Chapter 4

Taking It Literally

Dake’s rule for reading the Bible, and where it leads

Eyes in every place

The eyes of the LORD are in every place, Keeping watch on the evil and the good. Proverbs 15:3 (NKJV)¹

Every reader knows that Proverbs 15:3 is a picture. Nobody who reads it imagines a pair of eyes in every room of the world. The verse tells us that nothing escapes God’s notice, and it says so with an image that a child can understand. The writer never stops to explain that he is using a figure of speech, and he never needs to.

Finis Dake read the Bible by a different rule. In Lesson Three of God’s Plan for Man, his course of Bible study, he gave his students the rule in a form they could remember: “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.”² The default is literal. A figure of speech is whatever is left over when a literal reading fails.

Dake would not have read this proverb as a promise of physical eyes. His rule has that fallback, and the fallback covers the verse. In his system God has one body, located in heaven, so eyes in every place are impossible, and the verse becomes a picture. But look at where that decision came from. The verse did not tell him it was a figure. His belief about God’s body told him. When the same belief met Genesis 11:5, where God comes down to see the tower of Babel, it told him the words were literal and that God had traveled.³ So the rule settles nothing by itself. Everything depends on who decides what is “possible,” and in Dake’s notes the one deciding is always the system he already held.

Here is my verdict on the rule. Dake’s rule is to take Scripture literally “when it is at all possible.” It sounds like a high view of the Bible, yet it sets aside what the Bible’s writers meant. It treats their figures of speech as physical facts wherever his system needs facts. It is the engine that produces his embodied, located, and limited God. The rule is wrong, and Dake himself could not keep it. He was right to resist the modernists of his day, who were busy explaining away the miracles, and I share his conviction that the Bible means what it says. His rule was the wrong way to defend it.

Why a rule for reading matters

Most people who own a Dake Bible have never asked how its notes were made. They ask whether a given note is right, which is a fair question, but a second question stands behind it. What method produced these notes? In the chapters ahead you will meet a Godhead of three separate beings, each with His own body, soul, and spirit. You will meet a God who travels from place to place, and a God who did not know ahead of time what Abraham would do on the mountain. Those teachings came from one method, applied with great consistency over many years. If the method is bent, everything it produced was bent before it reached the page.

A method also gets passed on. Picture a Sunday school teacher who has studied from these notes for twenty years. She has absorbed more than Dake’s conclusions. She has absorbed his habits, and she has learned to ask of every verse why it should not be taken at face value. That question sounds brave. But when it becomes her first move on poetry, prophecy, and parable alike, she slowly loses her ear for the way the Bible actually speaks.

Above all, how we read the Bible shapes who we 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 an organ, then His attention points in one direction, and you have to stand in front of it to be seen. When a psalm says “Seek My face,” a reader with a good ear hears an invitation to come near to God.⁴ A reader trained to hear body parts hears directions to a location. The Bible’s pictures are God’s kindness. He bends low and speaks in images so that ordinary people can hold what He says. Read those images as anatomy, and God shrinks to the size of the picture.

The rule in Dake’s own words

Literal wherever it is at all possible

Lesson Three of God’s Plan for Man is titled “How to Interpret the Bible,” and the table of contents promises “30 rules to follow.”⁵ 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,” and he gives his answer in capital letters.

Three things stand out in that paragraph. The default is always literal. The test runs in only one direction, since “what cannot be literal must be figurative.” Under this rule a reader finds a figure of speech only when a literal reading breaks down. And Dake is confident that the subject matter “will always make this clear” to any man of ordinary intelligence.

He states the rule again hundreds of pages later, in his lesson 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, Lesson Thirty-Nine, p. 782⁷

In plain words, a figure of speech exists only when the Bible announces it, or when a literal reading cannot be made to work. Even then, the figure must be interpreted by something literal. His publisher printed the same rule in the foreword to the one-volume edition of the course.

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 printing), the publisher’s words⁸

No interpretation needed

Lesson Three opens by rejecting a common view of the Bible. Dake says many people think it is “full of mysteries, secrets, and hidden meanings veiled in spiritual language which only a few special men of God can understand.”⁹ He is right to reject that view. Then he tells his students 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. 36¹⁰

Dake meant this as encouragement, and I believe he meant it kindly. But the promise cannot be kept. Collecting every verse on a subject is already an act of judgment. Someone has to decide which verses belong in the pile, and someone has to decide what to do when two of them seem to pull in different directions. Dake did that work on a scale few of us will ever attempt. My complaint is with a method that told his readers no one was doing it.

A few pages later he describes what he calls the true method of interpretation.

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. 42¹¹

The first sentence of that passage is right. The goal of reading is to find “the precise meaning the writers intended to convey,” and that has been the Protestant rule of interpretation since the Reformation. By the third sentence, though, the standard has moved. The first sentence tests a reading by asking what the writer meant. The third tests it by asking whether a literal reading is possible. Those two tests agree in a book of history like Kings, and they part ways in the Psalms. Dake names the right principle and then replaces it within one paragraph, and much of his doctrine of God passes through that exchange.

The second of his general rules of interpretation 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, rule 2, p. 43¹²

Everything rests on that last clause. If a Bible writer uses a word in an unusual sense, Dake says, “he will make the fact known.” A figure is either announced or it is not there. I will test that claim against the Bible below.

The course was advertised with the same confidence. The back pages of Dake’s 1950 book Bible Truths Unmasked promised that in this course “Not one truth has been left to human reasoning, or proved by human authority.”¹³ Many believers had been told that the Bible belonged to experts, and Dake told them it belonged to them. That part was a good word. But the promise went further. It claimed that reading the Bible was a settled process with no judgment left in it. A method that makes that promise still runs on judgment. It only hides the judgment from the reader.

Where the rule came from

Dake told his readers where the rule began. The account is in the preface to Revelation Expounded, a book he first wrote at the age of 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, Preface¹⁴

I understand why this paragraph has moved so many readers. A young man is taught things he cannot find in his Bible. He goes back to the text, checks, and finds they are not there. So he sets the teachers aside and reads the page for himself. Then he makes a promise.

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, Preface¹⁵

That is a serious vow, and his notes show how hard he worked to keep it. Every note has its references stacked behind it. Still, the longer paragraph frames the choice in a way that hides something. Dake gave himself only two options. Either God speaks the way men speak, or God speaks in a way meant to confuse us. No believer would choose the second. But there was always a third option, and the church has always taken it. God speaks the way men speak, and men speak in pictures. When a girl tells her father that her teacher chewed her out, she is speaking plain English, and her father does not picture teeth.

In the same book Dake raises the stakes.

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. 21¹⁶

“We have a right to expect” is a claim about what God owes His readers. As the next section shows, the Bible does not honor that claim.

The rule at work

A method is best judged by what it produces. Two examples show the machinery, and later chapters treat each doctrine in full. The first concerns God’s body. The church has always read the Bible’s language about God’s hands, eyes, and arms as picture language. Dake answered that view with an argument about 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. 54¹⁷

On the same page he draws his conclusion: “The expressions which tell us that God has bodily parts are real and literal and not figurative.”¹⁸ The logic runs like this. The Bible never labels these expressions as figures. A figure must point to something real. So the parts themselves must be real. A doctrine about God’s body arrives by way of a rule about sentences. Chapter 8 takes up the doctrine itself.

The second example concerns God’s knowledge, and here the rule is the whole argument. Dake writes that the Bible “makes many simple statements that limit God’s knowledge,” and that “There would be no sense to such passages if we do not believe them literally.”¹⁹ He does not begin with what the Bible says about who God is. He begins with a rule about how sentences work, and the doctrine follows. Chapter 10 answers that doctrine. The same method reads Daniel’s night vision of thrones and white hair as a physical report of two visible bodies, which is how it produces the Godhead set out in Chapter 6.²⁰

Dake’s doctrine of God grows from one rule applied to every sentence about God in the Bible. Read the picture language as anatomy, and God has a body. Give the body a location, and God is no longer everywhere. Read the passages where God says “now I know” at face value, and God learns. The teachings examined in Part II of this book all trace back to the rule in Lesson Three.

What Scripture does with its own pictures

The Bible seldom labels a figure

Dake’s second rule depends on the idea that a writer who uses a word in an unusual sense “will make the fact known.” Here is a verse that tests it.

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 (NKJV)

The psalm gives no notice that it is speaking in a picture. By the letter of Dake’s rule, the reading should stand as written. Dake did not read it as feathers, of course, and neither does anyone else. We read it as a picture because we know how people talk. We have all heard a mother say she gathered her children under her wing, and none of us went looking for the wing.

The Gospels work the same way. Jesus says, “I am the door,”²¹ and “I am the true vine.”²² He never adds a note that He is speaking in a figure, because He expects His hearers to understand Him. A psalmist calls the LORD God “a sun and shield” without a word of explanation.²³ Scripture calls God a rock, a fortress, a shepherd, a horn of salvation, a hen gathering her chicks, a lion, and a moth.²⁴ Read them the way they were written and you meet a God who is solid, safe, watchful, tender, and terrible at once. The pictures are how the truth was given to us.

Scripture does sometimes label a figure. In Galatians 4 Paul says of the story of Hagar and Sarah, “which things are symbolic.”²⁵ Such labels are rare, and the unlabeled figures are beyond counting. Dake’s rule asks the Bible to do something the Bible does not do. When a rule and the Bible disagree, the rule has to give way.

What “literal” has always meant

The word literal comes from the Latin littera, “letter.” To read a text literally is to read it according to the letter, that is, according to what the writer was saying with the words he chose. That is what the word has meant in Christian interpretation from the beginning.

It follows that the literal sense of a metaphor is the meaning the metaphor carries. When Jesus says “I am the door,” the literal sense of the sentence is that He is the way in. A reader who insists that He meant wood and hinges has misread the sentence. He has not read it more literally.

Where the church says literal, Dake hears physical. Once that exchange is made, his sentences can sound orthodox while they mean something else. Chapter 5 follows that pattern through his whole system, and it begins with this word.

Scripture explains its own pictures

The Bible also shows us how to handle its pictures. In John 2, Jesus speaks of a temple.

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 (NKJV)

The men who took the words at face value got them wrong. The right reading comes when John tells us what Jesus meant. The literal sense of the sentence was always His body, never the building.

Revelation works the same way. John sees seven stars and seven lampstands, and a few verses later the vision explains itself: the stars are the angels of the churches, and the lampstands are the churches.²⁶ Dake built much of Revelation Expounded on passages like this, and on that point he was right. He was also right to warn against the habit of waving away an uncomfortable verse by calling it a parable.²⁷

The apostles read the Old Testament with a trained ear. Jesus points back to the bronze serpent Moses lifted up on a pole and says the Son of Man must be lifted up the same way.²⁸ The serpent was a real serpent on a real pole, but its meaning reached far past serpents. Paul takes the law against muzzling an ox and applies it to the support of preachers.²⁹ Nothing in Deuteronomy labeled that reading. Paul heard it because he knew the whole story, and he expected his readers to hear it too. Scripture explains a handful of its own images and leaves the rest to readers who know how people talk.

The church has always read this way

Some Dake readers suspect that talk of picture language is a modern dodge, cooked up by liberals to get around the text. It is older than any liberal, and it comes from the Bible itself. Moses reminded Israel what they had seen at Mount Horeb.

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, lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure … Deuteronomy 4:15–16 (NKJV)

God spoke at Horeb, and no one saw a shape. Israel had to learn the difference between those two facts, because the commandment against carved images depended on it.

The church kept teaching the same lesson. The Reformers fought harder for the plain sense of Scripture than anyone before them, and they taught it in the same breath. John Calvin wrote that when God describes Himself in human terms, He “lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children.”³⁰ God chooses simple words that reach us, though they could never measure Him. The Westminster divines put it in one phrase in 1646: God is “without body, parts, or passions.”³¹ Dake quotes writers who use nearly those words and calls their statements “foolish and unscriptural.”³² His readers should know whom he is disagreeing with. He is setting aside the confession of the Reformation churches, and behind them the church of the creeds.

Dake could not keep his own rule

Dake never claimed that the Bible has no figures of speech. He wrote pages on symbols, types, parables, and riddles, and he insisted that figurative language carries literal truth, which is true.³⁴ My argument concerns his default setting and the person who decides when to override it. The plainest evidence is in his own list of rules.

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. 45³⁵

“No man hath seen God at any time” is a plain sentence in plain words. It is not poetry or a vision, and nothing in it is impossible to take at face value. By Dake’s rule it should stand as written. Instead, the word seen is given the meaning comprehended, so that the verse will agree with a conclusion he had reached elsewhere. He does not call the verse figurative. He changes the meaning of one of its words, and he does it inside his own list of rules for taking the Bible literally.

The list goes on. Rules 25 through 27 grant that Hebrew and Greek have idioms, that “hate” can mean only a preference, and that biblical numbers are sometimes rounded.³⁶ I agree with all three. No verse announces any of these features. Dake knew they were there the way every good reader knows, from the language, the culture, and the setting of the sentence. He 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 statements that “cannot possibly be literal,” Dake includes Jesus being a door.³⁷ No rule told him that. No verse says the door is a metaphor. He knew it was a figure because he was a competent reader of human speech, which is the very skill his rule was built to make unnecessary.

It all comes down to the word possible. The rule says to take a passage literally when that is “at all possible,” but someone has to decide what is possible. Is a God with a physical body possible? Dake said yes, so the body language stayed physical. Is a God who does not know the future possible? He said yes, so those verses stayed flat. Are feathers on God possible? He said no, so Psalm 91 became a picture. Each time, the deciding vote was cast by the interpreter and his doctrine of God. The rule that promised to remove human judgment runs on human judgment. Every reader uses judgment, and that is no scandal. The trouble is the claim that none was used. “Not one truth has been left to human reasoning” is a bold sentence to print above one man’s reasoning.

What Dake’s defenders say

“At least he takes the Bible seriously”

A defender will say that liberal scholars spent a century calling the miracles myths, and that Dake stood against them and taught ordinary people that the words mean what they say. Loosen his rule, the defender says, and you open the door to spiritualizing anything you dislike, starting with the resurrection.

The concern is right, and I share it. But Dake’s rule does not guard against that danger. What keeps a reader honest is the writer’s intended meaning, the very principle Dake named first and then replaced. Ask what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 15, and the resurrection is safe, because Paul plainly meant a body raised from the grave. Ask only what is physically possible, and the same rule that defends the empty tomb gives God a body of ordinary size.

“The rule protects ordinary readers from clever men”

A more careful defender will say that the rule is a safety device. Without it, any clever teacher can empty any verse by calling it symbolic. With it, the ordinary reader is protected from the professionals.

The rule does not get rid of the clever teacher. It only moves him. Someone still decides when a literal reading is “at all possible,” and whoever holds that decision has more power than any professor, because his rule says he is not deciding anything. A judge who claims to have no opinions is harder to appeal than one who admits them. Chapter 24 gathers the defenders’ full case.

The God the pictures 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. He named the right principle, the writer’s intended meaning, and then replaced it with a test of physical possibility. That rule treats the Bible’s figures as physical facts wherever his system needs them, and it is the engine behind his embodied, located, and limited God. The rule is wrong, and his own rules for idioms, round numbers, John 1:18, and the door show that he could not keep it.

Paul told Timothy what kind of reader to be.

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15 (NKJV)

A worker who handles the word rightly listens for what the writer meant, and the pictures give back far more than a rule about bodies can. Go back to Proverbs 15:3, “The eyes of the LORD are in every place.” Read the way the writer meant it, the verse promises much more than a pair of eyes. It says there is no corner of your life where you are unseen or unheld. A God with literal eyes would have to turn His head to find you. The God of Proverbs 15 never has to, and that is what the picture was given to teach.