Appendix E
A doctrine-by-doctrine chart, with the page numbers and the chapters that argue them
This page is a map of the whole book. It shows you where everything is, in one place. But a map is not the territory. A map of the Grand Canyon will not get you to the bottom. You still have to hike down.
I built every row the same way. I took a doctrine that Christians have confessed for centuries. I opened Dake’s own pages and found what he actually says about it. Then I set them side by side, listed the Scriptures that speak to the question, and pointed you to the chapter where the full argument is made.1
The second column is the one to watch. That is where Dake speaks. When a short phrase of his fits inside the cell, I put his exact words in quotation marks. When his position needs more room than a table cell allows, I give a plain summary instead. Either way, the footnote pins the book, the printing, and the page number. Nothing in that column was written from memory. Every quotation was pulled from the text of God’s Plan for Man or Bible Truths Unmasked, then checked against the printed page numbers in that text.2
Let me be honest about what a chart like this cannot do. It cannot give you Dake’s full context. It cannot show you how reasonable he sounds on one page and how startling he is on the next. And it cannot argue anything. A single line in a table cell is not a case. The case lives in the chapters. That is where his notes are quoted at length, where his reasons are heard at full strength, and where the answer comes after the evidence, never before it. So if a row surprises you, do not argue with the row. Follow the link. Read the chapter.
One more thing about the fourth column. I quote the old creeds there because they say certain things better and shorter than I could. The creeds are not a second Bible. They are the church writing down what it heard in the first one, after long argument and at real cost. Every line in that column has Scripture underneath it. The chapters open that Scripture. If a creed ever said something the Bible does not say, I would drop the creed. It never has, and I have never had to.
Two final notes before the chart. First, no row claims more than its chapter has proved. Where the sources in hand leave a question open, the row says so. Second, some of what Dake taught falls within the normal range of disagreement among believers. It is not a departure from the faith. Those rows are marked. I would rather give up a point than win one unfairly.
How to Read a Row
Read from left to right. The first cell names the doctrine. The second gives Dake’s position, with a footnote that pins the page. The third gives Scripture, quoted throughout this book from the New King James Version.3 The fourth gives what the church has confessed, in one line, with a creed named where a creed says it best. The last cell links the chapter that does the heavy lifting.
Where a row is marked in-house, it is there for the record only. It is not part of the case this book makes about his doctrine of God.
| The doctrine | Dake in brief | Scripture | The historic confession | Argued in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The unity of God | Three persons who are “one in unity,” the way several men can be one.4 | Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 44:6; Isaiah 45:5; 1 Corinthians 8:6. | One God in one being. The Athanasian Creed says it flatly: “not three Gods, but one God.”5 | Chapter 7 |
| The persons | “Three separate and distinct persons, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit.”6 | Matthew 28:19; John 1:1; John 10:30; 2 Corinthians 13:14. | One being, three persons. Nicaea says the Son is of one substance with the Father (Greek homoousios, “same being”).7 | Chapter 6 documents it; Chapter 7 answers it. |
| The Son | In becoming man He “laid aside His God-form,” yet “retained His deity or His divine nature.” Dake affirms that Christ is God.8 | John 1:1, 14; Philippians 2:5–11; Colossians 2:9; Hebrews 1:3. | One person in two natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”9 | Chapter 13 |
| The Spirit | The Spirit “is bound to have a separate spirit-body, soul, and spirit from either the Father or the Son.”10 | John 4:24; Acts 5:3–4; Romans 8:9–11; 1 Corinthians 2:10–11. | The Spirit is God, and is worshiped with the Father and the Son. He is spirit, not a body.11 | Chapter 14 |
| God’s spirituality and visibility | “God has a spirit body with bodily parts like man.”12 | John 1:18; John 4:24; Colossians 1:15; 1 Timothy 6:16. | God is spirit, “without body, parts, or passions.” The times He appeared were real, and they were God stooping to be seen.13 | Chapter 8 |
| Omnipresence | “God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere.” He “goes from place to place like anybody else.”14 | 1 Kings 8:27; Psalm 139:7–10; Jeremiah 23:23–24; Acts 17:27–28. | God is wholly present everywhere at once. He does not travel to reach you. | Chapter 9 |
| Omniscience | “The Bible makes many simple statements that limit God’s knowledge.” He “does not know from all eternity what any one man will do.”15 | Psalm 147:5; Isaiah 46:9–10; Hebrews 4:13; 1 John 3:20. | God knows all things in one act. He tells the end from the beginning. | Chapter 10 |
| Omnipotence | “There are certain spheres in which He does not and cannot operate.” His love is “naturally limited by the free moral agency of man.”16 | Genesis 18:14; Job 42:2; Jeremiah 32:17, 27; Matthew 19:26. | God is almighty and does all His holy will. He binds Himself by promise, never by nature. In-house note: resistible grace is ordinary Arminian teaching, and this book does not fault it.17 | Chapter 11 |
| Immutability | “God has had to change His plan temporarily because of man’s sin.” He “changes His own dealings with men.”18 | Numbers 23:19; Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 6:17–18; James 1:17. | God does not change in being, character, or promise. His dealings answer our repentance; His nature does not shift. | Chapter 12 |
| Creation and the world before Adam | Genesis 1:2 records a ruined earlier world. “All cities were destroyed in which the pre-Adamites lived.”19 | Genesis 1:1–2; Exodus 20:11; Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22. | God made all things from nothing, and Adam is the head of the race that fell. The creeds do not settle the age of the earth. In-house note: a gap reading of Genesis 1:2, held modestly, has orthodox company.20 | Chapter 15 |
| Heaven and the eternal state | Heaven is “a real planet like the Earth,” where God “dwells in a mansion and in a city.”21 | John 14:2–3; 1 Corinthians 15:42–49; 2 Corinthians 5:1; Revelation 21:1–4. | Heaven is a real place, and the body will truly rise. Its glory is God Himself, not its furniture. | Chapter 16 |
| Healing and the atonement | “All one must do to be healed is to have the same simple faith in healing in the atonement as one has for forgiveness.”22 | Isaiah 53:4–5; Matthew 8:16–17; Romans 8:23–25; 2 Corinthians 12:7–9. | The cross buys the healing of the body, and the full payment comes at the resurrection. In-house note: I believe God heals today. The quarrel is with the guarantee, not with the prayer.23 | Chapter 17 |
| Prayer | “It is impossible for any child of God to pray in faith and not receive.”24 | Matthew 26:39; Hebrews 11:35–39; 2 Corinthians 12:8–9; 1 John 5:14–15. | We ask a Father, and He answers according to His will. Bold asking is commanded. A ledger is not. | Chapter 18 |
| The unity of the human race | Printings before 1988 carry a note at Acts 17:26 giving thirty reasons for segregating the races.25 Elsewhere he writes plainly that “of one blood God made all nations of men.”26 | Genesis 1:27; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Revelation 7:9. | One race, from one man, of one blood. In Christ there is one new humanity out of every nation. | Chapter 20 documents it; Chapter 21 answers it; Chapter 22 tells what the publishers did. |
What the Chart Shows at a Glance
Read the fourth column straight down, and you are reading the creed. Read the second column straight down, and you are reading a different God. Not just a God talked about differently. A different God. Three beings instead of one. A body instead of spirit. One place instead of every place. A learner instead of the One who knows. A will that can be blocked, instead of the will that made the stars.
That is the whole claim of this book, gathered onto one page. The proof is in the chapters.
Same Words, Different Meanings
Look at the second and fourth columns of any row above. You will often find the same word in both. Dake says “Trinity”; the creed says “Trinity.” Dake says “omnipresent”; the confession says “omnipresent.” But the definitions are not the same. His “Trinity” is three separate beings, each with his own body. The church’s “Trinity” is one God in three persons. His “omnipresent” means God’s presence can be felt at a distance, like a wife felt by a husband who is far away. The church’s “omnipresent” means God is wholly there, wherever “there” is. This chart would be much less alarming if the words meant what they usually mean. They do not. Chapter 5 explains the pattern. Appendix D gathers the terms.
Let me come back to where I started. This chart is a map, and maps can lie by being tidy. Real teaching is messier than a row of boxes. Dake wrote for decades, and he said many good things along the way. His love for Scripture was real. His defense of the supernatural against the unbelief of his day was worth making. Some of the rows above are marked in-house for exactly that reason: on those points he stands where millions of faithful believers stand.
But the first nine rows are the heart of the matter, and they are not in-house. They concern the doctrine of God. Change those, and every other page in his notes changes with them, whether the words on the page look different or not. That is why this book spends so many chapters on his exact words, and why Appendix D sets his definitions beside the church’s in a table of their own.
I should also name what is missing from this chart. It has fourteen rows, and Dake wrote well over a thousand pages. He has notes on stewardship. On prophecy. On the Christian home. On prayer for a wandering child. Most of those notes raise nothing this book needs to answer. If you came here looking for every line of his work on trial, you will not find that. And you should not. The question this book asks is narrow on purpose: who is the God of these notes? Everything else in his work stands or falls on its own merits.
So take this chart for what it is. Use it to find your way. Then go read the chapter, with his Bible open beside you and the Scriptures open beside that. Check every quotation I give against the note. Check every note against the page. That is what Appendix F is for. And it is what I would want done to my own work. The God who is truly one, truly here, truly all-knowing, and truly able is not threatened by careful reading. He is what careful reading finds.
↑ 1. Every row traces back to a chapter where the quotation is printed in full and read in context. Where a cell and its chapter differ in emphasis, the chapter governs: a table cell cannot carry all the qualifications. On the labeling of Study Bible editions used throughout this book, see Appendix C; on Dake’s vocabulary, see Appendix D.
↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; copyright renewed 1977), the one-volume fifty-two-lesson printing; the resident copy carries “Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake” and “Copyright renewed 1977,” with the Dake Bible Sales imprint at P.O. Box 625, Lawrenceville, Georgia. Also Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, Inc., 1950). Page citations follow the printed page numbers embedded in the running heads of the resident digitizations. Both files are optical-character digitizations; every quotation was proofread against the retrieved text, and obvious scanning breakage (split words, stray spaces, soft hyphens) was rejoined silently without altering wording. Where a cited page carries its own note heading, the heading is given; otherwise the page number stands alone.
↑ 3. References in the third column are given for the reader to open rather than quoted, to keep the cells short. Scripture quoted elsewhere in this book is from the New King James Version unless a note says otherwise. Scripture quoted inside Dake’s own material is his King James text, reproduced as he printed it.
↑ 4. God’s Plan for Man, 54: “If there are three persons in the Godhead and they exist as one, we must understand this oneness to be the same as in the case of several men being one, one in unity.” See also 50, where he holds that the Hebrew word for “one” (achad, in his transliteration) can mean either one in unity or one in number, and that which is meant “must be determined by Scripture and not by the meaning of the word itself”; and 51, defining “Trinity” as three persons “one in unity and eternal substance, but three separate and distinct persons as to individuality.”
↑ 5. Athanasian Creed, arts. 3 and 15–16, traditional English text: “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity”; “And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.” Public domain.
↑ 6. God’s Plan for Man, 498, under the heading “Over 500 Scriptures Proving a Divine Trinity”: “There are over 500 plain scriptures that refer to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as being THREE SEPARATE AND DISTINCT PERSONS, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit in the sense that all other persons have them.” Capitals are his. Compare 60: “Each member of the Divine Trinity has His own personal spirit body, His own soul . . . and His own personal spirit.”
↑ 7. Nicene Creed (325, as received and expanded in 381): the Son is “begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.” The Greek is homoousios, literally “of the same being.” The word does the load-bearing work: it denies that the Son is a second being alongside the Father. Public domain.
↑ 8. God’s Plan for Man, 386–87: “in taking human form He divested Himself of His divine attributes, or at least power to use them, having laid aside His God-form . . . and become limited in knowledge, wisdom, power, glory, and in every way that man was, and that He retained His deity or His divine nature.” The concession in the cell is real and should be kept in view: Dake affirms the deity of Christ, and this book never claims otherwise. What Chapter 13 examines is what his Godhead does to that affirmation.
↑ 9. Definition of Chalcedon (451), traditional English text: one and the same Christ, made known “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Public domain.
↑ 10. God’s Plan for Man, 449: “If He is distinct from both the Father and the Son . . . then He is bound to have a separate spirit-body, soul, and spirit from either the Father or the Son.” Compare 451: “it is not hard to conceive that the Holy Ghost has a spirit-body like the Father still has.”
↑ 11. Nicene Creed: the Holy Spirit is “the Lord and Giver of Life . . . who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.” Public domain.
↑ 12. God’s Plan for Man, 56, numbered point 7: “God has a spirit body with bodily parts like man. This is proved by hundreds of plain Scriptures that do not need interpretation.” The list that follows on 57 has God wearing clothes, eating, resting, and sitting on a throne.
↑ 13. Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1: God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.” Public domain. The confession is quoted here as a clear summary of the older consensus, not as an authority above Scripture; the scriptural ground is opened in Chapter 8.
↑ 14. God’s Plan for Man, 61, under the heading “God is Omnipresent”: “God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere”; and “God is omni-present but not omni-body . . . God has a body and goes from place to place like anybody else.” Compare 60: “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.”
↑ 15. God’s Plan for Man, 62, under the heading “God is Omniscient”: “The Bible makes many simple statements that limit God’s knowledge”; and “God gets to know things concerning the free moral actions of men as others do.” The conclusion is drawn on 63: “God does not know from all eternity what any one man will do.”
↑ 16. God’s Plan for Man, 63, under the heading “God is Omnipotent”: “Within God’s own realm He is omnipotent, but there are certain spheres in which He does not and cannot operate; and there are certain things He cannot do.” The natural limit is stated at 342: “Thus God’s grace or love is naturally limited by the free moral agency of man.”
↑ 17. The distinction matters and is easy to blur. That grace can be resisted, and that salvation can be forfeited, is ordinary Arminian teaching held by millions of orthodox believers; this book does not treat it as error. The departure examined in Chapter 11 is the further step: turning a self-limitation God freely chose into a limit imposed on Him by the nature of the creature. No Arminian confession teaches that.
↑ 18. God’s Plan for Man, 46: “God has had to change His plan temporarily because of man’s sin, but the original and eternal plan will be carried out.” The second half of that sentence is a real qualification and is weighed in Chapter 12. Compare 63: “sufficient proof that He changes His own dealings with men, as they conform or refuse to conform to His will”; and 59, where repentance is listed among the feelings of God’s soul.
↑ 19. God’s Plan for Man, 117: “In Gen. 1:2 we have the fact that the Earth was in existence before the Spirit of God began to move (brood) upon the face of the waters which covered the Earth.” Compare 26: “All life was totally destroyed, including birds, men, vegetation, and all cities were destroyed in which the pre-Adamites lived.”
↑ 20. A gap reading of Genesis 1:2, held modestly, was taught by respected nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicals and appears in study Bibles no one calls heretical. This book does not make it part of the case. Chapter 15 examines the system Dake builds on the reading, not the reading by itself.
↑ 21. God’s Plan for Man, 834, numbered point 2: “IT IS A REAL PLANET LIKE THE EARTH.” Capitals are his. Compare 57, where God “dwells in a mansion and in a city located on a material planet called Heaven.” The concession in the cell is not decorative: that heaven is a real place and that the body will truly rise are the church’s own convictions, and Dake defends both against a vague spirituality that was losing them.
↑ 22. God’s Plan for Man, 175: “all one must do to be healed is to have the same simple faith in healing in the atonement as one has for forgiveness in the atonement.” Compare 243, where healing in the atonement is listed among the numbered points of his healing teaching.
↑ 23. I should say this in my own voice, since a chart cannot. I believe the gifts of the Spirit continue, I pray for the sick, and I have seen God answer. Nothing in this row is a retreat toward the view that the age of healing is past. Chapter 17 concedes that ground before it raises any objection.
↑ 24. Bible Truths Unmasked, 124, sec. 15, “No Defeat Possible to Christians”: “If they are true they cannot be lies. If they are not lies then it is impossible for any child of God to pray in faith and not receive.” On pagination: the resident digitization drops one running head between the printed pages 124 and 126, so a rough count of heads reads this section low by several pages; the page given here is derived by counting every head forward from the printed anchors at 103, 112, 123, and 127. The numbered conditions of answered prayer run through sec. 14, “Be Sure Conditions Are Met,” at 123, and end with “ASK ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF GOD”; the mastery-over-the-devil material is at 120. All three are examined in Chapter 18.
↑ 25. This cell is deliberately at naming level, and the reason is a rule this book keeps everywhere: the note in question is not resident in the library this appendix was drafted from, so nothing is quoted from it here. The verbatim transcription, made from photographs of the page and cross-read across several shots, is Appendix B; the documentation is Chapter 20; the record of what later printings did with it is Chapter 22 and Appendix C. The note appears in printings before 1988 at New Testament page 159, under Acts 17:26. Printings from 1988 onward do not carry it, and that change was made after Dake’s death.
↑ 26. God’s Plan for Man, 438: “In Acts 17:26 we are told that of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell upon the whole face of the Earth.” On the same page he rejects the old claim that the mark on Cain was a change of skin color, noting that the Hebrew word means a pledge and that “there is no statement that he was marked physically by a change of color.” I print this because it is true and because it complicates the picture, which is what honest documentation does. Chapter 21 weighs it.