Dake’s Godhead in His Own Words — Chapter 6

Three Persons, Three Bodies, Three Souls, Three Spirits: A Chapter That Only Documents

One Chapter Without a Verdict

I want to ask you for something unusual. Give me one chapter where I don’t argue. One chapter where I don’t answer back. One chapter where I simply read.

That is what we are going to do here. I am not going to tell you what to think about Finis Dake’s teaching on God. Not yet. What I am going to do is lay his own words on the table, with page numbers you can check for yourself. The answer comes next chapter. This chapter has one job: put his teaching out in the open so completely that no one can accuse us of clipping him short.

Here is where he starts. God’s Plan for Man is his fifty-two-lesson Bible course, roughly a thousand pages long. Lesson Four is titled “The Truth About God.”¹ Before he argues anything, he stops and defines his terms. That is good method, and I want to say so right up front. One of those terms is Trinity.

Now put those two entries together. Read them slowly. The first says the Trinity is a union of three persons. The second says every person in the universe has a body, a soul, and a spirit. And it puts the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit right at the top of that list, in the same breath as angels and men.

Later in the same lesson, Dake draws the conclusion himself. “If one person of the three in the Godhead has a personal body, soul, and spirit,” he writes, “all three persons must also have separate bodies, souls, and spirits.”⁴ Three bodies. Three souls. Three spirits.

I am not weighing any of that yet. I just want you to see it. And I want you to notice that I did not have to go digging for it. This sits right at the front of a beginner’s lesson, in a numbered list of definitions. It was printed for students who mailed their homework in by post.⁵

So here is my promise for the pages ahead. By the end of this chapter, you will know exactly what Dake teaches about God. You will know it from enough of his own pages that nobody can say I cherry-picked. And you will still be free to weigh it all for yourself, because that weighing belongs to the next chapter.

Why do it this way? Because a charge this serious has to be earned. If I just told you what Dake taught and you took my word for it, you would be doing the very thing I am asking you to stop doing. You would be trusting a confident voice about a book you haven’t read carefully yourself. So I am going to be thorough on purpose. Long quotations. Page numbers. Capital letters right where he put them.

Why This Chapter Comes First

Nine chapters of this book examine the God of the Dake Bible. His body. His location. His knowledge. His power. His changelessness. His Son. His Spirit. Every one of those chapters begins here, with a Godhead made up of three complete individuals. If this starting point is right, then the rest is just careful detail. If it is wrong, then a great many notes in a well-loved Bible are wrong at the root.

That is why I am keeping my mouth shut for one chapter. A charge this big gets proved from the page before it gets argued from the pulpit.

Think about what hangs on it. When you pray, are you speaking to one God or to one member of a divine family? When you sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” are you naming one Being three times or three Beings once each? At the cross, was God bearing our sin, or was one God watching another God do it? These are not word games. They shape who is on the other side of your prayers.

And here is what catches people off guard. What we are about to read is not the Pentecostal position. It never has been. The classical Pentecostal churches confess the historic Trinity in their own statements of faith: one God, existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.⁶ That is what an Assemblies of God church puts its name to. So when a Dake Bible sits open on an Assemblies of God pew, the notes in the margin are not teaching that church’s own confession. They are teaching something else. Nobody announced the switch. It happened quietly, one trusted study Bible at a time.

Let me be careful here, because this is where books like mine usually go wrong. I am not saying Pentecostals secretly believe in three Gods. I am saying the opposite. Pentecostal churches confess one God, and the notes many of their members read do not. That gap is worth knowing about, whichever side you come down on.

It also shapes how you look at the Bible you hold. Many of the people I love most in this world own a Dake Bible. Some have taught from it for decades. If that is you, hear me: I am not calling you a heretic. I am not looking down at the book on your table. I am asking you to read a few of its pages with me at a slower speed than Sunday morning allows.

One more thing before we get to the exhibits. Dake is not an Arian. He does not make Jesus less than God. He says plainly that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and he backs each claim from Scripture.⁷ He uses the word Trinity gladly and often. Whatever the issue turns out to be, it is not a low view of Christ. Keep that in mind as you read. It is exactly the reason so many honest readers have never noticed anything unusual.

Dake in His Own Words

A word about where these exhibits come from. Nearly all of them are drawn from God’s Plan for Man, the correspondence course Dake wrote and sold by mail. I chose it on purpose. It is his own teaching, at full length, with all the room in the world to explain himself. Nobody can say a cramped margin note sold him short. He had a thousand pages and he used them.

Three ground rules for reading what follows. Page numbers are the printed page numbers on his own pages. Three dots inside a quotation mean I left words out, and I have left nothing out that changes the meaning. And the capital letters are his, not mine. Those are the places where he was raising his voice.

Exhibit One: The Dictionary at the Front of the Lesson

Lesson Four opens with a complaint. Dake is tired of preachers who wrap God in mystery and then preach about Him anyway.

I get it. I have heard sermons that used the word mystery as an excuse to stop thinking. So had Dake. His response was to do something that most popular teachers never bother with. He sat down and wrote a dictionary.

Nine terms get defined at the top of the lesson: God, Godhead, one, in, person, incarnation, father and son, trinity, and body-soul-and-spirit. This is the moment that decides everything after it, and almost nobody reads it carefully.

Notice what he has done. He has cleared the ground. The words God and Godhead, he says, do not by themselves tell you how many persons are involved. As far as it goes, that is fair enough. But it also means the head count has to be settled by some other test. Watch for that test. It shows up in Exhibit Three, and it is not a word study.

Look at that last clause. A person, for Dake, is a rational being with bodily presence. Not a who within a being. A being. An individual who has a body of his own.

Now carry that definition back into his definition of the Trinity, where he uses the word person three times. The union of three persons becomes the union of three rational beings with bodily presence. That is not a trick I am playing with his words. It is his own dictionary, applied on the facing page.

He also defines one, and that entry matters enough to earn its own exhibit below. And he defines in, teaching that when Scripture says the Father is in the Son, it means union with, never bodily entrance.¹¹ Hold on to that. It comes back when he explains how three can be called one.

Exhibit Two: The Arithmetic, Stated Plainly

Sometimes you have to piece a writer’s position together from scattered clues. Not here. Dake states the arithmetic himself, more than once, across several lessons.

In Lesson Four he puts it as a question. That is his style when he wants to drive a point home.

By Lesson Twenty-five the questions have turned into statements. He is now arguing that the Holy Spirit has a body of His own, and he reasons downward from the whole Godhead to each member.

The phrase that does the heaviest lifting is “three separate distinct beings in the Deity.” Not three persons in one being. Three beings.

By Lesson Twenty-seven, where he gathers all his proof texts, the same math appears as a summary of the whole Bible.

The capitals are his. So is the closing phrase, and it bears all the weight: in the sense that all other persons have them. Whatever a body, a soul, and a spirit mean when you say those words about a man, they mean the same thing when Dake says them about God.

His review questions push the same point at the student. Question eighteen asks whether the three “have just one body between the three to dwell in.” Question nineteen asks where the Bible ever says “there is only one body for the three persons.”¹⁵ A student who answered those questions the way the lesson taught would write down a Godhead of three bodies. That was the whole purpose of the course.

One phrase from the Lesson Twenty-seven summary deserves a moment on its own. He writes that the three have body, soul, and spirit “in the sense that all other persons have them.” He is closing a door with that clause. He is telling the reader: do not soften these words. A body means a body. A soul means a soul. Not a picture. Not a figure of speech. Not a warm way of talking about God’s nearness. Whatever those words mean about the person sitting next to you in church, they mean that about the Father. Chapter 8 picks up what a divine body does to the rest of the doctrine of God. Here I only want you to see that the gentle reading has been ruled out by him, in advance.

Exhibit Three: Counting Bodies to Count Beings

His master rule is simple. When two or three divine persons are seen at the same moment, that settles how many there are. Lesson Twenty-seven puts it directly.

He then walks the student through a list of sightings. The first is Abraham’s.

Notice those brackets. He has written “[another one]” right into the text of Genesis 19:24. You will see him do the same thing to Deuteronomy 6:4 in the next exhibit. The brackets are how the reading gets into the verse.

His third sighting comes from Zechariah, where an angel called “the Lord” talks with “the Lord of Hosts.” His summary is blunt: “Here we have TWO Lords, one called ‘the Lord’ and the other called ‘the Lord of Hosts’ who sends ‘the Lord’ to Israel.”¹⁸

But his favorite case is Daniel 7. The Ancient of Days sits on a throne. One like a Son of Man comes to Him on the clouds. Dake reads the scene the way you would read an eyewitness report.

A few lines later he adds: “He had a body and the Son of Man had a body, or both could not have been seen coming before each other bodily.”²⁰

Stephen’s vision closes the list. Stephen saw Jesus standing at God’s right hand. Since that is the case, Dake argues, “God has to be a separate person from the Son in order for them to be standing and sitting side by side.”²²

Back in Lesson Four he had already turned this counting method into a moral duty.

That phrase, common honesty, carries a heavy load. He is not offering body-counting as one careful reading among several. He is offering it as what any honest reader would do. If you take the vision differently, you are not just mistaken. By his terms, you are being dishonest with the Bible.

Exhibit Four: What He Means by “One”

Every reader of the Dake Bible knows he says “one God.” He does say it. He says it often. So the real question is not whether the phrase appears on his page. The question is what the word one means when he uses it.

That last sentence sounds careful, and on its own it is. But watch what comes next. He settles which meaning applies to God, and the decision never changes.

In Lesson Twenty-seven he says the same about the Hebrew word for God: “The one Elohim then is not one person, or one in number, but one in unity.”²⁶ On the same page he reaches Israel’s daily confession, Deuteronomy 6:4, and prints it with a bracket written inside the verse. He speaks of how many persons are in “the ‘One [Unified] Lord.’”²⁷ That bracket is his. He has written his own definition into the text of Scripture.

So what kind of oneness is left? He gives us the picture himself, and it is the clearest sentence in all six exhibits.

A family. Three individuals who share a surname and agree perfectly. That is what “one God” means on his page. Not one Being. One household.

Sit with that picture for a moment, because it carries more than it first seems to. A family shares a name, a purpose, and a love. But a family does not share a single life. Your father is not you. When a family agrees perfectly, that is three wills lining up. It is not one will held three ways. So if the Godhead is one the way the Smiths are one, then the oneness of God is not something God is. It is an agreement between Gods.

Dake would not have said it that way. He says “one God,” and he means it as a confession, not a concession. But the family analogy is his. He chose it to explain the word, and an analogy teaches whatever it actually carries.

Exhibit Five: What He Calls the Church’s Doctrine

Dake knows he is departing from the standard teaching. He says so. And he does not say it gently.

Two pages earlier he fires off a round of questions at the standard books. “Do we have to believe that the Trinity is such a mystery? Do we have to believe that it bewilders the most astute minds? ... Do we have to believe the other foolish statements in our doctrine books?”³⁰

The heat goes up when he gets to the visions. After walking his students through Daniel 7, he turns on any reader who might disagree.

A page later, on Stephen’s vision, he goes further. Any reading that refuses to find two persons in those verses is, he writes, “plainly of the devil” and “out of harmony with the Word of God.”³²

I take no pleasure in quoting those words. But they belong in the record, because they show how much this doctrine weighed in his own mind. He did not offer his Godhead as one good option among several for thoughtful believers. He said the alternative was rebellion. At his sharpest, he called it the devil’s work.

Look closely at what he is actually rejecting. He calls it the idea “that God exists as three persons in one person.” Read that again. Three persons in one person. But that is not what the historic creeds teach. The church has never said God is one person. It teaches God is one being in three persons. The formula Dake calls ridiculous is a formula the church itself would also call confused, because it garbles the real thing.

One of two things is happening on this page. I will not pretend to know which. Either he is taking aim at a sloppy version of the doctrine that he genuinely heard from the preachers of his day, or he never quite grasped the difference between a being and a person. Both are possible. I have heard the sloppy version preached myself. But either way, the result on his page is the same. He gives his students the wrong formula, labels it the church’s teaching, and then tears it apart.

I am noting that, not scoring it. Chapter 7 sets the real formula beside his and lets you compare them word for word.

Exhibit Six: The Doctrine at Work Elsewhere

A critic can always be accused of building a case on a stray remark. So this last exhibit shows the teaching doing its work in other parts of the course, far from any lesson with “Trinity” in the title.

Lesson Five explains how God’s plan for the ages was drafted. Dake starts from the plural Hebrew word for God and translates it his own way: “In the beginning Gods created the heaven and the earth.” He then defends the plural as normal Christian speech.

Read that slowly. Two things are happening. First, the plural “Gods” is defended as proper speech for the Godhead. Second, the plan of redemption is described as a meeting. Three parties sat down and drafted it together.

The three-beings picture also shapes his teaching on the Holy Spirit. A section of Lesson Twenty-five is titled “The Holy Ghost Has a Personal Spirit-Body,” and it reasons from the three-beings Godhead established in Lesson Four.³⁴ The Spirit’s own body is not a curiosity tacked on at the end. The system requires it. Chapter 14 picks up what that does to the meaning of Pentecost.

And this doctrine shapes the way Dake sells the whole course. In Supplement Two, addressed to students who had just finished Lessons Three and Four, he calls it good news.

He calls it that himself: a new conception of God. Not a fine-tuning of the old one. A new one. And he offers it as a gift, because it clears away the mystery.

Watch the promise he attaches. The reward is understanding. The Godhead becomes something a student can picture, because it is now three of something he already knows how to imagine. A mystery has been traded for a diagram.

I think that trade explains a good deal of his appeal. I do not say that unkindly. He was writing for ordinary people who had been handed a doctrine wrapped in fog and told to stop asking questions. He offered them a God they could actually think about. That impulse is a good one, and the church has often deserved his complaint. Chapter 5 explains why the cost of this particular trade is higher than it looks. Chapter 4 traces the reading method that made it feel obvious to him.

That is the documentation. Six exhibits, five lessons, one supplement, roughly four hundred fifty pages apart at the outer ends. The same teaching in every one of them.

What the Pages Add Up To

This section is short on purpose. I promised I would not deliver the verdict in this chapter, and I intend to keep that promise. What follows is only the naming of what we read, an honest look at what has to be granted, and a hand-off to the next chapter.

Move One: The Name for This

Tritheism is the belief in three separate gods. It is the standard term in theology for dividing the one God into three beings, and it has been recognized as an error since the early centuries of the church.³⁶ Set the definition next to the exhibits. Three separate and distinct beings. Each with His own body, His own soul, His own spirit. Each with His own individuality in every sense required of any other person in existence. One in the way a family is one.

By the ordinary meaning of those words, that is tritheism. It wears the name Trinity, and the man who taught it believed he was defending the Trinity. But the thing on those pages is three Gods who agree.

I did not enjoy writing that sentence. I wrote it carefully, and this is the gentlest true version I can find.

Move Two: What Must Be Conceded

Dake affirms the full deity of all three. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and he proves each from Scripture.³⁷ Whatever else is true, he is not making Jesus a creature. He also insists on the phrase “one God” and refuses to drop it. And he defines his terms out in the open, at the head of the lesson, where anybody can look them up. That last habit is the reason this chapter could be written at all.

I told myself I would quote his denial of the tritheism charge if his pages contain one. So I searched for it. I ran the words “three Gods,” “tritheism,” and “polytheism” through every file in this library: all three volumes of the course, plus the six books and booklets alongside it. Zero results. Not one.³⁸

So I cannot show you a denial, and I am not going to invent one. What this library holds instead is page 77, where the plural “Gods” is defended as perfectly scriptural. That is the state of the evidence I have. If a denial sits somewhere in the Study Bible notes, it belongs in this record, and I have flagged it for checking there.³⁹

One more concession, and it is the most important. Dake believed he was defending the Bible. Every exhibit above is an argument from Scripture, made by a man who was sure the church had wandered from the plain text. He is not sloppy. He is not lazy. He gives chapter and verse on every page and expects to be checked. None of that rescues the doctrine, and none of it changes what his words actually mean. But it is true, and a book that left it out would not be honest.

Move Three: The Answer Belongs to the Next Chapter

Everything I have not said here gets said next. Deuteronomy 6:4 and the Hebrew word for “one,” opened the way it should be. The difference between a being and a person, put in plain English. Daniel 7 read as the kind of writing it actually is. The baptism of Jesus, where the church has always seen three persons and never three beings. And the creeds, quoted at length, in the sentences the church wrote for exactly this moment.

Answering the Defenses

Three objections come up every time this material gets read aloud. All three deserve answers here, because all three are about the documentation, not the doctrine.

Someone will say: the distinctions Dake points to are actually there in the text. At the Jordan, three really are present. The Father speaks, the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends. You cannot wave that away as poetry.

Agreed. Every word of that is true. Orthodox Christians have been confessing it for two thousand years. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. They are truly distinct, and the baptism shows it. If Dake’s teaching stopped right there, he would simply be right, and this chapter would not exist.

The problem is one step past that. It is his move from distinct to separate beings with separate bodies. Distinction is in the text at the Jordan. Three bodies belonging to three individuals is what he adds to the text, on the strength of his counting rule. That rule is the thing that needs testing, and Chapter 7 tests it.

The third objection is about my sources, and it is the fairest of the three. Someone will say: you quoted the correspondence course, not the Bible. The course was written for eager students in the 1940s. The Bible notes are milder.

That deserves a straight answer. The Study Bible’s own note on the Godhead is titled “89 Proofs of A Divine Trinity.” It opens like this.

That is the Bible note, not the course. It says what Lesson Four says, in nearly the same words. The pre-1988 printings point readers to this note from other pages, using the same language: the Father is called the head of the Divine Trinity, and Christ is called the second person of it.⁴¹ Course and Bible teach one doctrine.

One honest limit on that last exhibit. I wrote this chapter in the library that holds the text of the course, not the one that holds the page photographs of the Bible itself. The wording above comes from the confirmed record of those photographs, not from an image on my screen at the time of writing. I have flagged it in my notes for a fresh check against the original, and I would rather tell you that than let you think I had the page open when I wrote these paragraphs.

There is a second part to that objection. Someone may say the course was early work, written for students in the 1940s, and that a man can change his mind across forty years of ministry. He certainly can. But the copy in front of me is the 1977 printing, published under a copyright renewed in Dake’s own name, ten years before he died.⁴² He was still teaching this, in these very words, at the end of his working life. Whatever else he revised across the decades, he did not revise this.

What We Have Documented

We saw a dictionary at the front of a beginner’s lesson that defines a person as a rational being with bodily presence, and then uses that word three times in its definition of the Trinity. We saw the arithmetic stated outright: three separate beings, each with body, soul, and spirit, in the sense that all other persons have them. We saw the proof method: count the bodies visible at one time. We saw “one” defined as unity and pictured as a family sharing a surname. We saw the historic formula rejected as ridiculous, in a wording the historic church itself never used. And we saw the doctrine at work elsewhere: in the drafting of God’s plan, in the Spirit’s own body, in a supplement that offers the whole teaching as good news.

What we did not do is answer any of it. I have not opened Deuteronomy 6:4. I have not worked through the difference between a being and a person, except to point at it. I have not asked what kind of writing Daniel 7 actually is, or what the church has made of visions for twenty centuries. All of that waits one page ahead.

If you have read this far and you feel unsettled, that is a normal reaction. It is what happens when you read a familiar book at an unfamiliar speed. Sit with it. Nothing has to be decided tonight.

If you own a Dake Bible, nothing in this chapter asks you to throw it away. It asks you to do one small thing. Turn to the note on the Trinity, read it at the speed you would read a contract, and see whether the words mean what you have always assumed they mean. That is all Acts 17:11 ever asked of anyone.⁴³

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,” 49. The resident copy in the GPFM project library is an OCR-extracted text of the 1977 printing; its title page reads “Written by Rev. Finis Jennings Dake. Published by Dake Bible Sales, Inc., P. O. Box 625, Lawrenceville, Georgia 30246,” and the copyright page reads “Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake / Copyright renewed 1977 by Finis Jennings Dake.” The course runs fifty-two lessons in four parts. All page numbers in this chapter follow the printed page markers embedded in the extracted text (running heads of the form “GOD’S PLAN FOR MAN 51”). Where the OCR has split a word across a line break, the word has been rejoined silently; no wording has been altered.

↑ 2. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point I, 8, 51. The parenthetical Scripture references are his.

↑ 3. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point I, 9, 51. The definition continues with three numbered sub-definitions of body, soul, and spirit, each supported by a chain of proof texts. His definition of the body: “the outward form or house in which his soul and spirit dwell.”

↑ 4. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point II, 10, 65. The full sentence: “Since this is true, we must conclude here that if one person of the three in the Godhead has a personal body, soul, and spirit, all three persons must also have separate bodies, souls, and spirits.”

↑ 5. Each lesson closes with a numbered question set for the student. Lesson Four carries fifty questions, of which number 4 is “Define God, Godhead, one, in, person, incarnation, father, son, trinity, body, soul and spirit,” number 38 is “Does the Godhead consist of three separate and distinct persons? Prove,” and number 40 is “If there are three distinct persons in the Godhead, would each have a separate body, soul, and spirit? Why do you think so?” (Dake, God’s Plan for Man, 65-66). The course’s format is treated in Chapter 2.

↑ 6. The reference is to the doctrinal statements of the classical Pentecostal denominations, of which the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths is the best known; its article on God confesses one God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The document was not in hand at drafting, so it is described here rather than quoted, and it is cited at document level only. Readers who want the wording should consult the statement itself. The relationship between this book’s argument and Pentecostal confession is set out in Chapter 1.

↑ 7. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55-56: “The Father is called ‘God’ (1 Cor. 8:6); the Son is called ‘God’ (Isa. 9:6; Heb. 1:8; John 20:28); and the Holy Spirit is called ‘God’ (Acts 5:3-4).” His Christology is examined in Chapter 13, which documents both what he affirms and where his kenosis teaching creates problems of its own.

↑ 8. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 49. The paragraph immediately following claims “over 20,000 references” to God in the Bible “stating in almost infinite detail what He is like, what He can do and cannot do.” The “cannot do” is not a slip; the limits he places on divine power are documented in Chapter 11.

↑ 9. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point I, 1-2, 49. The two entries are consecutive and are quoted here in full.

↑ 10. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point I, 5, 50. The entry continues with a grammatical note on first, second, and third person pronouns, which becomes a major line of proof in Lesson Twenty-seven.

↑ 11. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point I, 4, 50: “IN. This word means in union with and when used of persons it does not mean bodily entrance into, except, in the case of disembodied spirits, or demons.” He calls this “the Bible doctrine of interpenetration” and defines it as “the union of two or more persons together for the same end.” The same definition governs his teaching on the indwelling of the Spirit in the believer; see Chapter 14.

↑ 12. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55. The passage runs as a chain of eleven rhetorical questions; the three quoted are consecutive.

↑ 13. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-five, sec. IV, “The Holy Ghost Has a Personal Spirit-Body,” 448. Ellipses mark two omissions within the paragraph; neither omission changes the sense, and the full paragraph is logged in the chapter’s source record. The immediately preceding sentences argue that “No person can exist without a body or a shape,” including demons and the souls of the dead.

↑ 14. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, “Over 500 Scriptures Proving a Divine Trinity,” 498-499. The section heading falls on the page preceding the running head “GOD’S PLAN FOR MAN 499”; the OCR of this stretch omits several intermediate running heads, so the citation is given as a two-page span rather than pinned to a single page. Capitalization is his throughout.

↑ 15. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, “Questions on Lesson Twenty-five,” nos. 18 and 19, 454. Question 17 asks whether Father, Son, and Spirit “are the only Beings in the universe” that “could not have separate bodies, souls, and spirits.”

↑ 16. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, “The Doctrine of the Trinity,” sec. III, 2, 486. The heading of the point reads that appearances of God to men “prove plurality of persons”; the OCR of the heading word is damaged, so the quotation here begins at the following sentence.

↑ 17. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (1), 486. The square brackets around “another one” are his, inside his King James text of Genesis 19:24. Compare his bracketed “One [Unified] Lord” at 480, quoted in Exhibit Four. The reading of Genesis 19:24, and the older Christian reading of the visitor at Mamre, belong to Chapter 8.

↑ 18. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (3), 487. He builds the same point from Zechariah 2:8-13 and 13:6-7, concluding of the angel that “He could not be the same person as the Lord of Hosts Himself.”

↑ 19. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (2), 486-487. The ellipsis omits his running paraphrase of Daniel 7:13-14. He continues: “He was seen bodily; He sat on a seat; He had clothes on; He had a head, and hair on His head.” The question of what a vision report can establish about the divine nature is taken up in Chapter 7; the wider question of God’s body is owned by Chapter 8.

↑ 20. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (2), 487.

↑ 21. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (4), 487. Scripture inside the quotation is his King James text, reproduced as he printed it.

↑ 22. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (6), 488. The vision is Acts 7:55-56; his citation of it as “Acts 7:56-59” is his own and is reproduced as printed.

↑ 23. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55. The sentence follows his rule for distinguishing the persons in any given passage, which he states as counting one, two, or three according to how many are “clearly seen” in the text. The hermeneutic behind the rule is examined in Chapter 4.

↑ 24. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point I, 3, 49-50. He transliterates the Hebrew as achad; the more common transliteration in English-language works is echad, and this book uses echad outside his quotations. The entry continues into the Greek heis. The exegesis of Deuteronomy 6:4, including what echad does and does not carry in Genesis 2:24 and Ecclesiastes 4:8, is owned by Chapter 7.

↑ 25. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point II, 10, 65.

↑ 26. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, Point 1 (“Elohim”), 480. The full sentence continues: “Elohim is not a divided Deity, but three persons in ‘one God,’ or one Deity.”

↑ 27. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, Point 2 (“Yehovah”), 480: “It does not tell us how many persons are in the ‘One [Unified] Lord,’ but the Scriptures mention three persons who are called ‘Lord.’” The square brackets are his own, not an editorial insertion by this book.

↑ 28. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 56. The sentence sits within his explanation of how each member “can be spoken of individually as ‘God’ and collectively as ‘one God’ in the sense of unity.”

↑ 29. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, Point II, 10, 65.

↑ 30. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55. The ellipsis omits two further questions in the same chain. His review questions repeat the charge; question 23 of Lesson Twenty-five asks whether his own view is not “more so than the foolish theory that there are three persons in one person and that this one person does not even have a body” (454).

↑ 31. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (2), 487.

↑ 32. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, sec. III, 2 (6), 488. The full sentence: “These passages cannot possibly be understood in connection with one person, and all theories that will not teach two persons seen in these Scriptures are plainly of the devil and are out of harmony with the Word of God.” Quoting it is not an argument against him, and this book does not answer heat with heat; it is quoted because a reader deciding how much weight the doctrine bore in his own mind deserves to see it.

↑ 33. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Five, “The Drafting of God’s Plan,” 77. The ellipsis omits a cross-reference to Lesson Four. His rendering of Genesis 1:1 appears on the same page: “Translating this word literally in the English it would be ‘In the beginning Gods created the heaven and the earth.’” On the grammar of Elohim as a plural of majesty rather than a plural of number, see Chapter 7.

↑ 34. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-five, sec. IV, 447-448. The section opens by reasoning from the earlier lesson: “As we have seen in Lesson Four, God has a personal body, soul, and Spirit like man. We have seen that they are three distinct persons in the Godhead and all of them are called ‘God.’”

↑ 35. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Two (for Lessons Three and Four), sec. I, “What this New Conception of God Will Mean to You,” 66. The supplements are addressed directly to the enrolled student and function as pastoral encouragement between lessons.

↑ 36. The term is standard in historical theology for the error of dividing the divine being into three, and it is the mirror image of modalism, which collapses the three persons into one. Both are named and excluded by the Athanasian Creed’s paired clauses: “neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.” The creed is quoted at length, with its scriptural ground, in Chapter 7; the vocabulary is gathered for reference in Appendix D.

↑ 37. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55-56. The concession matters for classification: a system that divides the one God into three is not the same error as a system that denies the deity of the Son, and this book does not blur them. See Chapter 5 on why an orthodox-sounding affirmation cannot be read apart from the definitions the writer attaches to it.

↑ 38. Search performed at drafting across every resident file in the GPFM project library: the three text volumes of God’s Plan for Man, Bible Truths Unmasked, Revelation Expounded, The Truth About Baptism in the Holy Spirit, The Rapture and the Second Coming, Heavenly Hosts, and Ages and Dispensations. The search terms were “three Gods,” “tritheism,” “tritheist,” “polytheism,” and “polytheist.” Result: zero occurrences of any term in any file. The negative result is recorded in this chapter’s source log so that it can be tested by anyone with the same files.

↑ 39. The Study Bible page scans live in a separate project library from the text of the course. This chapter was drafted in the library holding the course. Any denial of the charge appearing in the Study Bible notes will be added to the record when the scans are searched directly; the cumulative case made by Dake’s defenders is gathered and answered in Chapter 24.

↑ 40. Dake, Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, note “89 Proofs of A Divine Trinity,” newer typeset edition pp. 489-491, whose dual-pagination running heads read “(279-280) 489,” “490 (280),” and “(280-282) 491,” placing the note on classic New Testament p. 280. The wording quoted here is carried from the confirmed record of the page scans held in the Study Bible project library, established by direct inspection of those scans; the image was not resident in the library in which this chapter was drafted, and the sentence is flagged in the chapter’s source log for a fresh transcription against the photograph. No printing year is asserted: no dated title page or copyright page of either edition is resident, and the newer typeset edition is labeled by its typesetting rather than by a date. On why edition labels matter throughout this book, see Chapter 22 and Appendix C.

↑ 41. Per the same confirmed record of the pre-1988 printing: the notes on John at New Testament p. 113 read “The Father is the head of the Divine Trinity” and direct the reader with “See 89 proofs, p. 280”; the note on Exodus at Old Testament p. 89 calls Christ “The second person of the Divine Trinity.” Both are pre-1988 pages, established as pre-1988 by the presence of the thirty-reasons note at New Testament p. 159 in the same photographed set. Like note 40, these readings are flagged for fresh transcription against the images.

↑ 42. The resident copy is the 1977 printing; its copyright page reads “Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake / Copyright renewed 1977 by Finis Jennings Dake.” Dake died in 1987. The publishing history of his works, including what his publishers altered after his death, is treated in Chapter 22.

↑ 43. Acts 17:11 (NKJV): the Bereans “received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” The verse sits four verses before Acts 17:26, the verse that carries the thirty-reasons note documented in Chapter 20 and transcribed in full in Appendix B. The pastoral use of the verse is developed in Chapter 25.