Chapter 2

The Life of Finis Dake

From Missouri to Lawrenceville, and what a teacher’s life can and cannot prove

In 1950 the Bible Research Foundation of Atlanta published a book by Finis Jennings Dake called Bible Truths Unmasked. Its text ends with one word set on a line by itself: FINIS. Printers used that Latin word to mean “the end,” and it happens to be the author’s first name as well.¹ On the next page the advertising begins, and the first thing it sells is Dake’s own course, God’s Plan for Man.

The Bible Research Foundation was Dake’s own organization, so these are his claims about his own work. They promise that every doctrine in the course is proved from Scripture, that nothing in it rests on human reasoning, and that it came out of more than 75,000 hours of study. In later years the number of hours grew, and so did the reputation built on it.

The record behind that reputation shows a man who worked very hard. Dake preached from his early twenties, ran Bible schools, spoke on the radio, wrote a course of more than a thousand pages, and annotated a whole Bible. That industry was real, and I credit him for it here. The later picture of Dake as a uniquely anointed teacher, whose notes carry nearly the weight of Scripture, was built largely by his publishers. That picture leaves out the federal conviction that Chapter 3 documents. Even a complete life story could not vouch for his doctrine of God, because only Scripture can test a doctrine.

Where the story comes from

Nearly everything we know about Dake’s life comes from Dake himself or from people close to him. His own books tell parts of it. They include Bible Truths Unmasked, the preface to Revelation Expounded, and the course God’s Plan for Man. They also include the foreword to The Rapture and the Second Coming, which he signed at Lawrenceville, Georgia, in 1977. His publisher added an unsigned foreword to the 1977 printing of the course, and the Dake Annotated Reference Bible Owner’s Manual gives dates that appear nowhere in his own books.³ After his death the family’s company published more books under his name.

There is one biography. Leon Bible’s Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry came out in 2006 from Dake Publishing, the family’s company. It supplies most of the dates in this chapter that Dake’s own books leave out, and the notes say each time I rely on it.⁴ It is a sympathetic book, and it is brief where the record is painful. It gives the 1937 conviction about a paragraph. It does not mention the hotel registrations under a false name, what the prosecutor told the court, or the loss of his ministerial credentials.⁵ Outside that circle, the independent witnesses are the newspapers of 1936 and 1937 and his obituary in the Atlanta Constitution in 1987.

A Missouri boyhood and a cowboy’s return

Finis Jennings Dake was born on October 18, 1902, in Iberia, in Miller County, Missouri. His biographer says he was one of eleven children. His father, James Dake, was a contractor in the housing trade, and his mother’s name was Mary. The family settled in Springfield, Missouri, where he spent most of his childhood.⁶ His father died in July 1912, when Finis was nine, and the family went through hard times after that.⁷

In his middle teens he left home and worked out west, first as a ranch hand and then as a cowboy. His obituary puts it more briefly. As a young man, it says, “he worked as a cowboy, according to a relative.” He was gone about two years. When he came home, many in his family had become Christians, and in the winter of 1920, at a prayer meeting, he gave his life to Christ. He was seventeen years old.⁸

Dake never wrote a memoir. The closest he came is one paragraph in Bible Truths Unmasked, set inside an argument against worldly churches.

I was brought up in a nice, dignified church where I saw church members do all the things referred to above. Many is the time I said, "If that is Christianity, I do not want it." I saw my friends join church, get baptized, and formally accept Christ. I never would join the church. I first wanted to see if religion changed my friends. When I saw them live as they did before, I turned from such hypocrisy and sham and rejected the church for years and until I saw real Christianity in practice. Then I was not long in getting saved from my sins. Bible Truths Unmasked, 35⁹

He wanted to see the gospel change people before he would trust it, and once he saw it, he believed. A good many Christians have come to faith by the same road.

Bible school and the “Walking Bible”

The Owner’s Manual reports that in May 1920, within weeks of his conversion, Dake received what it calls “the gift of scriptures,” an ability to quote Bible verses he had never studied. His admirers came to call him “the Walking Bible.”¹⁰ Whatever lay behind it, his memory for Scripture became his reputation, and it went with him everywhere.

In 1921, at the age of nineteen, he went to Glad Tidings Bible Institute in San Francisco. His biographer says he clashed with his teachers in his first year over a belief he already held, that God the Father has a body, soul, and spirit as human beings do.¹¹ He left, came home, and enrolled at Central Bible Institute in Springfield, the Assemblies of God school, where he graduated in May 1925.¹²

Those dates tell us something about his theology. The doctrine of God that Chapters 6 through 9 examine did not grow out of his long years of study. He carried it into his first Bible school classroom as a teenager, and the years of study came afterward.

Preacher, husband, and author at twenty-four

He began full-time ministry in 1924, at twenty-one, believing God had called him to be an evangelist. The same year he became pastor of a church in Joliet, Illinois. On October 7, 1925, he married Dorothy Dobbins, and by his biographer’s account they had first met twenty days before the wedding.¹³

The next year he wrote the book that first made his name. The preface to its enlarged edition begins with the date.

The original manuscript of Revelation Expounded was written in 1926 when the author was only twenty-four years of age. At that time and in the years that followed there was much foolish and sensational speculation among prophetical teachers. This book was written to counteract this sensationalism and to set forth the true teachings of the Bible concerning prophetical subjects. Revelation Expounded, enlarged edition copyright 1950, Preface¹⁴

The same preface tells how he chose his rule for reading the Bible. As a young man he had been taught things he could not find in the plain words of Scripture, and the teachers he heard did not agree with one another. So he vowed never to teach anything “that he could not give two or three plain Scriptures to prove.” Chapter 4 prints that passage in full and follows the rule into his notes.¹⁵ It was a good vow for a young preacher, and it is the standard this book holds him to.

By his biographer’s date, Dake and Dorothy were traveling together as full-time evangelists by the summer of 1926. The Assemblies of God ordained him on June 9, 1927.¹⁶

Dake also stood against the date-setters of his day. In his 1977 foreword to The Rapture and the Second Coming, he tells of a minister he held revival meetings for in the 1920s. The man heard him preach on the Antichrist and the mark of the beast, then went home sick. Only the Sunday before, he had told his people that the mark of the beast “was the fasces on the American dime” and marched them to the front to see one. Dake also tells of a preacher so sure that Mussolini was the Antichrist that he wrote a book about it. When Mussolini died, the preacher complained, “They’ve killed my Antichrist and I’ve just printed 5,000 copies of my book!”¹⁷ Dake tells both stories with good humor, and on this point he was right.

Dallas, Enid, and the first controversy

In 1927, at twenty-five, Dake became principal of the newly opened Texico Bible School in Dallas, Texas.¹⁸ In Bible Truths Unmasked he tells a story from that school to teach a lesson from Psalm 91. Two students fell sick in the dormitory. He gathered students around the bed, prayed, and anointed the sick young men with oil. One was healed at once. The other broke out with smallpox, and the school nearly emptied in fear. In chapel Dake read Psalm 91 and asked who would agree in faith that God would stop the plague, and no one raised a hand. When he asked why, students began to confess their quarrels and ask each other’s forgiveness. He asked again, and every hand went up. He says the sick student was healed and no one else caught the disease. Then he adds this.

We never did let the health officer of Dallas know about the plague. We fumigated the best we knew how and finished the school year in victory. Bible Truths Unmasked, 98¹⁹

He tells it as a victory. Smallpox broke out in a school full of young people, the city was never told, and Dake saw nothing in that worth a second thought. The same confidence shows up again and again in his notes. Once he was sure of a point, checking it against anything outside his own reading did not seem to matter to him.

By 1929 he had moved to Enid, Oklahoma, as dean of men and a teacher at Southwestern Bible School. Within a year his teaching, especially his teaching on a world before Adam, drew complaints that spread from Oklahoma into Texas and Kansas. He resigned on May 5, 1931, and went back to evangelism.²⁰

Zion and the list of 160 points

In June 1932 Dake became pastor of the Christian Assembly in Zion, Illinois. In God’s Plan for Man he tells how something there began to trouble him.

A number of years ago I became greatly awakened to the need of the modern church by the fact that God was not doing for modern believers what I read about in the New Testament. Being a man of sincerity, honesty, and at least ordinary intelligence, I decided to find out what was wrong. God’s Plan for Man, 361²¹

He asked his church to read the whole New Testament with him, night after night, with pencil and paper, and to write down every place where their church fell short of it. They began on a Monday and reached Matthew 10 that first evening, and he says they already had their answer. They kept reading anyway, and by the end his list held 160 points. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” he writes, “and yet there was chapter and verse for every point.” He resolved to deal honestly with what he found: “I decided, as I have always done and always will do, that I am going to be honest with the Eternal Word of God.” Of that time he says, “From then on I became a new man.”²²

A pastor who holds his own church up to the New Testament and will not explain away the gaps deserves respect. It is a big part of why so many people found him worth reading. The same instinct, pushed past its limits, also built the system that Part II of this book examines.

The case of 1936 and 1937

The case began in 1936, while Dake was pastor at Zion. On February 9, 1937, he pleaded guilty in federal court to violating the Mann Act. He was sentenced to six months and served five.²³ In March 1937 the Assemblies of God revoked his ministerial credentials, and I hold the records that show it.²⁴ Chapter 3 tells the story from the newspapers, and Appendix A lists every document. The case belongs in any account of his life, because the story later told to recommend his teaching left it out.

Dake did not stop working. Having lost his credentials in one fellowship, he found another, and by 1942 he was a pastor in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee). From 1947 to 1948 he traveled as an evangelist, and in 1948 the Church of God ordained him.²⁵

Radio, the foundation, and the course

His biographer dates the start of his radio ministry to 1948, and his obituary records a program in the 1950s on WGST in Atlanta.²⁶ Dake wrote that he kept a stack of letters on his desk marked “Testimony,” and that “people hear the radio programs and are inspired to take God at His Word.” He tells of a woman who heard him “say on the air” that she could refuse to be sick, and who got up out of bed. He tells of another whose prayers were answered “from laying her hands on the radio and praying with us.”²⁷

The publishing work was his own. The Bible Research Foundation, Inc., of Atlanta, sold his books and his course. The publisher’s foreword of 1977 calls it “a non-denominational, non-profit organization” that was “orthodox and fundamental in faith.”²⁸ From that office came the work that made Dake’s name long before his Bible existed.

God’s Plan for Man was a Bible course by mail, completed in 1949. It ran to fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year, printed in twenty-six booklets and mailed out every two weeks. Each lesson ended with questions, and no one graded the answers but the student.

Go over and over the answers, until you can answer from memory each question. Then choose at random about twenty of the questions and write out the answers, and see how many you have right. By this method you can see for yourself how much you have learned. You can grade yourself by taking off five points for each answer that is wrong. . . . It is impossible for us to grade thousands of papers, but you can easily grade your own. If you fail, start all over again until the lesson is mastered. Seventy is a passing grade. After all, it is not grades you are seeking but the truth, and this you can get regardless of grades. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson One, 10²⁹

Dake trusted ordinary believers with the Bible. He wrote that the Bible “is very simple to understand” and that “no man has any excuse for misunderstanding it.”³⁰ That trust was generous, and many lay teachers learned their Bible from his course. It also meant that nobody checked the work, the student’s or the teacher’s. The course promised to leave nothing “to human reasoning,” yet no one but the student ever corrected a wrong answer.

The back pages of Bible Truths Unmasked print letters from students, signed with initials only, from Georgia, South Dakota, Alabama, Kentucky, Michigan, and Missouri. A minister in Kingston, Jamaica, reports that his executive board “passed a resolution that all ministers be required to take this course.”³¹ By 1950 the course was reaching pastors across the American South and into the Caribbean. Most of them had no seminary nearby and no money for one if they had. For many of those preachers, Dake was the first Bible teacher who reached them at all, and that goes a long way toward explaining how completely they came to trust him.

How the hours grew

The labor figures did more than anything else to build Dake’s reputation, and they changed over the years. In 1950 the advertisement claimed more than 75,000 hours of study and more than 31,214 Scripture references. The preface to Revelation Expounded, in Dake’s own voice, gives the same 75,000 hours. By 1977 the publisher’s foreword to the course had raised the number.

When God’s Plan for Man was first published the author had been a diligent student of the Bible for many years, spending over 75,000 hours searching the Scriptures before writing the lesson-set. By the time this work was to be put into book-form and he had published other books and a later work — Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible — the author had spent nearly 50 years studying the Word, with more than 100,000 hours being devoted to searching the Scriptures, always following consistently this all-important fundamental principle of taking the Bible literally where it is at all possible. God’s Plan for Man (1977 printing), Foreword, the publisher’s words³²

The same foreword counts “more than 33,000 references to Scripture passages” where the 1950 advertisement had counted 31,214. Dake gave his own version of the larger figure in the preface he signed for the whole Bible, written two years after the New Testament edition came out: “During the author’s 100,000 hours in 43 years of searching the Scriptures this all-important and fundamental principle of interpretation has been strictly and consistently followed.”³³ His obituary in 1987 repeats the “100,000 hours” and credits the figure to “a company biography.”³⁴

The numbers can be tested with simple arithmetic. If he began serious study at his conversion in 1920, then 75,000 hours by 1949 comes to about seven hours a day, every day, for twenty-nine years. The later figures are gentler. The extra 25,000 hours between 1949 and 1977 come to about two and a half hours a day. If the Bible’s preface was written in 1963, its forty-three years reach back to 1920, and 100,000 hours over that span comes to a little more than six hours a day.³⁵ The figures hold together well enough to be believed by anyone who wants to believe them. They show effort, but they cannot show that his conclusions are true. A man can study a passage for a thousand hours and still read it wrongly.

In Lesson Two of the course, Dake tells his students that the Bible has sixty-six books, 1,189 chapters, and 31,214 verses, “made up of 773,746 words and 3,566,480 letters.” He measured his own course the same way, at about 1,100 pages and roughly 1,000,000 words. By his own count, 31,214 is also the number of verses in the whole Bible.³⁶

The Study Bible

In 1961 the family formed Dake Bible Sales as its own publishing company.³⁷ The New Testament came first, with Daniel, Psalms, and Proverbs, copyrighted in 1961. The whole Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible followed, copyrighted in 1963.³⁸ Its dedication reads, “To my wife, Dorothy, and our children — Finette, Rhoda Annabeth, and Finis, Jr. — whose help on this work I gratefully acknowledge.”³⁹ By 1977 the title page of his course introduced him as “Author of Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, Revelation Expounded, Bible Truths Unmasked, and other books dealing with the Word of God.”⁴⁰ The Bible, more than the course, was now what people knew him for.

The last years and the books that came after

In 1977 Dake learned that he had Parkinson’s disease. He was about seventy-five. Dorothy died on February 19, 1987. Finis died at home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on Tuesday, July 7, 1987, at the age of eighty-four. His funeral was held at the Lawrenceville Church of God, and the Atlanta Constitution printed his obituary four days after his death.⁴¹

His work went on being published. In 1995 a book called Heavenly Hosts appeared under his name, with the copyright held by his three children, Finette Dake Kennedy, Annabeth Dake Germaine, and Finis Jennings Dake, Jr.⁴² Its editor explained in the preface how the book was made.

Though Finis Jennings Dake never actually wrote a book exclusively on this theme, his many writings . . . have touched on angels repeatedly. . . . The thoughts are Dake's own, as is a significant portion of the text. However, because the material is a compilation from his other writings, portions of the narrative have been constructed in order to provide a necessary flow from point to point. . . . In order to accomplish this, additional pieces of narrative were written for the sake of transition between supporting verses. All in all though, this is a book by Finis Jennings Dake. David Patton, editor, preface to Heavenly Hosts (Dake Publishing, May 1995)⁴³

The editor was candid. Dake never wrote this book, and parts of it were written by others to join his material together. Yet the preface still calls it “a book by Finis Jennings Dake,” the cover carries his name, and readers quote it as if he wrote every line. The same preface says, “As his family we are convinced that if he were alive today, he would want to address this issue.”⁴⁴ I read that as the warm wish of people who loved him. Still, when a family tells readers what a dead teacher would have wanted to say, readers have nothing he wrote to test it against. Two more compilations followed, Another Time... Another Place... Another Man in 1997 and Ages and Dispensations after it. This book cites all of them as compilations made after his death.⁴⁵

In the same years, his Bible notes on race were reworded and then replaced, without a word of notice inside the Bible. Chapter 22 tells that story. His Bible also spread far beyond the churches where he preached, and well-known preachers have praised it in print. Chapter 23 weighs that influence and its sources.⁴⁶

What the record shows

Set side by side, the documents show where Dake’s reputation came from. The 75,000 hours and the 31,214 references first appear in his own advertising, printed by his own foundation. The 100,000 hours appear in his preface and in his publisher’s foreword, and the obituary credits them to a company biography. The compilations under his name were made by his family’s company after he died, and the one biography came from the same company. That biography gives 1937 about a paragraph and leaves out the parts of the record that hurt most.

Somewhere along the way, many of his readers began to treat Dake as more than a hardworking Bible teacher. They treated him as a man whose notes carried almost the weight of Scripture. Nothing in this record supports that. Dake himself claimed no special revelation for his discoveries, and he asked to be tested by plain Scripture.

Doesn’t this belittle a mighty man of God?

Some readers will feel that a chapter like this cuts a great man down to size. I hope they will look at what the chapter actually says. Every achievement in it is documented from his own pages or from the one biography in print: the conversion at seventeen, the book at twenty-four, the schools, the church that read the New Testament through, the radio, the course, and the Bible. What I question is the idea that a life of labor puts a teacher beyond correction. Scripture says the opposite. James warns that teachers will receive the stricter judgment (James 3:1), and that warning falls on me as much as it falls on Dake.

Isn’t this reading advertising as biography?

This is a fair objection. Advertising is written to sell, and it often comes from a staff writer, not the author. But the Bible Research Foundation was Dake’s own organization, not an outside publisher promoting a stranger. And the figure appears in his own voice too. In the preface to Revelation Expounded he speaks of the truths he had discovered “in over 75,000 hours of diligent study,” and the later preface to his Bible, which he signed, gives the 100,000 hours.⁴⁷ Whoever wrote the advertising copy, the claims are his own.

Doesn’t his fruit prove his doctrine?

This is the objection his admirers raise most often, and it comes from real experience. People came to faith under his influence, and preachers found their footing in his course. How could false doctrine bear good fruit? Chapter 24 answers the question at length. Isaiah gives the test, and the size of the harvest is not part of it.

To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. Isaiah 8:20 (NKJV)⁴⁸

Good fruit usually grows from the true things a teacher says, and Dake said many true things. That does not certify the rest of what he taught. If it did, Paul would never have needed to correct teachers in churches that were growing.

A faith that does not rest on one man

The picture of Dake as a teacher whose notes stand near Scripture was built after the fact, mostly by those who published him. It leaves out 1937, and even a full account of his life could not settle a single doctrine. You can respect the hours a man put in and still test what he wrote. Your faith rests on Christ, who needs no study note to make Him true, and Paul gives every believer the same charge.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies. Test all things; hold fast what is good. 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21 (NKJV)

People who love the truth test what they hear. The Bereans tested the apostle Paul himself, and Luke praises them for it.⁴⁹ Dake asked his readers to check him in their own Bibles, and the chapters ahead do just that. They begin with the part of his life that his own story left out, the record of 1936 and 1937.