Chapter 1

The Bible on the Table

The case against Dake’s doctrine of God, and the measure Dake set for himself

Finis Jennings Dake wrote a course called God’s Plan for Man to teach the whole Bible, one lesson a week. Lesson Twenty-seven is titled “The Doctrine of the Trinity.” Under a heading that promises more than five hundred proof texts, Dake says what he means by that doctrine.

Dake means this as plainly as he says it. In his teaching, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each have a body, a soul, and a spirit “in the sense that all other persons have them.” That is the sense in which you and I have them. Three persons who each have a body, soul, and spirit of their own in that sense are three beings, and three divine beings are three Gods. The church has a name for that belief. It is tritheism, and the church has always called it heresy. The Athanasian Creed answers it in a single line: “not three Gods, but one God.”²

The case against Dake’s doctrine of God

On the doctrine of God, Dake taught another God under the church’s own words. He kept the words Trinity, one God, omnipresent, and almighty, and he gave each of them a meaning the church never gave it. His three separate divine beings are tritheism, and tritheism is heresy. On this subject Dake was a false teacher, and the chapters that prove it will say so.

The Godhead is not the only place where his notes leave the faith of the church. They teach that God the Father has a body of ordinary size, lives in one place, and travels from place to place. They teach that God does not know ahead of time what free creatures will choose. They teach that human free will limits God’s grace by nature, that there are realms where God cannot act, and that God changes His plans. In the printings made before 1988, the same Bible also taught that God commands the segregation of the races.

I make no judgment of Dake’s salvation, his sincerity, or his private motives. Those belong to God. My subject is what he printed. Each chapter that follows proves its claim from his own pages, with the page numbers given, and then opens the Scriptures that answer him.

The Bible and the course behind it

The Dake Annotated Reference Bible is a King James Bible with Dake’s notes printed in the columns beside the text, along with cross-references, a concordance, and an index. It was copyrighted in 1963. It has been reprinted many times since, and it is now also published with the New King James text.³ On its pages the verse and the note sit side by side, and nothing on the page marks where God’s Word stops and one man’s comment begins. A reader who studies from it for years can come to hear the notes with the same trust he gives the verses.

Behind the Bible stands the course. God’s Plan for Man came out in 1949 as fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year, and it runs past a thousand pages. It says at length what the Study Bible notes say in a line or two, which is why this book quotes it so often. Its title page tells you what it claims to be.

Over 1,000 Pages of Bible Truths Backed by a Profusion of Scripture Texts. Thousands of Questions on All Bible Subjects and Prophecy Answered with Scripture. God’s Plan for Man, title page⁴

The claim is that the course answers its questions with Scripture and leaves nothing to opinion. The publisher’s foreword says that nothing in it is “left to human reasoning alone.”⁵ Dake’s own advertisement of 1950 promised that “Not one truth has been left to human reasoning, or proved by human authority.”⁶ Chapter 2 looks at that advertising and at the labor figures that came with it. For this chapter, what matters is that the work offers its readers proof from the Bible itself.

The standard Dake set for himself

Dake asked his readers to test his teaching by Scripture, and he wrote the test down as plain rules. Lesson Three of the course is called “How to Interpret the Bible.” Early in that lesson he says what a teacher may and may not claim.

Any doctrine that is not plainly stated in Scripture is best left alone. If God did not say anything about a question, then man has no right to teach anything about it as being taught in the Bible. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 36⁷

If the Bible does not plainly teach a thing, no one should teach it as the Bible’s. A page later Dake says that the Bible explains itself.

We maintain that the Bible needs no interpretation apart from its own interpretation of what it says. … We shall let God’s own Word be the final word of authority on every question. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 37⁸

Later in the same lesson he says how much proof a doctrine needs before anyone should believe it.

Always get two or three plain Scriptures to prove a doctrine, or forget it. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 44⁹

That is a good rule, and it is close to what the church has always asked of its teachers. Dake also built testing into the course itself. His students graded their own answers, because, as he told them, “it is not grades you are seeking but the truth.”¹⁰ He believed that ordinary people could understand the Bible, and he believed a teacher should be able to show his work. I agree with him on both counts.

So this book measures Dake by his own rule. Every teaching about God in his notes will be asked the question he taught his students to ask. Where are the two or three plain Scriptures that prove it, and do they say what he says they say? His other rules for reading the Bible, especially his rule of literal reading, are the subject of Chapter 4.

What the New Testament expects

The New Testament warns that false teaching often arrives with the right names on it. Paul wrote this to a church he loved, and the title of this book comes from it.

But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted—you may well put up with it! 2 Corinthians 11:3–4 (NKJV)¹¹

Paul feared a preacher who would preach Jesus and mean someone else. He speaks of another Jesus, a different spirit, and a different gospel, all offered under familiar names, and he says a church can put up with them and never notice. To the Galatians he set the standard even higher.

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. Galatians 1:8 (NKJV)¹²

The measure is the message the apostles first delivered. Sincerity does not settle the matter, and neither does the standing of the one who brings the message, since Paul will not even exempt an angel. He says the same thing twice in the same passage (Galatians 1:6–9).

The New Testament expects ordinary believers to do this testing. Luke praises the Jews of Berea for it.

These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Acts 17:11 (NKJV)¹³

The Bereans heard Paul gladly, and then they checked what he said against the Scriptures. Luke treats the eagerness and the checking as partners. The teacher they checked was the apostle Paul himself, so a study Bible can certainly be checked the same way.

The same chapter of Acts holds a verse that the original Dake Bible used for its race note. At Acts 17:26, on page 144 of the New Testament, a small letter c sends the reader to page 159. The first item on that page is headed “30 reasons for segregation of races: (Acts 17:26).”¹⁴ A reader who follows Luke’s example and searches the Scriptures will find that list. Chapter 20 documents it, and the two chapters after it answer it and trace what happened to it.

Paul gives every believer the same charge in one short verse.

Test all things; hold fast what is good. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NKJV)¹⁵

The verse has two halves. We test a teaching so that we can keep what is good with a clear conscience. Dake’s own rules ask for exactly that kind of reader.

Why the argument is about definitions

Dake used the church’s words for God, and he defined them in his own way. He wrote a lesson called “The Doctrine of the Trinity,” and he defined the Trinity as three persons who are one in unity but “three separate and distinct persons as to individuality.”¹⁶ A reader can agree with every word he uses and still be handed a different God. Chapter 5 shows how this works and gives three questions to ask of any teacher, and Chapter 6 prints his definitions in full.

Where I stand

I will say once, and plainly, where I stand. I hold the Apostles’, Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds without qualification. I believe in the full inspiration and authority of Scripture, the Trinity, the full deity and full humanity of Christ, His atoning death, and His bodily resurrection. I also believe the gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today. I was trained in Pentecostal schools, and three of my degrees come from Assemblies of God schools.¹⁷

I became a Christian in 1987, and that same year I got my first Dake Bible. It was also the year Dake died. Since then I have gathered about a dozen printings of his Bible, from the first full edition of the early 1960s to a printing from the 2000s. I have served in ministry through teaching and counseling.

This book is not an attack on Pentecostal or charismatic faith. I believe God heals. I believe the Spirit gives gifts to ordinary believers, and that the church should expect Him to act. The Pentecostal denominations themselves confess one God in three persons.¹⁸ My argument is with Dake’s doctrine of God, and on that doctrine his notes give Pentecostal readers less than their own churches confess.

Dake deserves credit on one point that matters to me. He spent his life defending the supernatural against people who had explained it away, and he had no patience for a church that had stopped expecting God to act.

What a contradiction to modern theories which teach that the Spirit baptism, healings, signs, wonders, and miracles ended with the apostles! If they have ceased, then we have no New Covenant and no ministration of the Spirit to administer the New Covenant. The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, sec. XVII¹⁹

He was right, and the gifts of the Spirit did not end with the apostles. When Dake stood against the unbelief of his day, he stood where I stand.

What is not in dispute

Some of Dake’s views are held by orthodox Christians on both sides of a debate, and this book leaves them out of the case. He was an Arminian. He taught that God’s grace can be resisted and that a believer can fall away, and many orthodox Christians, including many in my own tradition, believe the same.²⁰ He was premillennial, and he read the Bible through a dispensational framework, as many evangelicals do. He held that there may be a gap of time between the first two verses of Genesis, and a modest form of that view is an old debate among believers. He believed in healing and spiritual gifts for today, and so do I.

These are family disagreements among believers, and the book does not treat any of them as heresy. The case begins where Dake moves past them, into claims about what God is, what He knows, and what He is able to do. Nor is the case against the people who trust his Bible. Many of them love Christ deeply.

How this book quotes and cites

Every chapter quotes Dake’s own words with the page number, gives enough of the surrounding text to show what he meant, and then sets his teaching beside Scripture and the creeds. The text of his Study Bible has changed across printings, so each citation names the printing or setting it comes from.²¹ Apart from the race material, his teaching changed very little from one printing to the next. No change was made to the race note while Dake lived, and my own copies show that the changes began with the 1988 printing. Chapter 22 sets out the stages. Where I could photograph a page, the photograph is printed with the chapter so you can check it yourself.

The road ahead

The book has five parts. Part I covers the man and his method: his life, the federal case of 1936 and 1937, his rule of literal reading, and his habit of keeping the church’s words while changing their meaning. Part II is the center of the book. Its nine chapters examine the God of the Dake Bible, from his Godhead to his Christ and his Spirit. Part III follows the same method into his world before Adam, his material heaven, his teaching on healing and prayer, and his map of angels and demons. Part IV documents the thirty reasons for segregation, answers them from Scripture, and traces what later printings did with them. Part V looks at where his teaching went, answers his defenders, and closes with the way home. If you want the documents first, Appendix B gives page 159 in photographs and in full, Appendix A gives the trial record, and Appendix F lists every source.

Haven’t critics always attacked Spirit-filled men?

Pentecostals have heard criticism like this before. For decades they were mocked by people who had already decided that God does not heal or speak today, so a book that criticizes a Pentecostal teacher can look like more of the same. The answer lies in how this case is made. My opinion of Dake proves nothing, and I do not ask you to accept it. His pages are printed here with their page numbers, beside the Scriptures that answer them, and where I could photograph a page you can see the page itself, so the evidence you weigh is Dake’s own.

Doesn’t criticizing Dake help the liberals?

Some of Dake’s admirers raise a stronger objection. He fought the modernists of his day. He defended the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection, and a real devil when many churches were quietly giving them up, and his admirers fear that criticizing him now only helps the skeptics. Dake was right to stand against modernism, and I have said so above.

But the doctrine of God is the center of the faith, and the creeds are not liberal documents. They were written by Christians who confessed that Jesus is God, sometimes at the cost of their lives, and they say what they say because the Scriptures say it first.²² The modernists denied the deity of Christ, and the creeds confess it. A defense of miracles that comes joined to three separate Gods also hands the next generation of skeptics an easy target, and they will aim at everything Dake defended. Getting the doctrine of God right protects the faith he fought for.

The God the Bible gives

On the doctrine of God, Dake’s notes describe another God under the church’s words. Three separate divine beings, each with a body, soul, and spirit, is tritheism, and the church has always called it heresy. That verdict does not take your Bible from you. The words of Scripture in a Dake Bible are still the words of Scripture, and nothing in this book touches a single verse you have loved. What changes is the way you read the notes beside the verses. Read them with respect for the work Dake put in, and with the Scriptures open beside them.

The question matters because Jesus tied eternal life to knowing the true God.

And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. John 17:3 (NKJV)²³

The God of the Bible is one God. He is present everywhere, He knows the end from the beginning, He is able to do all that He has promised, and He does not change. Dake’s notes made that God smaller in the minds of their readers, but they never made Him smaller in fact. The chapters ahead open Dake’s pages one at a time and set each of them beside the Word of God.