Chapter 4
The rule that built the system
Try something for me. Open a Bible to Proverbs 15:3 and read the verse slowly.
The eyes of the LORD are in every place, Keeping watch on the evil and the good. (Proverbs 15:3)1
Now apply one rule to it. One simple rule: take every statement in the Bible literally unless it cannot possibly be literal. Proverbs does not mark this line as a picture. No angel breaks in to say, "This is a figure of speech." So the rule says the verse stands as written. And what it gives you is eyes. Physical eyes. In every place at once.
Here is the strange part. That reading gives God more presence than Dake himself allowed. In his system, God has a single body in a single location. A body can only be in one spot. Chapter 9 documents that claim from his own pages. But I bring it up here for a narrower reason. One rule, applied honestly to one verse, just produced a conclusion the rule's own author would have rejected.
That is what this chapter is about. Not any single doctrine the rule produces. The chapters ahead will walk you through those. This chapter opens the hood and looks at the engine. I want you to see how the machine works before we look at what it built.
Dake stated his interpretive rule many times, in books he wrote and published under his own name. Here is a short form, from Lesson Three of God's Plan for Man:
Remember this: Take the Bible literally wherever it is at all possible. When the language cannot be taken literally, then we know it is figurative. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 422
Two sentences. A default and a fallback. The default is always literal. Figurative language is whatever is left over when a physical reading finally breaks down.
Before we go further, I need to say something I mean. That rule is not stupid, and it did not come from nowhere. Dake was writing in the 1930s and 1940s. A large share of Protestant scholarship in his day was busy explaining away the Bible's miracles. The resurrection became a mood change in the disciples. The parting of the Red Sea became a fireside tale somebody embellished. In that world, a man who stands up and says the words mean what they say is defending something real. I respect that instinct. I share it.
My concern is what happened when the instinct hardened into a machine. A rule that sounds like reverence can work like a factory. Feed it a poem and it gives you a body. Feed it a vision and it gives you a photograph. And the reader holding the Bible never sees the trade, because every step came wrapped in the name of believing the text.
Most people who own a Dake Bible have never stopped to ask how the notes got made. They ask whether this note or that note is right. That is a fair question. But it is the second question. The first question sits behind it: what method produced all these notes?
I press the point because of what is coming. In the chapters ahead you will see teachings that may surprise you. A Godhead of three separate beings, each with His own body, soul, and spirit. A God who travels from place to place. A God who did not know in advance what Abraham would do on the mountain. These are not stray lines. They are conclusions, and conclusions have a source.
Here is the honest answer. Dake did not reach those conclusions by ignoring his Bible. He reached them by applying one method with tremendous consistency for tens of thousands of hours. That is what makes this chapter the hinge of the whole book. If the method is sound, his teachings deserve a hearing on their own terms. If the method is bent, the teachings it produced were bent before they ever reached the page.
There is a second reason, and it may hit closer to home. A method is catching. Someone who reads these notes for twenty years does not only absorb the conclusions. She absorbs the reflexes. She learns to ask of every verse, "Why shouldn't this be taken at face value?" That question sounds brave. But when it becomes the first move on poetry, prophecy, and parable alike, it quietly ruins a reader's ear for the way the Bible actually speaks.
The third reason is the one I keep coming back to. How you read the Bible shapes who you think God is. If "the arm of the LORD" is a limb, then God's strength has a length and a width. If His eye is a physical organ, then His attention has a direction, and you need to be standing in front of it to be noticed. Picture-language is not a downgrade from truth. It is God bending low so that ordinary people can hold what He says. Take the stoop away and you do not get a bigger God. You get a smaller one with a bigger body.
It reaches your prayers, too. When the psalm says "seek My face," a reader with a good ear hears an invitation into fellowship.36 A reader trained to hear body parts hears directions to a location. One of those readings sends you toward God. The other sends you looking for where He is standing.
Plain Words
Literal: the meaning a writer actually intended by the words he chose. From the Latin littera, "letter."
Figurative, or picture-language: words used in a way other than their everyday sense to carry a real meaning. "He is a rock" is picture-language. It is also true.
Anthropomorphism: picture-language that gives God a human shape or human feelings so we can understand something about Him. I will mostly just say "picture-language" from here on. (Dake himself defines the word differently in his Study Bible notes, as "the ascription of human bodily parts, attributes, and passions to God, and taking the substantiating statements of Scripture to be literal and not figurative."37 Notice how his definition flips the term. In standard use, calling something an anthropomorphism means recognizing that it is figurative. For Dake, calling something an anthropomorphism means affirming that the body parts are real.)
Hermeneutic: a scholar's word for someone's rules for reading. Everyone has a hermeneutic. Most people never write theirs down. Dake wrote his down, which is why we can weigh it.
Everything in this section comes from books Dake wrote and published under his own name, held in the source library for this chapter.3 I have quoted at length so you can check every claim against the page.
Lesson Three of God's Plan for Man is called "How to Interpret the Bible." The table of contents promises "30 rules to follow."4 Near the end of the lesson, Dake asks how a reader can tell whether a passage is literal or figurative. He calls it "one of the most simple questions to answer." Then he gives his answer in capital letters.
Dake's Words: The Rule, in Capitals
"But how can we tell whether the language is literal or figurative? This is one of the most simple questions to answer. Any man with ordinary intelligence can distinguish between the two ways of expressing the truth. The one fundamental rule to determine whether the language is literal or figurative is this: TAKE EVERY STATEMENT IN THE BIBLE AS LITERAL WHEN IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE AND WHERE IT IS CLEAR THAT IT IS LITERAL, OTHERWISE, IT IS FIGURATIVE. In other words, what cannot be literal must be figurative. The subject matter itself as expressed in human language will always make this clear. One must be sure the language is figurative before giving it a figurative meaning."
God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 475
Three things stand out. First, the default is always literal. Second, the test only runs one direction: "what cannot be literal must be figurative." A figure of speech is not something you recognize in the text. It is whatever is left after a physical reading breaks down. Third, the confidence. The subject matter "will always make this clear." Always. Any man with ordinary intelligence.
He says the same thing hundreds of pages later, writing on Daniel:
All Scriptural language is to be taken literally when it is at all possible, or unless there is some clearly stated reason that the language is not to be taken literally. Even all the figurative language is to be interpreted by that which is literal. God's Plan for Man, p. 7826
In plain English: a figure of speech only exists when the Bible announces it, or when a physical reading cannot be made to work. Even then, the figure has to be cashed back into something physical. This was not a comment in passing. His publisher put the same rule in the foreword of the one-volume edition:
As to the viewpoint of the author, Rev. Finis Jennings Dake, the general principle adhered to is that of literalizing instead of spiritualizing the statements of the Scripture. The rule observed is: 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. Foreword, God's Plan for Man (1977 one-volume printing)7
That is the house describing itself. Nobody is being caught off guard. The rule is the brand.
The rule does not stand alone. It sits inside a larger system. That is where the trouble starts to show.
Lesson Three opens by clearing the ground. Dake says the common view is that the Bible is "full of mysteries, secrets, and hidden meanings veiled in spiritual language which only a few special men of God can understand."31 He rejects that view. Good. Then he tells the reader what to do instead:
All we have to do is collect everything God says on a subject, and it will be so clear that no interpretation is necessary. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 3632
Hold on to that phrase: no interpretation is necessary. It is a warm promise. Dake meant it kindly. But the promise cannot be kept. Collecting every verse on a subject is already an act of judgment. Somebody has to decide which verses belong on the pile. Somebody has to decide what to do when two verses on the pile seem to pull in different directions. Dake did that work at a scale most of us will never approach. I do not fault him for doing it. I fault the method for telling readers nobody was doing it.
A few pages later he sets out what he calls the true method:
The chief fundamental principle is to gather from the Scriptures themselves the precise meaning the writers intended to convey. It applies to the Bible the same principles, rules, grammatical process, and exercise of common sense and reason that we apply to other books. In doing this, one must take the Bible as literal when it is at all possible. When a statement is found that cannot possibly be literal, as Jesus being a "door" or of a woman being clothed with the sun and standing on the moon and on her head a crown of twelve stars, or of land animals coming out of the sea, and other statements which are obviously not literal, then we know the language is figurative. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 428
Read the first sentence again. I want to give Dake full credit for it, because it is right. The goal of reading is to find "the precise meaning the writers intended to convey." Any seminary in the world would write that sentence on the board. It is the historic Protestant rule of interpretation.
Now read the third sentence. Somewhere between the two, the standard has shifted. The first sentence tests a reading by asking what the writer meant. The third tests a reading by asking whether a physical reading is possible. Those are different tests. They will agree in the Book of Kings and disagree in the Psalms.
The Sentence That Turns
Dake names the right rule and then replaces it in a single paragraph. "The precise meaning the writers intended" is a rule about an author. "Literal when it is at all possible" is a rule about physics. Everything this book documents in Part II flows through that swap. Once you see it, you will see it on page after page of his work.
The second of his thirty general rules makes the new standard official:
It may be assumed that no one resorts to speech or writing without having some idea to express; that in order to express that idea he will use words and forms of speech familiar to his hearers or readers; and that if he uses a word or figure of speech in a different sense from what is commonly understood he will make the fact known. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, General Rules of Biblical Interpretation, rule 2, p. 439
There is the load-bearing beam. If a Bible writer uses a word in an unusual sense, "he will make the fact known." Announced or absent. I will come back to that claim in the answer section of this chapter, because everything hangs on whether it is true.
The confidence of the method was advertised openly. The back matter of Bible Truths Unmasked promotes the course this way:
The Bible will be made a new and a very simple book to all who will take this course and study it for one year. You will marvel at its simplicity and comprehensiveness. Not one truth has been left to human reasoning, or proved by human authority. Bible Truths Unmasked, back matter, p. 12510
I do not look down on that promise. I know the hunger it speaks to. I suspect you know it too. Believers by the thousands have been told the Bible belongs to the experts. Dake told them it belonged to them. That is a good word.
But look at what the promise actually says. Not just that the Bible is true and can be understood. It says that reading it is a settled process with nothing left over. No judgment. No loose ends. When a method promises that, the judgment has not gone away. It has just gone out of sight.
Dake told us where the rule came from. The account is in the preface to Revelation Expounded, a book he first drafted when he was twenty-four:
As a young man the author was taught many things that were contrary to the plain Scriptures themselves when taken literally. He had to make a decision either to believe that God was intelligent enough to express Himself in human language as men do, and that He did do so, or, that God gave His revelation in terms different from those used by men so as to deliberately confuse them regarding the true meaning of His revelation. This latter idea the author could not conceive of God, so he had to settle upon the fact that God meant what He said and said what He meant, and that the Bible is clear in itself when taken in the plain literal sense that the same language would be taken if found in another book. Revelation Expounded, Preface11
That paragraph is the emotional heart of the whole system. I understand why people find it compelling. A young man gets handed teachings he cannot find in his Bible. He goes back to the text and checks. The teachings are not there. So he throws out the middlemen and reads the page for himself.
Then comes the promise he made to God:
Having decided on his course, he made a covenant with God that he would never teach anything that he could not give two or three plain Scriptures to prove. Revelation Expounded, Preface12
Whatever else may be said about the man, that is a serious vow. And by the standard he set for himself, he kept it. Every note he ever wrote has references stacked behind it.
But go back to the longer paragraph, because the framing hides something. He gave himself two options and only two. Either God speaks like a man, or God is trying to confuse us. Put it that way and no believer will pick the second. But there was a third option the whole time, and the church has always taken it: God speaks like a man, and men use pictures. When my daughter tells me her teacher chewed her out, she is speaking like a person. No teeth were involved.
In the same book, Dake raises the stakes even higher:
If God uses a word or a figure of speech or any other form of human expression in a different way than that which is commonly understood, we have a right to expect Him to make due explanation. Otherwise take it as it is commonly used and understood. Revelation Expounded, "How to Interpret Prophecy," point 6, p. 2113
"We have a right to expect." That is a claim about what God owes the reader. As we are about to see, it is a claim the Bible itself does not honor.
A method is best judged by what it produces. Here are two quick examples. Both get full treatment in later chapters. I am only showing the machinery.
The first has to do with God's body. The historic Christian position is that the Bible's language about God's hands, eyes, and arms is picture-language. Dake went straight at that position. His argument rests entirely on how language works:
Neither does the Bible say that the bodily parts of God are figures of speech or mere human expressions trying to convey some idea of God, or that they do away with the reality of God's body. All figures of speech emphasize and make as real or more real the ideas they express than if literal language were used. There can be no true figure of speech to convey an idea unless the idea conveyed is real; so if God's bodily parts are mere figures they are true figures of the real bodily parts of God. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 5414
Then the conclusion, in one line: "The expressions which tell us that God has bodily parts are real and literal and not figurative."15 Follow the logic. The Bible never labels these expressions as figures. A figure of speech must point to something real. Therefore the parts themselves are real. The doctrine of God's body arrives by way of a rule about sentences. Chapter 8 takes up the doctrine itself.
The second example is about God's knowledge. Here the rule is not just in the background. It is the entire argument:
The Bible makes many simple statements that limit God's knowledge. There would be no sense to such passages if we do not believe them literally. There is no meaning to them if we take them figuratively. There was no object in God saying such things about Himself if they were untrue. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 6216
Read that again slowly. The argument does not begin with a study of who God is. It begins with a rule about how sentences work. The doctrine follows from there. Chapter 10 handles that doctrine in full. The same machinery also produces the Godhead documented in Chapter 6, where Daniel's night vision of thrones and white hair is read as a physical report of two visible bodies in the same room.17
Key Point: The Engine and What It Built
Dake's doctrine of God is not a handful of odd opinions bolted onto ordinary Christianity. It is the harvest of one rule applied without flinching to every sentence about God in the Bible. Run the picture-language through a physical filter and God gets a body. Give the body a location and He stops being everywhere. Read the "now I know" passages at face value and He starts learning. Every surprising note in Part II of this book is downstream of the rule you just read.
Dake's rule 2 depends on the idea that a writer who uses a word in an unusual sense "will make the fact known." Let us test that idea against the Bible and see if it holds. Here is the Ninety-first Psalm:
He shall cover you with His feathers, And under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler. (Psalm 91:4)
Feathers. Wings. The psalm does not pause to inform us this is a picture. No footnote shows up. By Dake's rule, the reading has to stand as written. God has plumage.
Nobody believes that. Dake did not believe it either. But ask yourself why not. Not because the text flagged it. Because we are competent readers of human speech, and we have all heard a mother say she gathered her children under her wing.
Turn to the Gospels. "I am the door."18 "I am the true vine."19 Jesus never adds a disclaimer. He never says, "Please understand that I am speaking in a figure." He expects the room to get it, the way any speaker expects it. And the psalmist writes that the LORD God "is a sun and shield" without a word of explanation.20
Widen the lens and the problem gets worse. Scripture runs on pictures the way English runs on nouns. God is called a rock, a fortress, a shepherd, a horn of salvation, a hen gathering her chicks, a lion, and a moth.33 Some of those images sit a few verses apart in the same book. Push them all through the physical rule and you get a zoo. Read them the way they were written and you find a God who is solid, safe, watchful, tender, and terrible all at once. The pictures are not decoration over the truth. They are how the truth was given to us.
Scripture does occasionally flag a figure. Paul does it in Galatians 4, where he says of Hagar and Sarah that "these things are symbolic."21 It happens. It is rare. You can count the flagged figures. You cannot count the unflagged ones.
So the rule asks the Bible to do something the Bible does not do. And when a rule and the Bible disagree, the rule is the one that needs to move.
This is where the whole argument lives. Let me walk through it carefully.
The word literal comes from the Latin littera, meaning "letter." To read a text literally is to read it according to the letter, that is, according to what the writer was actually saying with the words he chose. That is all the word has ever meant in Christian interpretation.
So here is the part that catches people off guard. The literal sense of a metaphor is its metaphorical meaning. When Jesus says "I am the door," the literal sense of that sentence is that He is the way in. Not that He is made of oak. A reader who insists on the oak has not taken the sentence more literally. He has misread it.
Dake quietly swaps one word for another. Where the church says literal, he hears physical. Once that swap is made, everything he writes from that point on sounds orthodox and means something else. Chapter 5 examines that pattern as a system. But the pattern starts right here, with this one word.
Same Words, Different Meanings: "Literal"
His words: "TAKE EVERY STATEMENT IN THE BIBLE AS LITERAL WHEN IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE ... In other words, what cannot be literal must be figurative" (God's Plan for Man, p. 47).
What he means: read every sentence as a physical description unless a physical reading is impossible or the Bible labels it otherwise.
What the church has always meant: read every sentence in the sense its author intended by the words he chose, including his pictures, his poems, and his parables.
Same word. One version asks what the writer meant. The other asks what could physically be true. That gap is not a shade of emphasis. It is the difference between a God who has an arm and a God whose strength the arm was given to describe.
The Bible is not shy about picture-language. And it shows us what to do with it.
Jesus answered and said to them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." Then the Jews said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?" But He was speaking of the temple of His body. (John 2:19–21)
Notice who gets it wrong. The men who take the words at face value. The correct reading only arrives when John, writing years later, tells us what Jesus meant. The literal sense of the sentence was never the building.
Revelation works the same way. John sees seven stars and seven lampstands, and the vision explains itself a few verses later: the stars are the angels of the churches, and the lampstands are the churches.22 Dake knew this well. He built much of Revelation Expounded on exactly that principle. On that point he is right, and his critics should say so. He also warns against the sloppy habit of waving away any uncomfortable verse by calling it a parable. Right about that too.23
The apostles read the Old Testament with that same kind of ear. They are our best teachers on the subject. Jesus points back to the bronze serpent Moses raised on a pole and says the Son of Man will be lifted up in the same way.34 The snake was a real snake on a real pole, but its meaning was never about snakes. Paul takes a farming law about not muzzling an ox and applies it to paying preachers.35 Nothing in Deuteronomy flagged that reading. Paul heard it because he read with an ear shaped by the whole story, and he expected his readers to do the same.
Count the ratio. Scripture decodes a handful of its own images. It leaves the great majority to readers who know how people talk. The Bible assumes you have an ear. It does not assume you need a label on every figure.
I need to say something here, because I have heard the accusation and it stings. Recognizing picture-language about God is not a modern dodge. It is not something liberals cooked up to get around the text. It is older than any liberal, and it comes from the Bible itself.
Take careful heed to yourselves, for you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire. (Deuteronomy 4:15)
Moses is not correcting Exodus. He is teaching Israel how to hold two things at once. God spoke. God was not seen in a shape. Israel had to learn the difference, and the whole second commandment depends on their learning it.
The church went on teaching the same lesson. The Reformers fought harder for the plain sense of Scripture than anyone before them, and they said so in the same breath. Calvin taught that God speaks to us the way a nurse speaks to a small child, using simple words that do not measure Him but do reach us.24 That was not a retreat from the text. It was reverence for the God the text describes.
The English divines put it in a single phrase in 1646. God, they wrote, is "without body, parts, or passions."25 Dake quotes writers who use almost those exact words and calls their statements "foolish and unscriptural."26 He is free to disagree. What his readers should know is who he is disagreeing with. That is not modernism he is pushing aside. That is the confession of the Reformation churches, and behind them the church of the creeds.
This is the hardest point, and I take no pleasure in making it. The rule does not survive contact with Dake's own pages.
Turn to his rule 21:
Words of Scripture must agree with the content and the subject matter in the passages where found. No meaning should be given to a word that would be in the least out of harmony with any Scripture. For example, the word seen in John 1:18 should be understood to mean comprehended, in order to harmonize with all Scriptures that state men saw God with the natural eyes. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, rule 21, p. 4527
Stop and see what just happened. "No man hath seen God at any time" is a plain sentence in plain words. It is not poetry. It is not a vision. Nothing about it is impossible to take at face value. By his own rule, it should stand as written.
Instead, the word seen gets quietly reassigned to mean comprehended, so the verse can agree with a conclusion already reached somewhere else. He does not even call the verse figurative. He just changes what one of its words means. The man whose entire method rests on "take it literally" has un-literalized a plain statement, inside his own list of rules for how to take things literally.
It goes on. Rules 25 through 27 acknowledge that Hebrew and Greek have idioms, that "hate" can mean nothing more than preference, and that biblical numbers are sometimes rounded.28 I agree with him on all three. They are real features of the languages. But notice what has happened. No verse announces any of those features. He knows they are there the way any good reader knows, from the language, from the culture, from how the sentence sits in its context. He has brought a trained ear back into a system that was supposed to work without one.
Then there is the door. In his own list of things that "cannot possibly be literal," Dake includes Jesus being a "door."29 What rule told him that was figurative? None. No verse says "the door is a metaphor." He knew it was figurative because he was a competent reader of human speech. That is the very ability his rule was built to make unnecessary.
All of this comes down to one small word: possible. The rule says take it literally when it is "at all possible." But somebody has to decide what counts as possible. Is a God with a physical body possible? Dake says yes, so the body-language stays physical. Is a God who does not know the future possible? He says yes, so those verses stay flat. Is a mouthful of feathers possible? He says no, so Psalm 91 becomes a picture. Every time, the deciding vote is cast by the interpreter. The rule that was supposed to remove human judgment turns out to run on it.
That is not a scandal. Every reader uses judgment. The problem is the claim that no judgment was being used, and the authority that claim borrows. "Not one truth has been left to human reasoning" is a bold sentence to print above a page of one man's reasoning.
Dake's readers have real answers to all of this, and the best of those answers deserve a hearing before I respond.
Objection: "At least he takes the Bible seriously."
The defense: liberal scholars spent a century calling the miracles myths. Dake stood against that and taught ordinary people that the words on the page mean what they say. Loosen his rule and you open the door to spiritualizing anything you don't like, starting with the resurrection.
My answer: the concern is right, and I share it. But the fence he built does not guard that field. What keeps a reader honest is not physicalism. It is the author's intent, which Dake himself named as the chief principle before he replaced it. Ask what the writer meant, and the resurrection is safe, because Paul plainly meant a body coming out of a tomb. Ask only what is physically possible, and you have not protected the resurrection. You have handed God a rib cage.
The second defense is subtler. I have heard it from thoughtful people. It goes like this: the "figures must be stated" rule is a safety device. Without it, any clever person can empty any verse by declaring it symbolic. With the rule in place, the ordinary reader is protected from the professionals.
I feel the force of that argument. I have watched someone with three degrees and an agenda talk a verse into silence. But the rule does not get rid of the clever man. It moves him. Someone still decides when a literal reading is "at all possible." Whoever holds that decision holds more power than the professor ever did, because his rule says he is not making a decision at all. A judge who claims to have no opinions is not safer than one who admits to having them. He is just harder to appeal.
The third defense is a fairness point, and I want to give it its weight before anyone else raises it. Dake never said the Bible has no figures of speech. He said the opposite. He wrote pages on symbols. He listed types, parables, allegories, and riddles. He insisted that figurative language carries literal truth, and that is a sentence I would sign.30 If someone tells you Dake denied that the Bible uses pictures, that person has not read him carefully.
So my case is not that he ignored figures. It is narrower than that, and I think harder to answer. His problem is the default setting and the gatekeeper. The default says physical unless proved otherwise. The gatekeeper decides what counts as proof, and the gatekeeper is always the interpreter, with a doctrine of God already in hand. Put those two pieces together and the outcome is predictable. Wherever his system needed a verse to be physical, the rule delivered. Wherever the system needed a verse to be figurative, the rule bent. Chapter 24 gathers the defenders' full case. This chapter only addresses the question of method.
Here is what the pages show. Dake taught, in print and in capital letters, that every statement in the Bible should be taken literally when it is at all possible, and that a figure of speech exists only when a literal reading fails or when Scripture labels it. He named the right principle first (the writer's intended meaning) and then replaced it with a test about physical possibility. He built thirty rules on the new test. He applied the method for tens of thousands of hours. And he could not keep it. Nobody can. His own rules grant idioms, round numbers, and a metaphor about a door. His own rule 21 turns a plain verb in John 1:18 into a word the verse does not actually say.
The word to watch is literal. When Dake uses it, he means physical. When the church uses it, the word means what the writer meant. Two dictionaries running side by side, and almost nobody notices where they part ways. That pattern is exactly what Chapter 5 examines as a system and what Appendix D gathers term by term.
I want to close where I started. "The eyes of the LORD are in every place." Read the way the poet wrote it, that line is not smaller than a pair of physical eyes. It is immeasurably larger. It says there is no corner of your life where you are unwatched and unheld. No hospital hallway at three in the morning. No kitchen table where the bills are spread out. Nowhere.
A God with literal eyes would have to turn His head to find you. The God of Proverbs 15 never has to. That is what the picture was always for.
My friend Ray, the Sunday-school teacher you met in Chapter 1, asked me to open the man's own books and show him what is there. This is the first of those pages. It is only a rule about reading, and it looks harmless enough on its own. But stay with it, and you can feel what is coming. A rule about reading is never just a rule about reading. Follow it far enough and it will hand you a God. The chapters ahead are about which God it handed Finis Dake.
↑ 1. Proverbs 15:3 (NKJV). Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the New King James Version. Scripture quoted inside Dake's own material is his King James text and is reproduced as he printed it.
↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 one-volume printing), Lesson Three, 42 (page per the embedded running-head markers in the resident text file). The sentence closes section VII, "The True Method of Bible Interpretation."
↑ 3. This chapter was drafted in the project library holding Dake's own text sources: God's Plan for Man (three OCR-extracted files carrying the book's printed page numbers inline), Bible Truths Unmasked (1950), and Revelation Expounded (enlarged edition, 1950). Every quotation below was retrieved from those files and logged before drafting. No quotation in this chapter is reconstructed from memory. Where the resident optical character recognition broke a word across a space (for example "STATEM ENT"), the break has been silently repaired; no wording has been altered.
↑ 4. God's Plan for Man, contents page: "LESSON 3. False and true methods of Bible interpretation, utter simplicity of the Bible, 30 rules to follow ... 36." The lesson runs from page 36 through page 48; the numbered rules occupy pages 43 through 46.
↑ 5. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, section IX ("Figurative Language of the Bible"), 47. Capitalization is Dake's own; the rule is set in full capitals in the printed text.
↑ 6. God's Plan for Man, 782, in the exposition of Daniel 7. The context matters, in fairness to Dake: he states the rule while arguing that the four beasts of Daniel 7 are symbols, because the chapter says so at verse 17. His point is that symbolism is admissible when Scripture declares it. That is precisely the standard this chapter examines.
↑ 7. Foreword, God's Plan for Man (1977 one-volume printing), unpaginated front matter. The foreword is the publisher's, not Dake's; it speaks of the author in the third person. The same page states that the course contains "more than 10,000 subjects, sermon outlines, and questions fully answered," and that "Nothing is left to human reasoning alone, or proved by human authority."
↑ 8. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, section VII, 42. The three examples he gives of language that "cannot possibly be literal" are John 10:9, Revelation 12:1, and Revelation 13:1.
↑ 9. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, section VIII ("General Rules of Biblical Interpretation"), rule 2, 43.
↑ 10. Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), back matter, 125 (page per the embedded markers in the resident text). The same advertisement states that the course rests on "over 31,214 Scripture references" and represents "over 75,000 hours of Bible study and research." The labor claim and its history belong to Chapter 2.
↑ 11. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, or Eternal Mysteries Simplified, enlarged edition (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, copyright 1950), Preface, unpaginated front matter. The preface states that the original manuscript was written in 1926, "when the author was only twenty-four years of age."
↑ 12. Revelation Expounded, Preface. The two-or-three-witnesses standard reappears throughout God's Plan for Man; compare Lesson Three, rule 14, 44: "Always get two or three plain Scriptures to prove a doctrine, or forget it."
↑ 13. Revelation Expounded, chapter 1, "How to Interpret Prophecy," point 6. The resident digitization carries the running head "Revelation Expounded 21" immediately before this material; the point may run onto page 22. Compare the same book's section III, "Literalness of the Book," page 11: "The book is admittedly both literal and symbolic. It is to be taken as literal whenever possible."
↑ 14. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four ("The Truth About God"), 54.
↑ 15. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 54. The full sentence reads: "The expressions which tell us that God has bodily parts are real and literal and not figurative, as will be seen below."
↑ 16. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, section "God is Omniscient," 62.
↑ 17. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 53, on Daniel 7:9–14 and 10:5–6. The exhibit is printed in full and weighed in Chapter 6, which owns it. The Dake Annotated Reference Bible itself is not resident in the library used for this chapter; its parallel notes are documented from photographs and scans in Chapters 6 through 14.
↑ 18. John 10:9 (NKJV): "I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture."
↑ 19. John 15:1 (NKJV): "I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser."
↑ 20. Psalm 84:11 (NKJV): "For the LORD God is a sun and shield; The LORD will give grace and glory."
↑ 21. Galatians 4:24 (NKJV), "which things are symbolic." The underlying Greek participle is allegoroumena, from allegoreo, "to speak figuratively." Paul's flagging of the figure is the exception that proves the point: the biblical writers almost never do this, which is why a rule that requires them to do it cannot be their rule.
↑ 22. Revelation 1:20 (NKJV). Compare Revelation 17:9–12, 17:15, and Daniel 7:17, 23–24, where the angel supplies the meaning of the vision. Dake makes heavy and legitimate use of these self-interpreting passages.
↑ 23. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, 45: "Some sects are getting into the habit of doing away with Scriptures that are contrary to their theories by saying, 'That is a parable,' or 'That is figurative language,' as if such language means nothing." Compare rule 14, 44: "Passages obviously literal should not be spiritualized." On both counts he is right, and the same warning applies in the other direction.
↑ 24. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 1, chapter 13, on divine accommodation. Cited at chapter level; the wording is paraphrased rather than quoted, since no copy of the Institutes was resident at drafting. The same doctrine appears far earlier; Augustine and the Cappadocian fathers argue at length that Scripture's bodily language for God is given for our capacity, not as a measure of His nature.
↑ 25. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapter 2, article 1. The Confession is public domain and is quoted directly. The Second London Baptist Confession (1689) and the Savoy Declaration (1658) carry the same clause, which is why the phrase runs across Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist confessional traditions alike.
↑ 26. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 53. Dake quotes two unnamed sources, the second including the words "without parts, without body, without passions," and replies: "Such statements are foolish and unscriptural, to say the least." He does not identify the writers; he says only that they are "prominent men who have had a wide ministry in our large denominations," and adds, "We personally admire these men for their great work." The courtesy is his, and it is worth noting.
↑ 27. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, rule 21, 45. The verse in question, John 1:18 (KJV), reads: "No man hath seen God at any time." Dake's move here is the exegetical foundation of his doctrine of God's visibility, taken up in Chapter 8.
↑ 28. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, rules 25 through 27, 45. Rule 26 reads in full: "Preference is sometimes expressed by the word hate (Luke 14:26; Rom. 9:13)." Rule 27 begins: "A peculiar idiom concerning numbers must be understood. Sometimes round numbers rather than the exact number are used." Both are sound observations about ancient languages, and both are recognized without any announcement in the text.
↑ 29. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, 42. The other two examples he names, the woman clothed with the sun and the beast rising from the sea, both come from books whose visions are explicitly identified as visions, which makes the door the revealing case: nothing in John 10 labels it.
↑ 30. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, 47: "REMEMBER, NO FIGURE OF SPEECH EVER DOES AWAY WITH THE LITERAL TRUTH, BUT MERELY EXPRESSES IT IN ANOTHER WAY." Compare the preface to Revelation Expounded: "It must be remembered, however, that all figurative language conveys literal truth." Both sentences are true, and I hold them with him. The disagreement in this chapter is over the default setting and over who decides when the default is overridden.
↑ 31. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, 36, opening paragraph. The full sentence begins: "It is almost a universal idea that the Bible is hard to understand and must be changed to be understood."
↑ 32. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Three, 36, under the heading "BECAUSE OF ITS REPEATED TRUTHS." The surrounding paragraph is one of the finest things Dake wrote: "Any doctrine that is not plainly stated in Scripture is best left alone." He is holding himself to a standard, and this book takes him at his word.
↑ 33. Psalm 18:2 (rock, fortress, horn of salvation); Psalm 23:1 (shepherd); Matthew 23:37 (hen); Hosea 5:14 (lion) and 5:12 (moth). The last two sit two verses apart in the same oracle, which is a useful reminder that the prophets did not expect their images to be catalogued as physical claims.
↑ 34. John 3:14, drawing on Numbers 21:8–9.
↑ 35. 1 Corinthians 9:9–10, quoting Deuteronomy 25:4; compare 1 Timothy 5:18. Paul asks, "Is it oxen God is concerned about?" and answers his own question in the direction of the ministry.
↑ 36. Psalm 27:8 (NKJV): "When You said, 'Seek My face,' My heart said to You, 'Your face, LORD, I will seek.'" The Hebrew idiom for seeking a person's face (panim, "face, presence") is the ordinary language of coming into someone's presence, and the same phrase is used of approaching a king.
↑ 37. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales), note at Job 42:3 (headword "Anthropomorphism"). The note's full opening line reads: "Anthropomorphism is the ascription of human bodily parts, attributes, and passions to God, and taking the substantiating statements of Scripture to be literal and not figurative." The definition appears in at least two scanned archives resident in the project libraries: Dakes_Bible__Bodily_Form.pdf and Dake_Bible_Misc_Passages_From_Images_Folder.pdf. In standard theological usage, anthropomorphism is the recognition that such language is figurative, given for our understanding; Dake's definition inverts the term, making it a vehicle for affirming the body parts as real. The full treatment of anthropomorphism belongs to Chapter 8.