’ve got this Eskimo with a flashlight down his throat to see the tongue positions. Going to Wycliffe turned out to be especially benefit to Jane and me in teaching English to the Japanese. I mean, we could draw diagrams of the mouth positions and you’ve got to get your tongue out between your teeth to do the T-H sounds, so that Wycliffe was helpful to me for many reasons but for that…for that reason too. I…I feel very good about the summer at…at Oklahoma. And I…Pike has been out to be a commencement speaker at William Carey [University], and he says that I…he credits me with giving him a start in ventriloquism. Of course, he far…went far beyond me because of all the things he can do with his voice. But anyway, he gives me the credit for getting…getting him

ERICKSEN: How was it decided that you’d work in Japan?

FOXWELL: I like to believe that you can pray for guidance and say, “God, you know, we’ve only got one life to invest and, you know, we need some light on the path.” My wife and I traveled to New Jersey to talk to Tom Lambie about going out. Oh, [laughs] this is something. We go and talk to Tom Lambie [missionary in the Middle East with the United Presbyterian Church]. He’s working over there in, you know, in Jordan, and he’s very frank with us. He says, “Look, I’ll get to the bottom line quick.” He said, “I don’t want you Wheatonites. You have an air of knowing too much.” So, my wife and I go away saying, “Well, okay that ends the….” You know, the board had been interested in sending us over to the Middle East, and so we go and talk to Tom Lambie, and “Oh, that…that takes care of that.” Then reports came in about ripe opportunities, you know, waiting to be…opportunities are like ripe plum waiting to be…ripe fruit waiting to be plucked and so on. And there was a woman [bumps microphone] who had come to the Moody Bible Institute in 1937 named Elizabeth Whewell [?], and she had a profound influence on me early on for Japan. She said, “You are not able to conceive of the real darkness of a truly pagan land.” That sentence and the impact of it, it stayed with me over the years. So, now the war is over and we’re hearing this, you know, opportunities are…are really great. So, we…I believe in response to asking the Lord, you know, “What do you want us…where do you want our lives?” and so on and so on, Japan opened up and we were one of the first missionaries to go in there after the war. We, the first missionaries under the Independent Board. At that time we didn’t have any special plan to start a seminary, but in ’49, a Japanese who had done graduate study in this country, he came and said, “Look, we have….” He…he had some hyperbole about “We don’t have even one sound seminary theologically.” What he meant was there were at least…that there was a very distinct dearth of…of theological grad study of a conservative nature. And so we felt minded in 1949 to start a graduate study. And in that summer of ‘49 we asked the board…then we said, “With 3,000 bucks we can launch this.” We had a plan. They said, “We haven’t,” in effect, “we haven’t got a nickel.” In the summer of’49, I communicated with George Palmer. He was a Christian pastor in the Philadelphia area. He had a broadcast and some camps and stuff. And I said, “With 3,000 dollars we can start a seminary.” And he got us the 3,000 dollars. So, in the fall of ’49, we launched the Japan Christian Theological Seminary and that became…that ultimately went into a merger with Don Hoke’s Christian College and a women’s Bible school in Yokohama. So, this…this accredited Christian university is a merger of Hoke’s college and my seminary and the Kyoritsu. And Hoke and I, having a close personal friendship, were able to pull a greater amount of cooperation than otherwise I think would have been…. I think one of the human factors that brought this together is that he is the president of the…what you might call midstream Evangelicals, and I’m the president of the Japan Bible Christian Council, and our personal friendship greatly facilitated bringing this thing to pass.

ERICKSEN: Is that…in having the friendship work the deal like that, is that something that worked well in a Japanese context or does that run against the stream?

FOXWELL: Well, I…I think the…at least the quick answer is friendship will always help to overcome some of the background differences or…or…or theological differences. I mean, like I can think of one of my close missionary friends. We were…I had such a good close personal relationship that I avoided talking about certain theological issues for a good many years. Then when we do get into them, why, I find out that we have a basic harmony, but….

ERICKSEN: Who [unclear] away from your training in…in the Japanese language, between the two of you—you and Jane—which of you had the easier time with learning and speaking Japanese?

FOXWELL: I had more opportunity than she did because she’s looking after the children and the home, and also I don’t have…I don’t have difficulty…what should I…I won’t say…yeah, I don’t have a lot of difficulty making a fool of myself or making a mistake. I mean, I…I can…I’m willing to take a certain amount of flak, and in the process of learning something, so I had…I had better opportunity. Jane always had good loving relationships, but I had more opportunity to…. You know, I’m teaching…after all, I’m teaching Greek to the Japanese, and I had to enlarge my vocabulary and so on. All of my textbooks have a great deal of Japanese vocabulary in them.

ERICKSEN: I think you mentioned at one point—was it in your book?—about someone saying your Japanese had a DuPage County accent?

FOXWELL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m accused of speaking Japanese with a DuPage County accent.

ERICKSEN: So you weren’t mistaken for a Japanese?

FOXWELL: Only one time, I’m on the telephone with a Japanese operator, you know, “Mmph- mmph-mmph,” and then she asks me if I can speak English, you know. And that gave me, you know, that was a great boost to my morale. I was sort of sleepy at the time, and I think maybe I was softer and, you know, was a little more natural.

ERICKSEN: Now, going back to the chronology. You said that in the fall of ‘49 the seminary was founded.

FOXWELL: Oh. Oh, and the…. Okay, okay. We have a Japanese who’s been to America to seminary. He, Roy Hasegawa, comes to…to me and to John Young in the summer of ‘49 and he says there’s a real need for Japanese study. I don’t know how…he may have said something like there’s not even one really sound theological seminary in the whole Tokyo area. He had some kind of a statement like that, and maybe it should have...he could have qualified. But anyway, he persuaded us that we ought to roll with a seminary. So, in the summer of ’49, I send a cable to, as I told you, this George Palmer, and I say, “Look, with 3,000 dollars we could start a…a…a seminary.” And the mission board didn’t have any money. George Palmer raised it. And…and so we rolled it in the fall of…in the fall of ‘49.

ERICKSEN: How many students did you start with?

FOXWELL: Eight or nine maybe. And these were guys that were maybe halfway through a course in fishery or something. And that very beginning point, it’s this Japanese guy who’s got the influence and the contacts with these guys and he’s going to pull them over into a program of Christian training. One of those first women is today, you know, on the faculty of…she’s on the faculty and on the board of this, and…and so on.

ERICKSEN: Now, I’m curious, what…? You arrived in Japan….

FOXWELL: We’d arrived in Japan February of ‘48. We…we moved…we…we voted in the summer of ‘49 that we would start this seminary, and we started it in the fall of ’49. And it was mostly Inde…it was Independent Board for Presbyterian Missionaries, which meant John Young and me and the single women and especially this Japanese guy who had been to seminary in this country and who looked to us as being like-minded with him. Roy Hasegawa was his name, and….

ERICKSEN: What had you been doing during the first year-and-a-half that you were in Japan?

FOXWELL: Studying the language, driving, you know, the older missionaries around to their meetings to learn what we could. And I could gather people at a street meeting, but then I couldn’t do anything much with them after I got them there.

ERICKSEN: With your magic.

FOXWELL: Yeah, but the Japanese pastor, he wouldn’t have been able to gather the guys…

ERICKSEN: Right.

FOXWELL: …the people, so I would team up with a Japanese pastor and I’d get the crowd in there. I knew enough Japanese to do my tricks. And then the Japanese pastor, then he’s in there for the…the communication and so on.

ERICKSEN: I’m curious, do other Japanese magicians…?

FOXWELL: Oh, yes.

ERICKSEN: Did you…?

FOXWELL: Oh, one thing…you know, in some parts of the world, pe…doing magic, there would be…it would be associated with superstition maybe and so on and be a no-no. The Japanese department stores, they have sections for magic, and Siegfried and Roy, the biggest guys in Vegas, they can afford to fly over there with 747s and sell $300 tickets and stuff. The Japanese are very…. I should say that I really went to the mission field figuring I’m done with the magic. I gave a lot of it away, and I’m out there…. One reason I became a missionary, one of the factors was I was getting typed as the gospel magician, and anywhere I’m invited I’m supposed to do Gospel magic, okay? Well, that’s like a doctor who’s maybe got five hundred

ERICKSEN: Right.

FOXWELL: …with the gospel magic. and one of the things that really led me toward the mission field, I didn’t want to be a Gospel magician, you know. So, I’m…That was one of the factors that made…. So, I’m done with it. I’m going out to the mission field. And then I’m out there and, you know, it’s pulling people into the street meetings. I could get them in and then the Japanese pastor could…could preach to them and so on. So, I should just say that at various stages of my life I’ve thought I’m done with the magic, it served me well, and then it gets a revival for one reason or another. I’ve been ten years in Pasadena helping the U.S. Center for World Mission, and I’ve got about twenty big illusions, whereas when I arrived there, you know, I might have had four or five, but that’s another story. I…I rent them out to other guys and that gives me a bridge for witness. We should take a recess in about five minutes maybe, but anyway….

ERICKSEN: So, for that…that first year you were just polishing up your language.

FOXWELL: That first year and the rest of my life I was…

ERICKSEN: Yeah.

FOXWELL: …polishing up the language. I mean, I don’t think I ever went to long meetings without having a dictionary along with me or whatever. [Clears throat] Yeah, that first year [clears throat]…. But remember, we did get a couple of Sunday schools going that first year that became…that went into [clears throat]…. I say we, John Young and I, we had…we got a couple Sunday schools going that first year and those [clears throat] eventually became strong churches, so…so we were, you know, having kids meetings and we were start…we were starting a couple of churches that…that first year. We…John Young and I didn’t really want to start a denomination. But we were…the separatist in Japan was even less popular than he was in this country. I mean…I mean, like after one meeting with forty conservative pastors I had, you know, in a friendly way criticized a couple of liberals and they had said to me [clears throat], “Now, Foxwell, we like you. You’re a good guy, but we don’t talk about…we don’t criticize, you know, liberal theologians,” and…. What’s the track that I just lost? What was your question?

ERICKSEN: I lost it too [laughs].

FOXWELL: Okay, okay. Well. That’ll happen again too.

ERICKSEN: Well, following into that though, how then...?

FOXWELL: Oh, oh, oh. But what I started to say was, John Young and I we were sort of partners. We were the men of the mission, and we didn’t have any thought of starting another…another denomination was the last thing we thought of. However, [clears throat] the

© 2019. The Billy Graham Center Archives. All rights reserved. This transcript may be reused with the following publication credit: Used by permission of the Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. BGC Archives CN 442, T2 Transcript—Page 10 nearest thing to our theology was what’s called the Kaigakuha, the Reformed Church of Japan. And in the…in 1949, John Young and I went to their annual meeting and in effect we said, “Here we are. If you want to do something with us, we’d like to help you in any way we can.” Well, [clears throat] the Japanese are…maybe they’re overpolite. I mean, you don’t criticize a liberal theologian in a lot of places, and so on and so on. Anyway, [clears throat] John Young and I in effect offered ourselves to help with a program of Reformed theology at their annual meeting in’49, and we were tarred with the separatist brush of Carl McIntire and separatism, and they didn’t really want us. So, not because we wanted to, John Young and I started a denomination, which has become a respectable Japan Presbyterian—it’s a denomination with quite a good number. So, we started a Presbyterian denomination. Remember also that the…the Presbyterians were…as the war came on they were all, you know, brought into a thing called the United Church, so there were strains of old Presbyterian and new Presbyterian, but we…we [clears throat] didn’t really seem to fit. So, not because we really wanted to but we started the Japan Presbyterian Church. Two of the guys that I trained, they are Christian leaders that will be coming this summer and visiting the [clears throat]…visiting the annual meeting of the Presbyterian Church of America and then there will be a few days with…with me out in California in June.

ERICKSEN: Is there any kind of link between this denomination in Japan and the PCA here?

FOXWELL: Yeah, sure, because…yeah, because we have pulled that kind of….

ERICKSEN: You’re the link.

FOXWELL: Yeah, we’re the…we’re the link, and the guys will be coming…the pastors will be coming to the PCA general assembly [clears throat].

ERICKSEN: Okay. Let’s take that break.

FOXWELL: Yeah, right, good. Shut that off. It’s time for me to….

[Recording stopped and restarted]

ERICKSEN: [Foxwell clears throat] Okay, we’re…we’re back. You had said that the seminary initially had, what, eight or nine students? Was that…did I remember that right?

FOXWELL: Yeah, that was the beginning.

ERICKSEN: And for faculty, how many?

FOXWELL: Yes. Well, we….by that time there would be John Young and I, and our wives, and three single women, so like, three, maybe seven. And in the very beginning, two Japanese…three Japanese, I guess, in the very beginning. Small operation. I do feel good that we have turned out a quality product, and people that we’ve turned out are in positions of leadership in the Christian church in Japan. Gives you a good feeling.

ERICKSEN: Now, does the university as it’s now structured have a denominational affiliation?

FOXWELL: I would say not, but the top guy is…belongs to our Japan Presbyterian Church, so…. The…the university as it now stands, you’ve got a mixture in there of the people that have come from the seminary and that have come in there from some of them maybe more Arminian backgrounds, and I…I guess you would say that there is some…would be some theological tensions, but that would exist in every institution probably where you begin to broaden out your faculty, and….

ERICKSEN: Yeah. Now, what about other institutions, let’s say in Tokyo or in Japan where, for Evangelicals now, that didn’t exist back in ‘49 when you started. Is there…?

FOXWELL: There are more…definitely more Evangelical institutions for training, and I wouldn’t even be able to give you a catalogue. But I can say that [laughs] we were one of the very first…

ERICKSEN: Yeah.

FOXWELL: …that moved in that…in that direction, so we can…. [clears throat]. And I…I believe truly that there are divine providences that have put this thing together, and getting accreditation for a Christian school in Japan is awesomely difficult. And I would…this very…has happened quite recently, maybe within the, I don’t know, time goes by, but year. Certainly within two years…

ERICKSEN: Uh-huh.

FOXWELL: …less than two years since this has been accredited, and this is very difficult in Japan. And remember, we’re still talking about a country with, you know, one or two percent Christians…

ERICKSEN: Right.

FOXWELL: …and Pete Wagner speaks of…of maybe Japan, Kyoto, being where Satan’s throne is, and anyone knowledgeable will tell you that more money and effort has gone into Christian witness in Japan with poorer return than practically anywhere else.

ERICKSEN: I wonder since you were in Japan when…right after…shortly after the war had ended and the American occupation was in place, what was the environment like for missionaries coming back into the country and establishing work?

FOXWELL: At that time?

ERICKSEN: Uh-huh.

FOXWELL: A mixture of golden opportunity and some very difficult problems. Golden opportunity in that if you read a Japanese newspaper six months after Pearl Harbor you would find this kind of a theme that, “Well, Americans have more oil and steel, but the gods are on our side. The gods are…are…are…are going to give us victory,” so that the Japanese were, you know, really looking to their deities to do something for them at…at that time. My mind slipped. What’s the question? Get me back to….

ERICKSEN: The initial phase for opening up mission work?

FOXWELL: Roy Hasegawa came to we missionaries in…sometime in…early in ‘49 and he said, “We do not have even one Evangelical seminary.” And he may have said…he must have said in Tokyo, and that’s where people…kids don’t travel around as much at that time, and they didn’t, to go to school as they do in this country. So, I mean, Tokyo is where you had all of your…your universities, and your…. Well, this guy said, “We don’t have one.” That was his pitch to us as missionaries. There’s a real need for an Evangelical seminary. And we did hear things like this that there is not one commentary on the Old Testament written from the conservative standpoint. We’d hear things like that. To what extent they were exaggerations I cannot say, but remember that we still have only, you know, one to…one to two percent of Christians in Japan after, what, a 140 years of Christian witness and missionary work. Feed me the question again. I may not have had enough sleep the last couple nights. See, I’m not on…. My body’s in California. Feed me the question again and prod me again.

ERICKSEN: I’m wondering a little more generally than…than the seminary at this point.

FOXWELL: Oh.

ERICKSEN: Just about what it was like for mis…Evangelical missions coming und…in and…and setting things up. You said there were golden opportunities and there were obstacles.

FOXWELL: Well, you…if you had a street meeting you might have thirty people down on their knees. There was a vacuum after the war, and we…the Japanese were practically ready to try any, you know, anything new. And…and [clears throat, laughs] I used to distribute used clothing. The Japanese parents would compel their children to come to Sunday school not to be in…indoctrinated with Christian views but in order to get the handout of clothing. So we had great Sunday schools, and…and those were [clears throat] aided by the distributions we made of used clothing. No one had any clothing after the war. You met a banker, he’d have patches on his clothes. I traded a suit of clothes for a chicken once for a Thanksgiving…Thanksgiving dinner.

ERICKSEN: Can you think of any…any mistakes that come to mind as you look back on those…those early couple of years?

FOXWELL: Stakes?

ERICKSEN: Mistakes.

FOXWELL: Oh.

ERICKSEN: That missions were making in terms of setting up their work? Any lessons that got learned the hard way? [Foxwell sighs] Not necessarily for yourself either.

FOXWELL: Lessons. Lessons. Lessons. I…. [pauses]. Better shut that thing off a minute.

[Recording stopped and restarted]

Out of…one of the difficulties of those days is…was to really know what the Japanese were thinking. It is characteristic of them that they want you to feel good and so therefore they don’t give you honest communication. One time I asked one of my Japanese advisors, “Look, Naito Sensei, should I go A or B?” He says, “Go A.” Some months go by and it became obvious that…that I’d made the wrong decision. So, I say to Naito Sensei, I said, “Look, this…didn’t you realize that this is [clears throat] going to turn out this way?” He said, “Oh, yes.” I said, “Well, why in the world, you know, didn’t you keep me straight?” He said, “Well, you know, I told you what I thought you wanted to hear.” One time I was sitting in a meeting of Japanese pastors and there was some issue came up and one of them grinned and he pointed at some paper in his hand and I thought, “Ah.” The issue that had come up, which was now being discussed and would be approved, was something which I had proposed quite a while ago, but [clears throat] I hadn’t handled it in a Japanese way. Maruyama Gunji is saying to me, “See? You did have the right idea, but you needed to plant the seed and sit back and let the seed grow in the indigenous soil. You came on. You were too bom….” You know, he was…this was…. “You were too bombastic about the thing. You’ve got to plant the seed and let it…and then sit back and let the thing….” [clears throat]. One thing that helped us in Japan is this. In many fields where the money comes from the mission from the foreign side, the national always is at a, you know, he always feels that he’s under obligation, that he’s got a handicap in negotiation. And we had the benefit in Japan that as time passed and as the country became more prosperous that we no longer had this relationship: “These are the guys with the money. We have to condescend to them.” And so on. And so the time came when we didn’t have that kind of problem in Japan, which was one of the…one of the nice things about working with the Japanese. We got on an equal basis of…of where we were discussing something. I tended to be…I tend to be, “Hey,” you know, “what about this?” And…and this particular thing that comes to my mind, the guy is saying, “See? You had the right idea, but you needed to plant it in the…in the national soil, and then sit back and let it come up out of there instead of coming on so that it comes in as a….” One funny thing that happened that I remember. There were some Japanese pastors that were discussing the Westminster Confession, and they finally decided that “Well, it had some commendable features, but it was put together by foreigners, so junk it and let’s get something….” Of course, that to me was sort of humorous at the time, but I mean, “The Westminster Confession was done by foreigners, so let’s junk it and do something more indigenous to the…to the place.” An advantage in working with Japan was that the time came when we could discuss and decide things on a more…more equality. We were more like partners and say you know you guys put in so much from the Japanese side and we get so much from the mission side and we can go with this. It would seem to me that every mission field would…there would be a terrible handicap for the missionary who’s got to put in the money and the guy down here is the one who is receiving

ERICKSEN: How long did it take you to get to that point?

FOXWELL: Well….

ERICKSEN: Roughly.

FOXWELL: Roughly twenty years. Roughly twenty years.

ERICKSEN: So, ‘70.

FOXWELL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

ERICKSEN: Did that seem a long time for you or…? What was the feeling among the missionaries? Long overdue? Too soon?

FOXWELL: I think we all felt good when it came. We know…a good missionary knows he’s got to be expendable. If he makes himself indispensable…. I mean, I taught apologetics, but one of my guys gets a Th.D. and, of course, does a much better that…than I did. And I taught Greek to a woman named Tanabe Shige, and she put Machen’s Greek grammar into Japanese. I mean, she went…oh, she was…has been at Wheaton. I mean, we sent her here for a while. Tanabe Shige. So that…I lost my trend of thought. Probably will happen again.

ERICKSEN: We were talking about when…how missionaries felt about the transfer or the…the equalization of….

FOXWELL: That is always going to be difficult, but we…we were blessed in Japan by…the economic prosperity and success of Japan eliminated this inequality. And in fact, another missionary and I, one of the Japanese teachers would drive up in a fairly new car and we would joke, and say, you know, “We wish we could live like the natives, [laughs] you know? Like the nationals.” Because the…the Japanese were increasingly, you know, prosperous as the years passed.

ERICKSEN: Now, how did…how did the Japanese exert their independence or their equality so that at that point you knew…?

FOXWELL: Well, they could vote you down on something or, you know, let you know. I would say that the Japanese could make you feel rather small sometimes.

ERICKSEN: Can you think of an instance where that happened?

FOXWELL: Yeah, what was it we were discussing? And there was…the thought sort of was, “Well, this is really not worth discussing with you foreigners because, you know, you’re really

ERICKSEN: Uh-huh.

FOXWELL: …relationship even…even now with…with many of them.

ERICKSEN: Was there any kind of theological education by extension component in the seminary?

FOXWELL: No. We…those who wanted to study in…in Japan, whether theology or anything else, typically they came to Tokyo. And there were a variety of…you know, we’ve got a cluster of universities and so on in the Tokyo area. Now, one thing that I was involved with that’s worthy of mention—a Christian student comes into the Tokyo area to go to school, and he’s pitched into a non-Christian social environment and he’s into a non-Christian [laughs] philosophy of education. So, a friend of mine by the name of Charles Corwin established a dormitory for Christian students coming in from outlying areas, and I was on the board of that and he and I worked closely through the years. And these…the students would go to their university classes, but at night we would bring in our seminary teachers and we would have a program designed to help them integrate their secular learning with a Christian worldview. Otherwise, your typical Japanese who’s a Christian, I mean, he’s got a…one part of his brain is holding to Christianity and the other holding to…to, you know, philoso…distinctly non- Christian philosophies, and the guy’s not integrating those things. So, Corwin, who’s done a lot of good things, set up this…we called it Tyrannus Hall. And the guys…it was a Christian dormitory. The guys would come in, they would live there, they would go to the universities, but they are…we would use our seminary teachers over there, by the way, and sort of like a night school to help these guys put together what they’re hearing in the university with a…with a Christian worldview. That was one of the little things that we were involved in that we felt good about.

ERICKSEN: I wonder if you could…you talked about how the seminary was established. I wonder if you could just describe how it grew and changed.

FOXWELL: [Clears throat] The seminary was started in 1949 in a Japanese home that had three stories. It was the home of Roy Hasegawa who had done graduate study in this country. My wife and I pulled our house trailer into the yard of the seminary and that’s where we lived. And we had at one time as many as twenty students who…who lived in this Japanese home and that’s where the seminary began. Well, we had at the beginning about ten students, but the time came…Dr. [Enoch] Dyrness from Wheaton came out to visit once, and, I mean, I guess at that time they might actually be sitting on the steps in order to…in order to study. So, the seminary was launched in the fall of ‘49 in a three-story Japanese house, and my family, you know, we pulled our house trailer into the back yard. I had two little girls at the time. And one characteristic as the years passed, you had fewer missionary teachers and more Japanese

© 2019. The Billy Graham Center Archives. All rights reserved. This transcript may be reused with the following publication credit: Used by permission of the Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. BGC Archives CN 442, T2 Transcript—Page 16 teachers. I mean for instance, one of my pupil students, he comes to America, gets a Th.D. and then he comes back and well able to teach apologetics and better than I could. And one of the ladies to whom I taught Greek, she came back to Japan and put Machen’s textbook into the Greek language, and so [clears throat] went definitely above her teacher. I do feel good that, you know, we always realized that we’re here like the scaffolding to put something up and that can be pulled down in time. So, the passing of the time saw increased influence from the Japanese…I mean, from the American missionary teachers, and more influence, and more input, more direction coming from the…. Today, I think we have a few foreign missionaries in the office and maybe one or two, but today for an American to teach in a Japanese institute of higher learning, he’s got to have a specialty of some kind. And in my case and the people I…we more or less worked ourselves out of a job. An interesting thing—the last thing…you know, I taught Greek, I taught apologetics, I taught evidences. The last thing that I…one of the last things that I kept was a philosophy of Christian education because it seemed as though the Japanese, not much of a concept of a philosophy of Christian education. I mean, their idea is you have the Bible along with the other, but to integrate Scripture with all of knowledge was a concept that needed to have development and propagation in Japan. So, one of the last things that I was doing…teaching was a philosophy…Christian philosophy of education.

ERICKSEN: And did you teach that up until your retirement or…?

FOXWELL: Yeah, that…that I…that I taught pretty much right up to the end.

ERICKSEN: Now, in the beginning you were…were you the president of the…the seminary?

FOXWELL: We had…the other man was the president of the seminary. If he went on furlough, I might be the president, but….

ERICKSEN: So that was Jim Young?

FOXWELL: John Young.

ERICKSEN: John Young.

FOXWELL: John Young. Yeah, yeah.

ERICKSEN: And your post was as a professor?

FOXWELL: Yeah, I was a professor in there. John made a greater contribution in the area of church development, and I did maybe more over in funding, and, you know, I was more involved in Japanese real estate deals, and so on, and….

ERICKSEN: On behalf of the seminary.

FOXWELL: On behalf of the seminary, yeah. I’d go out and look at plots of land and figure how many airplanes went over, and you know, is this a suitable place to…? One thing that

ERICKSEN: When was the first Japanese president appointed of the seminary? Roughly.

FOXWELL: Yeah. Well, for a guess…for a guess, ‘65, but this is a…between ‘60 and ’65, I would say. But increasingly we are moving toward, you know….

ERICKSEN: Sure. Now, it was initially called the Japan….

FOXWELL: Christian Theological Seminary.

ERICKSEN: When did it become the Tokyo Christian Theological Seminary?

FOXWELL: This three-way merger is a merger with a lot of cooperating things and yet at the same time there’s more identity of the cooperating segments that might be, you know, in the normal sort of a situation. The largest components of the…of the merger are the Tokyo Christian College that [Don] Hoke founded and then the seminary in which I was involved. And those were the large components. And then the Kyoritsu Women’s Bible College. You had those three components coming in.

ERICKSEN: Uh-huh.

FOXWELL: Is this thing at an end down there? [Coughs]

ERICKSEN: Almost. One thing…question that just came to mind. With you and Don Hoke being good friends setting up two educational institutions, was there any kind of competition between the two of you?

FOXWELL: No, it worked out beautifully. I provided him with teachers in the early days, and you know we…our personal friendship facilitated a lot of…a lot of good things. We were able to help him. We were going before the…he was, so we were able to…. He came and visited Japan in 1950 and lived in my home for some months as a representative of Christian college, so we…we’ve worked together on things from the year one.

END OF TAPE