Appendix E
Dake and the Historic Faith
His teaching beside Scripture and the creeds, one doctrine at a time
This page sets Dake’s teaching beside the faith the church has confessed, one doctrine to a row. Each row gives a short phrase in Dake’s own words with its page and a verdict. Then come the Scriptures that speak to the question, what the church has confessed, and the chapter where the case is made in full.1
Read together, the rows on the doctrine of God describe another God. Dake’s God is three separate beings, each with a body, a soul and a spirit. The Father lives in one place and travels to others. He learns what free people will do, cannot act in some spheres, and changes His plans. Three separate divine beings is tritheism, and the church has always called it heresy. The other rows record errors that came from the same way of reading the Bible, and the last row records the racism his notes once taught as Bible doctrine.
How to read the table
A table cell can hold only a phrase. The chapters print Dake’s words at length, with enough of the page around them to show what he meant, and they answer him from Scripture. If a cell ever seems to say more or less than its chapter, go by the chapter. The Scripture column gives references for you to open.2 The confession column quotes a creed only where its wording settles the question. The creeds are the church’s summary of what the Bible teaches, and Scripture stands over them.
The verdicts use the church’s own categories. Heresy marks teaching the historic church has rejected as contrary to the faith itself. False teaching marks teaching that contradicts plain Scripture, and the rows on healing and prayer call it harmful because of what it does to believers who are not healed or not answered. Error marks speculation printed as though Scripture had revealed it. The row on Christ says serious error, for reasons given there, and the row on race says racism.
Many rows use the same word in the second and fourth columns. Dake uses “Trinity,” “omnipresent” and “immutable” as the church does, and he gives each word a meaning of his own. Chapter 5 shows how that works, and Appendix D sets his definitions beside the church’s.
Three rows carry an in-house note. Each one marks a view that sits close to Dake’s teaching and is held by many faithful believers: that grace can be resisted, a modest gap reading of Genesis 1, and healing in answer to prayer today. Chapter 1 lists these views as outside this book’s case. In those rows the verdict falls on the further step Dake took.
The table
| Doctrine | Dake in his own words | Scripture | The historic confession | Argued in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The unity of God | The three persons are one “the same as in the case of several men being one—one in unity” (p. 54).3 Heresy |
Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 44:6; 45:5; 1 Corinthians 8:6 | One God in one being. The Athanasian Creed says it in one line: “not three Gods, but one God.”4 | Chapter 7 |
| The persons | “THREE SEPARATE AND DISTINCT PERSONS, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit” (p. 498).5 Heresy |
Matthew 28:19; John 1:1; 10:30; 2 Corinthians 13:14 | One being in three persons. The Nicene Creed confesses the Son “being of one substance with the Father” (Greek homoousios, “of the same being”).6 | Chapter 6 documents it, and Chapter 7 answers it |
| The Son | In becoming man He “divested Himself of His divine attributes, or at least power to use them, having laid aside His God-form,” though He “retained His deity or His divine nature” (pp. 386–387).7 In Dake’s Godhead the Son is also one of three separate beings. Serious error |
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.”8 The Son added a human nature and lost nothing of what He is as God. The three-being frame is the heresy of the rows above. | Chapter 13 |
| The Spirit | The Spirit “is bound to have a separate spirit-body, soul, and spirit from either the Father or the Son” (p. 449).9 Heresy |
John 4:24; Acts 5:3–4; Romans 8:9–11; 1 Corinthians 2:10–11 | The Spirit is “the Lord and Giver-of-Life,” who “with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.”10 He is God, and He has no body. | Chapter 14 |
| God is spirit | “God has a spirit body with bodily parts like man” (p. 56).11 Heresy |
John 1:18; 4:24; Colossians 1:15; 1 Timothy 6:16 | God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”12 When He appeared to people, the appearances were real, and they were God stooping to be seen. | Chapter 8 |
| God is present everywhere | “God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere,” and He “goes from place to place like anybody else” (p. 61). What reaches us is a felt presence, the way Dake, writing far from home, felt his wife and children “hundreds of miles away.”13 Heresy |
1 Kings 8:27; Psalm 139:7–10; Jeremiah 23:23–24; Acts 17:27–28 | God Himself is wholly present everywhere at once. He does not have to travel to reach you. | Chapter 9 |
| God knows all things | “The Bible makes many simple statements that limit God’s knowledge” (p. 62), and “God does not know from all eternity what any one man will do” (p. 63).14 False teaching |
Psalm 147:5; Isaiah 46:9–10; Hebrews 4:13; 1 John 3:20 | God knows all things, and He declares the end from the beginning. Nothing a free creature chooses takes Him by surprise. | Chapter 10 |
| God is almighty | “there are certain spheres in which He does not and cannot operate” (p. 63), and “God’s grace or love is naturally limited by the free moral agency of man” (p. 342).15 False teaching |
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 His promises, and nothing outside Him sets a limit on Him. In-house note: resistible grace is ordinary Arminian teaching, and this book does not fault it.16 | Chapter 11 |
| God does not change | “God has had to change His plan temporarily because of man’s sin” (p. 46), and He “changes His own dealings with men” (p. 63).17 False teaching |
Numbers 23:19; Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 6:17–18; James 1:17 | God does not change in His being, His character, His purpose or His promises. His dealings answer our repentance, and His nature stays the same. | Chapter 12 |
| Creation and the world before Adam | Genesis 1:2 records the ruin of an earlier world, when “all cities were destroyed in which the pre-Adamites lived” (p. 34).18 Error |
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.19 | Chapter 15 |
| Heaven and the eternal state | Heaven: “IT IS A REAL PLANET LIKE THE EARTH” (p. 834), where God “dwells in a mansion and in a city” (p. 57). After the Millennium, natural peoples live on as “the subjects of the kingdom forever” (p. 995).20 Error |
Matthew 22:30; John 14:2–3; 1 Corinthians 15:42–49; 2 Corinthians 5:1; Revelation 21:1–4, 22–23 | Heaven is a real place, and the body will truly rise. The risen do not marry, and the glory of the new creation is God Himself. | 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 in the atonement” (p. 175).21 Harmful false teaching |
Isaiah 53:4–5; Matthew 8:16–17; Romans 8:23–25; 2 Corinthians 12:7–9 | The cross paid for the healing of the body, and the full healing comes at the resurrection. In-house note: God heals today, and the church should pray for the sick. The argument is with the guarantee.22 | Chapter 17 |
| Prayer | “it is impossible for any child of God to pray in faith and not receive” (Bible Truths Unmasked, p. 124).23 Harmful false teaching |
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. Scripture commands bold asking, and it also records holy prayers that God answered with no. | Chapter 18 |
| The unity of the human race | In its original printings his Bible headed the first note on N.T. p. 159 “30 reasons for segregation of races: (Acts 17:26),” and the note at the verse sent readers there.24 In his course he quotes the verse itself: “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” (p. 443).25 Racism |
Genesis 1:27; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Revelation 7:9 | One race, from one man, of one blood. In Christ God makes one new people out of every nation. | Chapter 20 documents the note, Chapter 21 answers it, and Chapter 22 tells what later printings did with it |
What the Second Column Shows
Read the fourth column from top to bottom and you are reading the creed. Read the second column the same way and you meet a different God: three beings instead of one, a body instead of spirit, one place instead of every place, and a learner whose will can be blocked.
What the table shows
The rows from the unity of God through God’s unchanging nature are about God Himself. None of them is in-house. The note in the row on God’s power marks a neighboring Arminian view that is in-house, and Dake’s “naturally” and “cannot” go beyond it. Three separate divine beings is tritheism, the heresy the Athanasian Creed answers. A God with a body, who lives in one place, learns what we will do, cannot act in some spheres and changes His plans, is not the God the Scriptures in the third column describe.
The rows on the world before Adam, heaven, healing and prayer record errors and false teaching that came from the same rule of reading. Two of them, on healing and prayer, put the blame on believers whom God has not healed or has answered with no. The last row concerns the race note. In its original printings his Bible headed thirty reasons for segregating the races with the reference to a verse that says God made every nation from one blood. That was racism printed as Bible teaching.
The table leaves out most of what Dake wrote. Many of his notes raise nothing this book needs to answer, because its question is narrow: who is the God of these notes? Every page cited here can be checked, and Appendix F lists the sources.
The God of the creeds is one God, present everywhere at once, who knows the end from the beginning, does all His holy will and does not change. A believer can pray to Him knowing that He is there wherever the prayer is prayed, and can rest on His promises because nothing outside Him can block or change His will.
Notes
↑ 1. Dake’s course is cited from Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; copyright renewed 1977), the one-volume printing of the fifty-two lessons, with the Dake Bible Sales imprint at P.O. Box 625, Lawrenceville, Georgia. Page numbers are the printed page numbers of that printing. His book on prayer and healing is Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, Inc., 1950). Where a cited page carries a heading of its own, the note gives it. Where a cell quotes the Annotated Reference Bible, the note names the printing; on the labels for its printings, see Appendix C. On Dake’s vocabulary, see Appendix D.
↑ 2. References in the Scripture 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.
↑ 3. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 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, as in John 17:11, 21-23; Matt. 19:5; Heb. 2:11; 1 Cor. 6:17; Acts 4:32.” The italics and the dash are his. See also 50, where he holds that the Hebrew word for “one” (achad, in his spelling) 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” (his references follow).
↑ 4. 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.
↑ 5. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, 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.”
↑ 6. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), which received and expanded the creed of 325, in the English of Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, “The Holy Creed Which the 150 Holy Fathers Set Forth”: the Son is “begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father.” Chapter 14 quotes the same text. The Greek word is homoousios, literally “of the same being.” It denies that the Son is a second being alongside the Father. Public domain.
↑ 7. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-one, 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.” Dake affirmed the deity of Christ. Chapter 13 shows what his Godhead and his account of the self-emptying do to that confession.
↑ 8. 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.
↑ 9. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-five, 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, and like the Son did have before He became a man and took a human body.”
↑ 10. The same creed and translation as note 6, the article on the Holy Spirit: “And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver-of-Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.” The brackets are the translator’s. This is the text of 381, without the words “and the Son” (filioque) that the Western church later added. Public domain.
↑ 11. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 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.
↑ 12. Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1: God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.” Public domain. The Thirty-Nine Articles, art. I, confess the same. The scriptural ground is opened in Chapter 8.
↑ 13. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 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.” His illustration is on the same page: “While I write I feel the presence of my wife and children who are hundreds of miles away at this time.” 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.”
↑ 14. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 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,” followed by his list of references. The conclusion is drawn on 63: “Such facts and many others make it clear that God does not know from all eternity what any one man will do, much less what different types and dispositions of men will do under various circumstances that are not yet present to deal with.”
↑ 15. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 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 in Lesson Nineteen, 342: “Thus God’s grace or love is naturally limited by the free moral agency of man.” On p. 342 the subject of “naturally limited” is grace or love. Of God’s dealings with free creatures Dake writes on p. 64, “He naturally has had to limit Himself in His dealings with free moral agents.”
↑ 16. That grace can be resisted, and that salvation can be forfeited, is ordinary Arminian teaching held by many orthodox believers, and this book does not treat it as error. The departure examined in Chapter 11 is the further step: turning a limit God freely chose into a limit placed on Him by the nature of the creature. No Arminian confession teaches that.
↑ 17. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, rule 29, 46: “God has had to change His plan temporarily because of man’s sin, but the original and eternal plan of God for creation has never been changed and will never be.” Chapter 12 weighs the second half of that sentence. Compare 62–63: “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.
↑ 18. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Seven, 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 Supplement One, 34: “All life was totally destroyed, including birds, men, vegetation, and all cities were destroyed in which the pre-Adamites lived (Jer. 4:23-26).”
↑ 19. A gap reading of Genesis 1:2, held modestly, was taught by respected nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicals and appears in other study Bibles. This book does not make it part of the case. Chapter 15 examines the system Dake builds on the reading, and names the writers who held it.
↑ 20. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Forty-two, 834, numbered point 2: “IT IS A REAL PLANET LIKE THE EARTH (Gen. 1:1; 11:8-16).” Capitals are his, and the page prints “Gen.”; the “better country” he goes on to mention is in Hebrews 11:16. Compare 57, where God “dwells in a mansion and in a city located on a material planet called Heaven.” On the eternal state, Lesson Fifty-one, 995: “Thus we must distinguish between the two classes of eternal people of Adam’s race, the natural people who will be the subjects of the kingdom forever, and the spiritual, immortal, resurrected, heavenly, glorified saints of all ages before the Millennium who will be the rulers and heirs of the kingdom forever.” He does not say which class is larger. That heaven is a real place and that the body will truly rise are the church’s own convictions, and Dake defended both.
↑ 21. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Ten, 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 Lesson Fourteen, 243, where healing in the atonement is listed among the numbered points of his healing teaching.
↑ 22. I hold, with the Pentecostal schools that trained me, that the gifts of the Spirit continue and that the church should pray for the sick and expect God to act. This row does not side with the view that healing ended with the apostles. Chapter 17 says the same before it raises any objection.
↑ 23. Dake, 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.” The numbered conditions of answered prayer begin on p. 123, under sec. 14, “Be Sure Conditions Are Met,” and end on p. 124 with condition (16), “ASK ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF GOD”; sec. 11, “Complete Mastery Over the Devil Possible,” begins on p. 120. All three are examined in Chapter 18.
↑ 24. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales), 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, the first note on the page. Acts 17:26 is printed on N.T. p. 144, whose note c reads “See 30 reasons for segregation of races, p. 159”. The note is transcribed in full, with photographs, in Appendix B, and documented in Chapter 20. No change was made to it while Dake lived. Beginning with the 1988 printing it changed in stages: the 1990 printing pasted softer words over the old ones and kept all thirty reasons, the 1992 printing reset and rewrote the note as thirty reasons still, and the newer typeset edition replaced it with “Separation in Scripture,” which restates about twenty of the old reasons in new words. No note inside the Bible told its readers what had changed. Chapter 22 and Appendix C give the stages.
↑ 25. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Twelve, 443: “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.” The answer just before it, on the same page, rejects the old claim that the mark on Cain was a change of color: “The Hebrew word for mark in Gen. 4:15 means a pledge,” and “There in [sic] no statement that he was marked physically by a change of color or some other mark.” Chapter 21 answers the race note from Scripture.