Chapter 5

Same Words, Another Dictionary

How a teacher can keep every word the church uses and still teach another God

Picture two men in the same Sunday school class. The teacher asks whether anyone has doubts about the Trinity, and both of them shake their heads. Later each of them says it out loud: “I believe in the Trinity.” The first man means what the church has always meant. There is one God, and the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are that one God. The second man means that there are three divine beings, each with a body, a soul, and a spirit of His own, who agree so perfectly that he calls them one. Both men would sign the same statement of faith, and they do not believe in the same God.

The second man did not invent his belief. He learned it, very likely from a teacher who used the same words the first man uses. Finis Dake was that kind of teacher. He wrote a course called God’s Plan for Man to teach the whole Bible, and in Lesson Four he stops to define his terms. This is how he defines the Trinity.

8. TRINITY. This means the union of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in one (unified) Godhead or divinity, so that all three persons are one in unity and eternal substance, but three separate and distinct persons as to individuality (1 John 5:7-8; Dan. 7:9-14; Matt. 3:16-17; 28:19; Acts 7:56-59). God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 51¹

Every word in that definition sounds familiar. It speaks of union and of one Godhead, and its phrase “eternal substance” echoes the old creeds. The weight falls on its last clause, “three separate and distinct persons as to individuality,” and the very next entry in his list says what that clause means. In it the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each have “a personal body, soul, and spirit, which are separate and distinct from all others,” the same as every angel and every man.²

So Dake keeps the church’s words and changes what they mean, and that is how a teacher can sound orthodox while he teaches another God. Under the word Trinity, Dake taught three separate divine beings, and three divine beings are three Gods. The church calls that belief tritheism, and it has always called it heresy. The Athanasian Creed answers it in one line: “not three Gods, but one God.”³ Chapter 6 sets out his teaching on the Godhead in full, and Chapter 7 gives the Bible’s answer. Any reader can learn to catch a change like this one.

Why the meaning of a word matters

Most of us judge a teacher by his words. We listen for the right answers. Does he say that Jesus is God? Does he believe in the Trinity? When we hear the right answers we relax, and most of the time that is a fair way to judge. It rests on a quiet assumption, though, that when another person uses a word he means what we mean by it. A changed definition slips through at exactly that point.

Picture a woman who has taught a Bible class from a Dake Bible for years. When a friend raises a question about it, she opens to a note and points to the word “Trinity” printed on the page. She is telling the truth about what she sees, because the word is there. What she has never done is go to the course where Dake defined the word and read his definition.

The definition reaches into prayer and into the gospel. When you pray, you speak either to the one God or to one of three beings who happen to agree. At the cross, either God Himself came to save you, or one divine being died to satisfy another. Those are two different gospels, and Paul warned the Corinthians about exactly that kind of difference (2 Corinthians 11:4).

How Dake defined his terms

Dake did not hide his definitions. In Lesson Four he set them under a heading, “Definition of the Terms Used.” His numbered list begins with GOD and GODHEAD and ends with TRINITY and BODY, SOUL, AND SPIRIT. The church had used every one of those terms for centuries. Several of them come out of his list with a new meaning.⁴

The entry that does the most work is PERSON. Dake says a person is anyone who can act, think, and feel, and he ends the definition with “a rational being with bodily presence, soul passions, and spirit faculties.”⁵ That is a fair description of a human person. Then he takes the same word, with all that it now carries, and applies it to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If a person is a rational being with bodily presence, then three divine persons are three rational beings, each with a body. When the church called the Father, the Son, and the Spirit three persons, it was naming who each one is within the one God, and it never meant three beings.

“One” as several men are one

The same thing happens to the word “one.” Dake’s entry on ONE gives the Hebrew word behind “one Lord” in Deuteronomy 6:4. He says the word by itself cannot tell you whether it means one in number or one in unity, so Scripture has to decide.⁶ That sounds careful. In practice his own framework decides, and a few pages later he says which kind of oneness he has in mind.

Two pages later he gives the picture that goes with it: “Any family as individuals or collectively could be called by the family name; so it is with the Godhead.”⁸ In his teaching the three are one God the way a family is one household. Each member belongs fully to the family, and there are still three of them. Dake can say “one God” sincerely and still mean something the church has never meant by those words. What the Hebrew word actually does in Deuteronomy 6:4 is the subject of Chapter 7.

“Omnipresent” as a body in one place

Dake treats a longer word the same way. Christians say that God is omnipresent, which means He is present everywhere. Dake writes a section of Lesson Four under the heading “God is Omnipresent.” There he says the bodies of spirit beings, God’s included, are “of ordinary size” and “must be at one place at a time,” like the bodies of men. God and the other spirit beings, he adds, go “from place to place bodily as men do,” and only their presence reaches anywhere else. He closes the paragraph with a phrase worth noticing: “what we mean by omnipresence.”⁹ A few lines later he says it outright: “God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere.”¹⁰

The heading says God is everywhere, and the paragraph beneath it places God’s body in one place. The phrase “what we mean by” is the nearest thing to a warning in all of this, because Dake is openly telling his reader that he is supplying a meaning. Few readers stop there, since the large word beside it is one they already trust. Chapter 9 examines this teaching in full.

“Trinity” as a credential

Dake also uses the church’s words as proof that he teaches the church’s doctrine. Lesson Twenty-seven of the course is titled “The Doctrine of the Trinity,” and one of its headings promises “Over 500 Scriptures Proving a Divine Trinity.”¹¹ The first sentence under it says what he takes them to prove: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are “THREE SEPARATE AND DISTINCT PERSONS, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit in the sense that all other persons have them.”¹² A reader who trusts the heading has been handed a doctrine he never asked for. Chapter 6 prints the passage with its context.

Dake did have a real opponent in view. In his day some Pentecostal teachers taught that Jesus is the only person in the Godhead, and Dake opposed them firmly.

Many are misled in making Jesus the only person in the Godhead and more than what the Bible says He is and they rob the Father and the Holy Spirit of their own separate personalities and make them less than what the Bible says they are, thus depriving them of their rightful and separate places in the unity of God. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-one, p. 373¹³

On that point he was right. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three distinct persons, and the church has always confessed it. The fight shaped what his readers listened for, though. Readers on guard against the “Jesus only” teaching heard Dake defend the number three, and they took him for a friend of the Trinity. Few of them noticed that he defended three persons by making them three separate beings with three separate bodies. Nowhere does he deny teaching three Gods. What he rejects is the idea that God is one person.¹⁴

How the church learned to guard its words

Many Christians assume the creeds came from politics or Greek philosophy. A large part of their history comes from this very problem. False teachers loved the Bible’s words, and the church learned that the Bible’s words, used alone, could not stop them.

Early in the fourth century a priest named Arius taught that the Son of God was made, so that there was a time when He did not exist. When the bishops met at Nicaea in 325 to settle the question, they tried biblical phrases first. They proposed that the Son is “of God,” that He is “the image of God,” and that He is “the power of God.” Athanasius, who was there, reports that the Arians accepted every phrase, because they could read each one in their own sense.¹⁵ A created being can be called “of God” in some sense, and a creature can be called an image.

So the council chose a word that is not in the Bible. It confessed that the Son is homoousios with the Father, which means “of the same being.” The Arians could not sign that word, and that is why the council chose it.¹⁶ Some readers think the creeds add to Scripture, but the council added nothing to it. It found a word that could not be bent, so that everyone who shared the Bible’s words had to say plainly what he meant by them. In that sense a creed is a fence around a meaning. A statement that said only “Trinity” would never have stopped the Arians, and it does not stop a teacher like Dake.

What Scripture tells us to do with words

The Bible itself tells believers to pay attention to the words. Paul gave Timothy this charge.

Hold fast the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me, in faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. 2 Timothy 1:13 (NKJV)¹⁷

Paul cares about the pattern of the words as well as the general idea, because a wrong meaning can travel comfortably inside a right word. To the Thessalonians he said it more briefly.

Test all things; hold fast what is good. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NKJV)¹⁸

“All things” includes the notes printed beside the text of a study Bible. To the Corinthians Paul named the danger outright. He feared a preacher who would come preaching “another Jesus whom we have not preached,” with a different spirit and a different gospel.¹⁹ That preacher would use the name of Jesus, and the familiar name is what would make him dangerous. Isaiah pronounced woe on those “who call evil good, and good evil,”²⁰ and Jesus warned of false prophets “who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.”²¹ In each warning the danger comes dressed in familiar words.

Three questions to ask of any teacher

You can test a teacher’s words yourself, in any study Bible and on any note, without waiting for someone else to do it for you. When a teacher uses a word that matters, ask three questions in order.

Here are the questions worked once, on the phrase “one God.” What does Dake mean by it? To find out, you go to the place where he defines it, which is Lesson Four. His entry on ONE says the Hebrew word can mean one in unity or one in number, and that Scripture must decide which. On p. 54 he decides that the three are one “in the case of several men being one,” and on p. 56 he adds the picture of a family that shares one name.²² Does that match the church’s meaning? It does not. The church means one God in being, and Dake means three beings in agreement.

The same questions work on his other words. Ask them about “invisible,” and you will find that Dake makes God’s invisibility mainly a matter of distance, a teaching Chapter 8 examines.²³ Ask them about “in,” and you will find that he defines it as union with a person, which when used of persons never means bodily entrance. That definition changes what his notes mean when they say God is in a believer.²⁴ Chapter 14 follows that word to the Holy Spirit.

The same method in other movements

Dake is not the only teacher to keep Christian words while changing their meaning. The Watchtower organization says that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe the Bible, and they read it and carry it door to door. They also teach that Jesus is a created being, the first thing God made.²⁵ The first of the Latter-day Saint Articles of Faith says, “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.”²⁶ Any Baptist could say that sentence. Latter-day Saint teaching, though, holds that the Father has a body of flesh and bones, and that the three are separate beings united in purpose. Dake belonged to neither group, and he confessed the deity of Christ, which both groups deny.²⁷ I make no claim that he borrowed from either one.²⁸ What they share is a method. Each keeps the church’s vocabulary because it makes the teaching feel familiar, and a reader who has seen the method once will recognize it elsewhere.

Those who were misled

If a changed definition is this hard to see, then most of the people it reached did nothing wrong. The woman pictured earlier, who taught from these notes for years and never noticed the change, was reading the way careful people read. She trusted a word. The man who wrote and printed the definition answers for it, and Dake answers for what he printed. His readers mostly trusted him, and nothing in this book treats them as false teachers.

I make no judgment of Dake’s motives. I cannot tell from his pages whether he knew he had replaced the church’s meanings or believed he was recovering the Bible’s. What I can do is read what he printed, give the page number, and set his words beside Scripture.²⁹

Doesn’t every tradition define its own terms?

Some readers will say that every tradition has its own definitions. Calvinists and Arminians both speak of grace, and they mean different things by it. That is true. A Calvinist and an Arminian disagree about how grace works, and they agree about who God is. Both confess one God in three persons, and both confess that the Son is of the same being as the Father. Their argument takes place inside the creed.

Dake’s own Arminian teaching belongs inside that circle. He taught that grace can be resisted and that a believer can fall away, and many faithful Christians, including many in my own tradition, believe the same.³⁰ His change to the word “one” is a different kind of difference. It keeps the sentence “we believe in one God” and changes the meaning of the word at its center. Calvinists and Arminians can both confess the Athanasian Creed’s line about one God in the sense the creed intends, and Dake’s definitions do not allow it. Chapter 24 gathers the rest of the defenders’ case.

But didn’t he print his definitions openly?

Others will say that Dake printed his definitions where anyone could read them, and that this is honesty. He did print them, and that is why they can be quoted here with page numbers. Printing a definition is still different from labeling it honestly. If he had written that by Trinity he meant something the church had never meant, few readers would have been misled. Instead he kept the church’s word, printed his own meaning in one lesson of his course, and let the familiar label do its work everywhere else. Think of a sugar jar that someone has filled with salt, with a note explaining the change taped inside the lid. No one has told a lie, and anyone who bakes from that jar will still ruin the cake.

The one God the words were meant to guard

Dake kept the church’s words and gave them new meanings. In his course a person is a rational being with a body. One means several in agreement. Omnipresent means a body in one place with a presence felt at a distance. Trinity means three separate and distinct persons, each with a body, soul, and spirit of His own. Under those words he taught three Gods, which is the heresy of tritheism. Chapter 6 documents his teaching on the Godhead in his own words, Chapter 7 answers it from Scripture, and Appendix D gathers his definitions in one place.

The words matter because of the God they were given to protect. Scripture reveals one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, undivided and present with you wherever you are reading this. The church guarded its words so that every believer could say “I believe in the Trinity” and know what that confession means, and you can say it with the same confidence.