A Dake Dictionary

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; renewed 1977), Lesson 4, “I. Definition of the Terms Used,” 49–51. Copyright and publisher details taken from the front matter of the resident copy, which reads “© Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake” and “© Copyright renewed 1977 by Finis Jennings Dake.” Page numbers throughout this appendix are the book’s own printed page numbers, which survive as running heads in the resident text file.

↑ 2. Method note. Each quotation was retrieved from the resident source file, logged with its file name and printed page, and then checked back against the file before this page was finalized. The resident copies are optical-character-recognition text of printed pages, so they carry scanning artifacts: split words, spaced capitals, stray marks. Where such damage was obvious, the word has been rejoined silently, as the project’s source rules direct. No wording has been altered, and nothing has been supplied from memory.

↑ 3. God’s Plan for Man was issued first as twenty-six loose-leaf books of two lessons each and later gathered into one volume of more than a thousand pages. The foreword of the resident printing states that the author had spent “over 75,000 hours searching the Scriptures before writing the lesson-set.” Chapter 2 weighs that claim and its uses.

↑ 4. Drafting note, offered because this book asks its readers to audit it. This appendix was drafted in the project library holding Dake’s own books, where God’s Plan for Man and the smaller works are resident and searchable. Study Bible page scans live in a different library and were not carried into this drafting session, so no Study Bible note is quoted here. Nothing in the table depends on one. Where a Study Bible note is the better witness for a term, the note is quoted, edition-labeled, and where necessary photographed in the chapter that owns it, and the printings are compared in Appendix C.

↑ 5. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 4, 49 (definition 1, “GOD”).

↑ 6. Ibid., 49 (definition 2, “GODHEAD”). Dake adds that the term is used of Christ in Colossians 2:9 and of “all three persons in the deity” in Romans 1:20. The definition itself is unremarkable; the whole weight of his system falls on what he says the Godhead contains, documented in Chapter 6.

↑ 7. Ibid., 49–50 (definition 3, “ONE”). Dake’s transliteration is achad; the standard scholarly form of the Hebrew is ’eḥad. He grants on the same page that the word can mean one in number, and adds that “whether one in unity or one in number is the meaning in a particular passage must be determined by Scripture and not by the meaning of the word itself.” That concession matters, and Chapter 7 takes it up: the question is what Deuteronomy 6:4 actually determines.

↑ 8. Ibid., 50 (definition 4, “IN”). Dake calls the idea “the Bible doctrine of interpenetration” and applies it to God in Christ, Christ in the believer, and the Spirit in the believer alike.

↑ 9. Ibid., 50 (definition 5, “PERSON”).

↑ 10. Ibid., 51 (definition 8, “TRINITY”). The resident text reads “individual ity” at the line break, an artifact of scanning; the word is individuality.

↑ 11. Ibid., 51 (definition 9, “BODY, SOUL, AND SPIRIT”). Compare his statement at Lesson 4, 56: “A spirit being can and does have real, material, and tangible spirit form, shape, and size, with bodily parts, soul passions, and spirit faculties.”

↑ 12. Ibid., 57. The claim is load-bearing for the whole system. If spirit is a higher grade of matter, then a spirit can have a body without contradiction, and John 4:24 stops being an obstacle. Chapter 8 tests the claim.

↑ 13. Ibid., 57. The em dashes inside the quotation are Dake’s, as printed.

↑ 14. Ibid., 64. The sentence appears in a list of attributes Dake holds to be qualified in practice, alongside God’s longsuffering, mercy, and impartiality. His cross-reference is to his own earlier points cataloguing appearances of God.

↑ 15. Ibid., 61. See also 60: “He is not omni-body; that is, His body is not everywhere at all places at the same time,” and, on the same page, “Spirit beings, including God, Himself, cannot be omnipresent in body, for their bodies are of ordinary size and must be at one place at a time.” The flat statement “God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere” stands at 61. Chapter 9 prints the surrounding argument in full.

↑ 16. Ibid., 62. Dake’s own examples follow on the same page: God “did not know beforehand that men would become so wicked,” that they would plan Babel, how wicked Sodom would be, or “that Abraham would actually proceed to offer up Isaac.” Chapter 10 quotes the passage at length and answers each prooftext.

↑ 17. Ibid., Lesson 33, 618. His formal definition stands at 621: “The word foreknowledge simply means the prescience of God or the knowing beforehand certain events that will happen.” Prescience is simply the old word for knowing beforehand.

↑ 18. Ibid., Lesson 4, 63. On the same page Dake defines the term as “unlimited and universal power and authority within a certain sphere, or of a certain kind,” and gives a list of things God cannot do. Some items on that list are ordinary and orthodox, such as God cannot lie. Chapter 11 separates the two kinds of “cannot” carefully.

↑ 19. Ibid., Lesson 19, 342, in the discussion introducing his “Thirty Things Grace Cannot Do.” His definition of the phrase itself stands at Lesson 12, 210: “Free moral agency consists of intellect, sensibility, and free will, and those form the foundation of moral obligation to moral government.” The book does not treat Arminian teaching as error; see the fairness rules discussed in Chapter 1 and applied in Chapter 11.

↑ 20. Ibid., Lesson 4, 64. Compare Lesson 3, 46, where Dake reads Genesis 6:6 to say that “God repented that He had made man” because “sin and rebellion had entered, which made it necessary for God to have a changed attitude toward man.”

↑ 21. Ibid., Lesson 22, 387. His definition of the term stands at 384: “The kenosis of Christ means that Christ emptied Himself.” Kenosis is the Greek word for emptying, from Philippians 2:7. He is clear that Christ did not lay aside the divine nature itself, and Chapter 13 gives him that credit before weighing what he does say was laid aside.

↑ 22. Ibid., Lesson 22, 384.

↑ 23. Ibid., Lesson 45, 782. The same rule is stated in the publisher’s foreword to the resident printing: “Take the Bible literally where it is at all possible; if symbolic, figurative, or typical language is used, then look for the literal truth it intends to convey.” Chapter 4 traces the rule to his early work and shows what it does when it reaches the doctrine of God.

↑ 24. Ibid., Lesson 7, 118. Dake anticipates the objection and answers it on the same page, arguing from Genesis 9:1 and other uses of the word. Chapter 15 prints his argument in full and answers it.

↑ 25. Ibid., Lesson 8, 138. This entry is a deliberate example of the table clearing him. In the course book the word carries no racial freight whatever, and the reading is the common one. The extension of a law of “kind” to human peoples belongs to the Study Bible note on Acts 17:26 in printings before 1988, which is documented, photographed, and transcribed in Chapter 20 and Appendix B, and answered from Scripture in Chapter 21. No part of that note is quoted here.

↑ 26. Ibid., Lesson 12, 254. That healing is provided in the atonement is held across the Pentecostal and charismatic world and by many outside it, and this book does not treat it as error. Chapter 17 presses only the further step: that failure to receive healing must be traced to the sick person’s unbelief.

↑ 27. Ibid., Supplement 5, 106. Compare Supplement 10, 214: “Faith is the making of a blueprint of what you want and working toward that end. Act before you get what you want as you would if you already had it. Visualize it as yours.” The same theme carries his Bible Truths Unmasked (Chicago: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), chapter 16, in sections headed “Complete Mastery Over the Devil Possible” and “No Defeat Possible to Christians”; the resident digitization of that book preserves only scattered page markers, and these sections fall between its printed pages 112 and 127. Chapter 18 handles the whole of it.

↑ 28. This row carries no quotation, and the blank is deliberate. The word belongs to Dake’s publishers rather than to Dake, and no publisher’s statement about the changes is resident in the library where this appendix was drafted. The printings actually in hand, what each one shows, and what is missing from the record are set out in Chapter 22 and tabulated witness by witness in Appendix C. Nothing is asserted here that those pages do not document.

↑ 29. The church’s technical vocabulary here is Greek. Ousia (“being, essence”) names the one thing God is; hypostasis (“person”) names each of the three who share it. The distinction was fixed in the fourth century precisely to say what Dake’s definition cannot say: that three persons need not be three beings. Chapter 7 develops the grammar in plain English.

↑ 30. Athanasian Creed, art. 15–16, traditional English text. The creed is quoted here in a single line because Chapter 7 owns it and sets out its argument, with its scriptural ground, at length.

↑ 31. Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1. The confession is cited as a clear summary of what Protestant orthodoxy has confessed, not as an authority above Scripture; the same chapter shows the texts beneath it.

↑ 32. Nicene Creed, traditional English text of the article on the Son.

↑ 33. The teacher is introduced in Chapter 1, where a footnote explains that he is a composite drawn from many such conversations rather than one man.