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. © 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 2 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. © 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 3 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? © 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 4 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….