Chapter 5: Same Words, Another Dictionary — Dake's Redefined Terms

Two men sit in the same pew on Sunday morning. Both of them say the same sentence: I believe in the Trinity.

The first man means what the church has always meant. One God. Three persons. Not three beings who work together, but one undivided God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The second man means something different. He means three separate divine beings, each one with His own body, His own soul, and His own spirit. They agree about everything. They work together perfectly. And because they agree, he calls them "one."

Neither man is lying. Both would pass a quiz that asked, "Do you believe in the Trinity?" Both would check the box. Hand them a statement of faith that says "Trinity" in it, and both would sign it without thinking twice.

This chapter is about how that happens. It is the most important chapter in the first five, because everything that comes after depends on understanding this one thing. If you can see how a familiar word can carry an unfamiliar meaning, you will be ready to read every Dake note in this book (and in your own Bible) with your eyes open.

So before we go any further into Dake's teaching, let me put his own definition on the table. In the fourth lesson of God's Plan for Man, his thousand-page course book, he defines "Trinity" for his students:¹

Read that slowly. Look at what it says, and look at what it does not say. It keeps the word "Trinity." It keeps the word "one." It even uses "eternal substance," which sounds very much like the old creeds. But the weight of the sentence falls on one phrase: "three separate and distinct persons as to individuality."

There it is. Three persons, each one a complete being with His own body, His own soul, and His own spirit. The Father has a body. The Spirit has a body. Every person in the universe has these three parts, and the three members of the Godhead are three such persons. The label over the door still reads "Trinity."

This chapter makes one claim, and I want to be clear about what it is and what it is not. The claim is about a method, not about a motive. Dake keeps the church's vocabulary and fills it with new content. He does this in the open, on numbered pages, in print. And because the labels stay the same, a reader can use his Bible for thirty years, quote it with conviction, defend it to every critic, and never realize that the dictionary has been swapped.

Why It Matters

You might wonder why any of this matters. Arguing about definitions sounds like seminary talk. But I want to change your mind about that, because the whole rest of this book turns right here.

Think about how you actually decide whether a teacher is sound. You do not usually dig into his footnotes or check his definitions. You listen for the words. Does he say Jesus is God? Does he believe in the Trinity? Does he take the Bible seriously? When you hear the right words, you relax. And you are not wrong to do that. That is how normal, busy Christians have always worked. Most of the time, it is a good enough test.

It works because we all carry one quiet assumption: that the other person means what we mean when he uses the same word. Nobody says it out loud. Nobody stops to verify it. We just assume it. And that assumption is the exact place where a swapped definition slips through without anyone noticing.

I have watched it happen. A pastor holds up a Dake note and says, "Look, he affirms the Trinity right here on the page." The pastor is telling the truth about what he sees. The word is right there. He has not misread anything. He just never turned back to Lesson Four, where the word was defined, ten lessons and four hundred pages earlier.

What rides on this is not small. Worship rides on it. When you pray, are you talking to one God, or to one member of a committee of three Gods who happen to agree? When you are in a hospital bed at two in the morning, is God with you, or is He far off, aware of you from a distance? Those are not the same comfort.

The gospel rides on it too. If the Son is a separate divine being from the Father, then the cross is one God dying for a different God's honor. But if the Son is God the Son, one with the Father in being, then God Himself came for you. Those are different gospels. Paul had a name for that kind of difference.³

There is also a gentler reason this chapter matters. Once you see how the vocabulary swap works, you stop blaming people and start checking definitions instead. That is an honest way to live, because it lets you say something true and something generous at the same time: this teacher used the right word with the wrong meaning, and the people who followed him were not careless. They were reading the way all of us read.

I need to say what I am not claiming here. I am not saying that anyone who uses a word a little differently is a heretic. Christians argue inside a shared faith all the time, and they use the same words with real differences in meaning. I will come back to that objection later in this chapter, because it deserves an honest answer. The swap I am talking about is narrower and more serious than that. It keeps the label on the one doctrine that tells you who God is, and changes what the label means.

Dake in His Own Words

Exhibit 1: The Dictionary He Printed

Here is what caught me off guard when I first sat down with God's Plan for Man and read Lesson Four all the way through. Dake was not hiding anything.

Most teachers who swap a meaning do it quietly. They use the old term in a new way and never stop to explain. Dake did the opposite. He stopped, typed out a heading, and wrote his definitions in a numbered list. The heading says:⁴

He is telling his students exactly what he is about to do. He is going to teach about God, and first he is going to say what his words mean. That is an honest instinct. I want to say so, because this book gives credit where it is due.

And the first entry itself is sound. A general word cannot settle a specific question on its own, so Scripture has to do the work. I agree with that.⁵ Remember that standard. It is the very test this chapter will turn back around on his own vocabulary.

But look at what the honest instinct produces as the list goes on. He works through nine terms: GOD, GODHEAD, ONE, IN, PERSON, INCARNATION, FATHER AND SON, TRINITY, BODY SOUL AND SPIRIT. Every one of those words has been in use in the church for centuries. And several of them come back loaded with new content.

Take the fifth entry, because it is the one that does the quiet heavy lifting:⁶

That is a perfectly fine definition of a human person. A person acts, thinks, feels, has a body and rights and duties. If you asked a hundred people on the street what "person" means, most of them would land close to this.

And that is the point. Dake has defined "person" the way we normally use it about human beings. Then he picks up that same word, carrying all of that content, and applies it to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If a person is an individual with his own bodily presence and his own faculties, and if God is three persons, then God is three individuals with three separate bodily presences. The math does itself. Three entries later, Dake puts it plainly.

Now set his sentence next to the church's. The Athanasian Creed is the sharpest statement the church ever wrote on the Trinity. It says we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, "neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance."⁸ A few lines later it drives the point home:

Put those side by side and the swap comes into view. The creed guards against two errors at once: do not blur the three persons into one, and do not split the one being into three. Dake avoids the first error. He walks straight into the second. He gives each person His own body, His own soul, and His own spirit. That is exactly what the creed means by "dividing the Substance."⁹

Same word. Opposite content. A reader who only hears the word will never know the difference.

Exhibit 2: The Same Move on Two More Words

If this happened with just one word, you could call it a slip. But it happens across his vocabulary. Let me show you two more briefly, because each one belongs to a later chapter that will open it up in full.

Start with the smallest word in the Bible's most famous sentence about God. "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." What does "one" mean? Dake answers in the third entry of his list:¹⁰

Read that last sentence again. He has told you that the word by itself cannot settle anything. Something else has to do the settling. And in his system, the "something else" turns out to be his own framework. So when he gets to Deuteronomy 6:4, "one" means one in unity, the way a team is one or a committee is one. He says it plainly a few pages later:¹¹

Two pages after that, he supplies the picture that nails it down: "Any family as individuals or collectively could be called by the family name; so it is with the Godhead."¹² The three are "one God" the way the Smiths are "one family." Every Smith is a Smith. There is still more than one of them.

Dake can say "one God" all day long, mean it, and mean something the church has never meant by it. The full question of what the Hebrew word actually does in Deuteronomy 6:4 belongs to Chapter 7. Here I only want you to see the pattern at work.

Now try a longer word. Every Christian says God is omnipresent. Everywhere present. Dake says it too. He even writes a section with the heading "God is Omnipresent." Then he explains what he means:¹³

Look at that phrase near the end. "What we mean by omnipresence." He knows he is assigning a meaning, and he says so openly. What he means is that God's body is in one place, and His awareness reaches out to other places. On the very next lines he says it in six words: "God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere."¹⁴

The heading says "omnipresent." The definition says "located." Chapter 9 takes this apart in full. I bring it up here for one reason only: it is the same move, with a different word, in the same lesson of the same book.

Notice that little phrase, too, because it is the closest thing to a warning bell in all of this. "What we mean by." Dake uses that construction more than once. He is openly telling the reader that he is supplying a meaning. That is not sneaky. But almost nobody pauses at those four words, because the big word standing right next to them is a word we already trust.

Exhibit 3: The Word as Credential

This is where the pattern does its strongest work, and I want to handle it carefully, because a careless writer would overreach here.

Dake does not just use the church's words. He uses them as evidence that he is teaching the church's doctrine. Lesson Twenty-Seven of God's Plan for Man is titled "The Doctrine of the Trinity."¹⁵ Inside it, there is a heading that many of his defenders have quoted with real confidence: "Over 500 Scriptures Proving a Divine Trinity." Here is the first paragraph under that heading:¹⁶

Look at what that sentence does. The heading promises five hundred proofs of "a Divine Trinity." The paragraph then tells you what is actually being proved. Not one God in three persons. Three separate and distinct persons, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit, in the same sense that you and I have ours.

The five hundred verses are real. The word "Trinity" is right there in the heading. And a reader who trusts the heading has just been handed a doctrine he did not ask for.

I want to be fair about the setting Dake wrote in, because fairness matters in every direction. He was fighting a real fight, and on one front he was right. In his day, some Pentecostal teachers denied that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three distinct persons at all. They taught that Jesus is the only person in the Godhead. Dake fought that, and he fought it hard. He wrote a whole section against it:¹⁷

On that point, he was defending something true. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit really are three distinct persons, and the church has always confessed it. He was right to fight a teaching that collapsed them into one. Give the man that.

But think about what the fight did to his audience. He spent his energy defending the number three, and three was what his readers were listening for. Almost nobody was watching the other side of the road. While he was proving that the persons are distinct, he was also teaching that they are separate beings with separate bodies. To a reader who was on guard against "Jesus only" teaching, Dake sounded like a man standing up for the Trinity. In one way he was. In the way that matters most, he was not.

I should say what I did not find. I searched the full library of Dake's own books for a place where he denies teaching three Gods, and I found no such denial.¹⁸ That is not proof that he never wrote one somewhere. It is what the sources in hand show, and I would rather tell you the limits of my evidence than let you assume more than I can actually prove.

Exhibit 4: The Same Pattern in Other Movements

I have to do something delicate here, and I want to tell you exactly what I am doing and what I am not doing before I begin.

I am comparing a method. I am not calling Dake a Jehovah's Witness or a Latter-day Saint. He was neither. He did not belong to either group, he did not teach their distinctive doctrines, and he affirmed things both groups deny, including the full deity of Jesus Christ. If anyone uses this paragraph to say otherwise, they are misusing it.¹⁹

What I am saying is narrower. The same pattern shows up wherever a movement grows up inside Christian language and then moves away from Christian doctrine. The movement keeps the vocabulary. It has to. The vocabulary is what makes the teaching feel familiar. It is what lets its people feel at home in the wider Christian conversation.

The Watchtower organization teaches that Jehovah's Witnesses believe the Bible. That claim is sincere and, at the level of words, true. They read it, memorize it, and carry it door to door. They also teach that Jesus is a created being, the first thing God made, and not God in the way the Father is God. "Bible" is the shared word. What the Bible teaches about the Son is not shared at all.²⁰

The first article of the Latter-day Saint Articles of Faith opens with a sentence any Baptist could say from memory: "We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost."²¹ Every word in that sentence is a word the church uses. But Latter-day Saint teaching holds that the Father possesses a body of flesh and bones, and that the three are three separate beings united in purpose. Same sentence. Different God.

I am not making a claim about influence. I have no evidence that Dake borrowed from either group, and this book does not trade in guilt by association.²² The point is simpler than that, and more useful for you as a reader. The pattern is the same in all three cases. And it is a pattern you can learn to spot.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. Words Are Containers. Doctrine Is What Goes Inside.

Why did the church ever write creeds? A lot of Christians assume the answer has something to do with politics, Greek philosophy, or bishops who liked long sentences. The real answer is simpler, and it is the whole point of this chapter.

In the early fourth century, a priest named Arius taught that the Son was made. There was a time before He existed. When the bishops gathered at Nicaea in 325 to settle the question, they tried Scripture first. They proposed biblical phrases. The Son is "of God." He is "the image of God." He is "the power of God." Every phrase came straight from the pages of the Bible.

And the Arians agreed to all of them. Athanasius, who was there, reports that they nodded at each other as the phrases were read, because they could receive every one of them in their own sense.²³ A creature can be "of God" in some way. A creature can be called "an image." The Bible words were not enough. The words were being poured into a different container.

So the council did something that still bothers people who have not thought about why it was necessary. It chose a word that is not in the Bible. Homoousios. Of the same being. That was the one word the Arians could not sign. That is exactly why it was chosen.²⁴

Let that sit for a moment. The church did not add to Scripture. It found a word that could not be twisted, so that everyone in the room would have to say plainly what they meant by the words they all shared. A creed is not a rival to the Bible. It is a fence around a meaning.

That is why "I believe in the Trinity" was never enough on its own. It never has been. The Arians would have signed a statement with the word "Trinity" in it. Some of them signed statements very close to that. The fight was never about the label.

2. Scripture Itself Tells Us to Check the Words

Someone will ask where the Bible itself tells us to look at definitions. Fair question. It does, and more than once.

Paul is writing to a young pastor, and he gives him an unusual instruction. He does not just say "hold fast to sound doctrine," though he believes in that. He says something sharper:

The pattern of sound words. Not just the general idea. Paul cares about the shape of the language, because he knows that a wrong meaning can ride comfortably inside a right word. He tells Timothy to guard the pattern.²⁵

All things. Not "test the teachers who look suspicious." Not "test the preachers from other churches." All things. That certainly includes the notes printed in the margins of your own study Bible.²⁶

And to the Corinthians, Paul names the exact danger this book is about. He warns that someone may come preaching "another Jesus whom we have not preached," bringing a different spirit and a different gospel.²⁷ Notice how the counterfeit arrives. It arrives using the name "Jesus." It does not introduce itself as a counterfeit. If it did, Paul would not have needed to warn anyone.

Isaiah says the same thing about labels. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light.²⁸ And when Jesus tells us that false prophets come in sheep's clothing, He is telling us that the outside will look familiar.²⁹ The clothing is the vocabulary.

3. Three Questions You Can Ask Any Teacher

Here is the practical heart of this chapter. I want you to be able to do this yourself, on any note, in any study Bible, without waiting for someone else to walk you through it. Use these on mine, if I ever write one.

First: what does he mean by the word? Not what you mean by it. What does he mean? This sounds obvious, but it is the step almost everybody skips. Your own definition is already sitting in your head, and it fills the gap on its own unless you stop and make it wait.

Second: where does he define it? Good teachers define their key terms somewhere. Find the spot. It is usually early: an introduction, a first lesson, a glossary, a note on a key verse. Definitions tend to live far from the doctrines they control. That is one reason they get missed.

Third: does his definition match the church's? Not "does it sound spiritual." Not "is there a verse nearby." Does the content of his definition match what Christians have confessed everywhere, across centuries, in the creeds that summarize Scripture?

That is it. Three questions. A page number. Five minutes. Let me run them once, out loud, on Dake and the phrase "one God."

Question one: what does he mean by "one God"? Question two: where does he define it? He defines it twice in Lesson Four. Under the entry "ONE" he says the word itself cannot tell you whether "one in unity" or "one in number" is the right reading. Two pages later he says the oneness of the Godhead is the same as several men being one, and then he uses the family picture.³⁰ Question three: does that match the church's meaning? No. The church means one being. Dake means one family.

You can run it on anything in his notes. Try it on "omnipresent" and you will end up at pages 60 and 61. Try it on "invisible" and you will find that Dake defines invisibility as a matter of distance rather than of substance, a move that Chapter 8 takes apart in full.³¹ Try it on "in," which he defines as "union with" rather than entrance into, and you will see why many of his notes about God being "in" us read strangely once you slow down and notice.³²

4. The Deceived Are Not the Deceiver

There is a pastoral duty that comes with everything I have said so far, and I do not want to save it for the last page.

If the pattern works the way I have described it, then most of the people it touches are innocent. That is not a soft addition to cushion a hard chapter. It follows from the argument itself. A swap that is invisible to normal readers cannot be held against normal readers. If you have taught from these notes for twenty years and never caught the swap, that does not mean you were lazy or careless. You were reading the way careful people read. You trusted a word.

So I will not write a single sentence in this book that treats a Dake Bible owner as a false teacher. The doctrine is on trial. The people are not.

And there is a second line I want to draw, even though it costs me something to draw it. I do not know what Finis Dake intended. I have spent a long time with his writing, and I cannot tell you whether he understood that he had replaced the church's meanings or whether he believed he was recovering them. Both explanations fit what I see on the page. His confidence reads like real conviction to me. But that is an impression, not evidence, and I will not build on it.

Motive belongs to God's court. The pages belong to ours. I can read what he printed, quote it with page numbers, and weigh it against Scripture. I cannot read his heart. Any writer who claims he can has left the evidence behind.³³

Answering the Defenses

Three objections come up every time I make this argument. All three deserve to be taken seriously. Chapter 24 gathers the full defense case.³⁴ Here I want to answer the three that bear directly on the vocabulary question.

So let me draw the line where I think it actually falls. A Calvinist and an Arminian disagree about how grace operates. They agree about who God is. Both confess one God in three persons. Both confess that the Son is of the same being as the Father. Their argument happens inside the house, and the house is the creed.

Dake's Arminianism is a good example of a debate that stays inside the house. He taught that salvation can be forfeited and that grace can be resisted. Millions of faithful Christians hold those positions, including many in my own tradition. Those are in-house questions, and this book does not treat in-house questions as heresy.³⁵

The swap I am describing is a different kind of thing. It does not argue inside the confession of one God. It keeps the sentence "we believe in one God" and changes what "one" means. That is not a family argument. That is a change to the foundation with the same address on the mailbox.

Here is a test that separates them cleanly. Ask whether both sides can sign the Athanasian Creed's sentence, "not three Gods, but one God," in the sense the creed intends. A Calvinist and an Arminian can both do it in a heartbeat. Read Dake's definitions and ask whether his system can.

He does print them. That is exactly why this chapter can quote them with page numbers instead of guessing. If he had buried his definitions, I would be stuck making guesses, and you would have every reason not to trust me. Give the man credit for a numbered list under a clear heading.

But printing a definition and labeling it honestly are two different things. If he had coined a new word, or written, "By Trinity I mean something the church has never meant," nobody could have been misled. He did not do that. He kept the historic word, printed a new meaning under it four hundred pages before the notes that depend on it, and left the familiar label to do its work everywhere else.

Think of it this way. A jar in your cupboard says "sugar" on the label. Someone fills it with salt and tapes a note inside the lid explaining the change. He has not lied. He has put the truth in a place almost nobody looks. And whoever bakes with that jar is still going to ruin the cake.

Guilt by association says: those people are wrong, he looks like them, so he is wrong. I did not argue that. I did not claim that Dake read either group, borrowed from them, or shared their beliefs. I said the opposite, in print, a few pages ago.

The comparison I made is about a pattern, and a pattern is a piece of neutral evidence. All it shows is that keeping the vocabulary while changing the meaning is a known thing, not a suspicion I cooked up for this book. That matters, because the most common reply to this whole chapter is that nobody could really do such a thing without realizing it. Well, it has been done. By sincere people. More than once. So the question is not whether it can happen. The question is whether the pages in front of us show it happening.

And that question gets answered by reading the pages. Which is exactly what the next chapter does, at length, with nothing held back.

Conclusion: The Word and the Meaning

Let me pull together what we have actually seen, because I want you to be able to explain it to someone else over coffee.

Dake printed a section called "Definition of the Terms Used." In it he defined "person" as an individual with his own bodily presence. He defined "Trinity" as three separate and distinct persons. He said each of the three has His own body, soul, and spirit. He defined "one" so that the word itself cannot settle whether it means one in number or one in unity, and then he read the oneness of God as the oneness of several men, or of a family. He kept the heading "God is Omnipresent" over a definition that puts God's body in one place and calls Him omnipresent by way of awareness. And under a heading promising over five hundred proofs of a Divine Trinity, he told his readers that what was being proved was three separate and distinct persons, each with a personal body of His own.

That is the whole pattern. And now you can see it. You do not need me for the rest. You need three questions, a page number, and the willingness to look up a definition before you trust a label.

I think about Ray at his kitchen table. Thirty years of pencil marks in the margins of his Dake Bible. He tells me it says "Trinity" right there on the page. He is right. It does. And the reason his challenge was such a good one is that it asked for the only thing that could settle the argument. Show me the words. Then show me the Scriptures.

That is what we are going to do. Chapter 6 puts Dake's doctrine of God on the table in his own words, at full length, with the context, and answers nothing. Chapter 7 opens the Scriptures and gives the church's answer. If you want the definitions gathered in one place, they are waiting in Appendix D.

One last word, and it is the one I most want you to take with you. Behind every argument in this chapter there is a God who is bigger than the definitions. He is not three beings who agree. He is one God, undivided, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He is wholly present with you right now, in whatever room you are reading this. No note in any margin can make Him smaller. The words matter because He is worth getting right.

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; copyright renewed 1977), Lesson Four, "The Truth About God," p. 51, item 8. Page numbers throughout this chapter are the book's own printed page numbers, which are embedded in the running heads of the resident text. The resident front matter gives the publication facts used here: the course was "originally published in 26 books of two lessons and a supplement in each book," is credited to "Rev. Finis Jennings Dake," and carries "© Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake" and "© Copyright renewed 1977 by Finis Jennings Dake."

↑ 2. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 51, item 9. Dake's numbered list of nine defined terms runs from p. 49 through p. 51.

↑ 3. 2 Corinthians 11:3–4. The phrase supplies this book's title and is developed in Chapter 1. The Christological question raised here is the property of Chapter 13.

↑ 4. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 49. The heading is Dake's, printed as the first main division of the lesson.

↑ 5. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 49, heading and item 1, quoted above. The principle he states here is sound and is standard lexical practice: a general term does not by itself fix a specific referent. His second entry applies the same care to "Godhead," which he glosses as "that which is divine," citing Colossians 2:9 and Romans 1:20. The difficulty this chapter documents does not lie in the method of defining terms. It lies in the content of several of the definitions that follow, and in the retention of the historic labels above them.

↑ 6. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 50, item 5. Dake continues the entry with the grammatical sense of "person" (first, second, and third person in discourse), which he then applies to the pronouns used of the Father, Son, and Spirit. The full documentation of his doctrine of "person" belongs to Chapter 6.

↑ 7. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 51, item 7 (Father and Son), and p. 55 (the question quoted). On p. 55 he also writes, "There are three persons in the divine unity and three separate persons in the divine individuality."

↑ 8. Athanasian Creed, articles 3–4, traditional English text; public domain. The creed's word "Catholic" here means universal, that is, the faith held by the whole church, and does not refer to the Roman Catholic Church. The creed is quoted only in passing in this chapter; it is owned and expounded in Chapter 7.

↑ 9. "Substance" in the creed translates the Latin substantia, which corresponds to the Greek ousia, "being" or "essence." To divide the substance is to make the three persons three beings. See the Plain Words box above and, for the full treatment, Chapter 7.

↑ 10. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, pp. 49–50, item 3. The ellipsis omits Dake's supporting examples from Genesis 2:24 and 11:6 and his parallel discussion of the Greek heis. Dake transliterates the Hebrew as "achad"; it is more commonly transliterated echad. The lexical question of what the word does in Deuteronomy 6:4 is answered in Chapter 7.

↑ 11. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 54. Dake's supporting references at this point are John 17:11, 21–23; Matthew 19:5; Hebrews 2:11; 1 Corinthians 6:17; Acts 4:32.

↑ 12. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 56. The same page carries his statement that the three "can be spoken of individually as 'God' and collectively as 'one God' in the sense of unity."

↑ 13. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, pp. 60–61, under his section heading "God is Omnipresent." The quotation crosses the page break: it begins on p. 60 and the closing sentence stands on p. 61.

↑ 14. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 61. On the same page he writes, "Not one time does one Scripture refer to God as being bodily everywhere." Earlier, on p. 60, he states the negative form: "He is not omni-body; that is, His body is not everywhere at all places at the same time."

↑ 15. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-Seven, "The Doctrine of the Trinity," beginning at p. 480. The lesson is listed in the resident table of contents as "The doctrine of the Divine Trinity — fallacies about — simple to understand — over 500 scriptures proving a Trinity."

↑ 16. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-Seven, p. 498, under the heading "Over 500 Scriptures Proving a Divine Trinity." The capitalization of "THREE SEPARATE AND DISTINCT PERSONS" is Dake's own. Compare his summary at p. 480: "The one Elohim then is not one person, or one in number, but one in unity."

↑ 17. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-One, p. 373, under his section heading "V. Jesus Christ Is Not the Father or the Holy Ghost." The teaching he opposes is usually called Oneness or "Jesus only" doctrine, and it was a live controversy in Pentecostal circles in his lifetime.

↑ 18. A full-text search of the resident library of Dake's own works, namely the three volumes of God's Plan for Man, Bible Truths Unmasked, Revelation Expounded, The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, The Rapture and the Second Coming, and the posthumously compiled Heavenly Hosts and Ages and Dispensations, returned no occurrence of the phrases "three Gods," "tritheism," or "polytheism." The absence is reported here as a limit of the sources in hand, not as a claim about everything Dake ever wrote. His Study Bible notes are examined in Chapter 6.

↑ 19. Dake affirms the full deity of Jesus Christ, which both groups named here deny. That affirmation is documented and discussed in Chapter 13. This book's fairness rules forbid guilt by association, and this paragraph is written to comply with that rule rather than to evade it.

↑ 20. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society's teaching that the Son is a created being, the first of Jehovah's creations, is stated openly in its own publications and is not in dispute between the group and its critics. No Watchtower publication is resident in this project's libraries, so the position is represented here by paraphrase at the level of well-established fact rather than by page-pinned quotation.

↑ 21. Articles of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, article 1 (Joseph Smith, 1842); public domain. The teaching that the Father possesses a body of flesh and bones is likewise stated in Latter-day Saint scripture and is not in dispute; it is represented here by paraphrase for the same reason given in note 20.

↑ 22. The similarity between Dake's embodied, separate-persons Godhead and Latter-day Saint teaching on the same points is real and is noted by other writers. This book makes no claim of borrowing or contact in either direction, because the sources in hand support none.

↑ 23. Athanasius, De Decretis (On the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea), sec. 20. Athanasius reports that the Arian party accepted the scriptural phrases proposed at the council while signaling to one another that they could receive them in their own sense, which is why the council turned to a non-scriptural term. Cited at work and section level; no page-pinned quotation is given, as no copy is resident in this project's libraries.

↑ 24. Nicene Creed (325), which confesses the Son as homoousios with the Father, rendered in the traditional English text as "of one substance with the Father" and in many modern versions as "of one Being with the Father." The choice of a term not found in Scripture was controversial at the time and was defended on precisely the ground given here: it was the one word that could not be received in an Arian sense.

↑ 25. 2 Timothy 1:13 (NKJV). The Greek noun rendered "pattern" is hypotypōsis, an outline, sketch, or model, and it governs "sound words" rather than "doctrine" in general.

↑ 26. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NKJV). Compare Acts 17:11, where the Bereans are commended for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether the apostolic preaching was so. The Berean pattern is developed as this book's model of reading in Chapter 1.

↑ 27. 2 Corinthians 11:4 (NKJV).

↑ 28. Isaiah 5:20 (NKJV).

↑ 29. Matthew 7:15–16 (NKJV). The point drawn here is limited to the disguise, not to a charge against any person; on that restraint see note 33 and the closing section of this chapter.

↑ 30. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, pp. 49–50 (item 3), p. 54, and p. 56. The three passages together are the full definition, and no one of them is complete without the others, which is itself an illustration of why definitions are easy to miss.

↑ 31. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 51: "When we use the word invisible we must not think of it altogether in the terms of substance, but mainly as distance — beyond eyesight, beyond natural visibility." The consequences of that redefinition are the subject of Chapter 8. Confirmed in the Dake Study Bible's note on Colossians 1:15, which defines invisibility in the same terms: "Invisibility consists more of distance than substance."

↑ 32. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 50, item 4: "IN. This word means in union with and when used of persons it does not mean bodily entrance into." He names the resulting doctrine on the same page: "The Bible doctrine of interpenetration means the union of two or more persons together for the same end." The Dake Study Bible's note on Luke 22:3 applies the same principle: "Satan, as an angel, could not possibly enter bodily into Judas, for he has his own personal spirit body as big as a man. The so-called doctrine of interpenetration, that is, persons entering bodily into each other, is false." The note then lists dozens of passages about God being "in" believers and concludes they "do not teach bodily entrance of one being into another."

↑ 33. This restraint is one of the standing rules of this book, stated as a promise to the reader in Chapter 1: no motives are asserted beyond the evidence, in either direction. The same rule governs the biographical chapters, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.

↑ 34. See Chapter 24, which gathers the cumulative case made by Dake's defenders and answers it as a whole. Each doctrinal chapter answers the defenses that bear on its own subject.

↑ 35. Dake's conditional security and resistible grace are ordinary Arminian positions with a long orthodox pedigree, and this book does not treat them as departures from the faith. Where his system turns resistible grace into a limit on God's power and knowledge, that is a different question, and it is examined in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11.