One God: The Bible’s Answer

Three thousand years ago, Israel was given one sentence. Children learned it before they could read. Faithful Jews died with it on their lips. They still say it today. It is called the Shema, after its first Hebrew word, which simply means “hear.”

A scribe once asked Jesus which commandment came first. Jesus did not reach for anything new. He quoted that sentence, word for word.

So here is the question this whole chapter comes down to. When Jesus said “the LORD is one,” did He mean one God? Or did He mean one team of Gods who get along?

In Chapter 6 we sat with Dake’s own pages and said nothing back.² We were listening. Now we answer. And we answer from the same Bible he spent his life writing notes in.

His position fits in two sentences. The Godhead is three separate and distinct persons, and each one has His own personal body, soul, and spirit. They are “one” in the way people are one when they agree. He wrote it into his own glossary, and the entry is short enough to put right here.

Read that slowly. Notice where the weight falls. The oneness is a union. The threeness is a count of individuals. And just one entry earlier on the same page, he told us what kind of union he has in mind.

“As any two persons can be.” Those six words carry the whole system. Whatever holds the Father and the Son together on that page is the same kind of bond that you and I could share.

I want to answer that carefully. So I will work through it in six steps. First, I will let the Bible answer the counting question head on. Then I will test his reading of the Hebrew word for “one.” Then I will show the three who are the one God. Then I will explain two small Greek words the church has used for centuries, and why it needed them. Then I will take his strongest proof passages and read them on their own ground. And last, I will let the oldest creed on this subject speak in its own voice.

Why It Matters

Start with the first commandment. “You shall have no other gods before Me.” That sentence is about counting. It only works if there is a number at stake. But suppose God is really a team of three separate divine beings who happen to agree. Then the first commandment is just a house rule inside a household of three Gods. The word “other” loses its bite.

Now think about prayer. If the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three separate beings, each with His own body and His own place, then prayer has a routing problem. Which one am I talking to right now? If the Son is listening, does the Father hear me too? People who hold the historic faith never face that question. There is one God who hears, and He is fully God in every person who hears.

Think about the cross. If God is three separate beings, then Calvary becomes a deal between parties. One divine being sends a second divine being to take the punishment, and a third shows up afterward to apply the results. That is not the gospel I read in John 3:16. There the love that gives the Son is God’s own love, and the Son who is given is God Himself.

Think about worship. Scripture is fierce on this point. Worship belongs to God, and to nobody else. An angel in Revelation refuses it. Peter in Acts refuses it. Yet Jesus receives worship over and over, and He never once sends it back.⁵ So do the arithmetic. If the three are three separate beings, then Christians worship three beings. There has never been any question about what that is called. But if they are one God in three persons, then all of our worship goes to God. None of it leaks.

Think about your baptism. You were baptized into a name. Not into an alliance. We will get to that verse shortly.

And there is one more reason that matters to me personally. This is not the Pentecostal position. Every historic creed says one God in three persons, and so do the doctrinal statements of the fellowships where Dake’s Bible is best loved.⁶ I am not going to pin a quotation on your denomination here. Go read your own fellowship’s statement of faith this week. You will find it says what this chapter says. And it will not say what the note in your margin says.

The Bible’s Answer, Opened in Order

1. How Many Gods Are There? The Bible Answers Out Loud.

The Bible does not whisper about this. It does not leave us to figure it out from hints. It says the number out loud, again and again, right in the middle of Israel’s most important speeches.

Isaiah says it in God’s own voice, over and over, in the space of a few chapters.

Paul says it in a letter to a city full of idols. “There is no other God but one.” Then he adds something remarkable, and I will come back to it: he folds Jesus right into that one. James says it with a sting. “You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe, and tremble.”⁹

Now go back and read those sentences again. Ask yourself what kind of claim they are making. They are not describing teamwork. They are counting. “I know not one” is not a line about cooperation. It is a statement about how many there are.

And notice what Isaiah does with that count. He does not file it in a doctrine book. He turns around and calls the whole world in on the strength of it: “Look to Me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.” The invitation rests on the number. There is nowhere else to look, because there is nobody else to look at. That is what this doctrine was always for. It was never a technicality. It was the reason the nations could be called home.

Dake knew these verses were a problem for him. And he answered them. His answer is that the singular language covers the whole Godhead the way a group name covers a group.

Look closely at the comparison he chose, because it answers itself. He says God is spoken of as one the way the church is spoken of as one man. But the church is millions of separate people. When Paul calls the church one body, everybody knows it is a collection. Nobody thinks the church is one being.

So on his own comparison, “the LORD is one” means the divine collection is one collection. And then Isaiah 44:8 becomes a very strange sentence. Collections do not say “I.” Collections do not say “I know not one.” That verse has a speaker, and the speaker says there is no other God besides Himself.

Dake was consistent about this. I respect consistency. He did not hedge. Elsewhere in the course he told his students exactly what to call the members of the Godhead when they are counted individually.

I need the reader to see how much weight that sentence carries. He is not being sloppy. He is telling his students that the plural is correct. And Isaiah is telling us that the plural is impossible.

There is one more piece, and it closes the circle. Dake does allow that “one God” sometimes means one in number. But watch what he says the number then counts.

So on his system, “one God” can mean two things. It can mean a united group of three. Or it can mean one member of that group. What it cannot ever mean is one divine being. And that third option is the only one the prophets were talking about.

One honest note here. I searched every file in the project library for the phrase “three Gods” and for the word “tritheism.” I found neither.¹³ Dake does not answer the charge, because in these pages he never faces it. His standing reply to everything in this section is two words: “one in unity.”

2. The Word “One”: Testing His Reading of the Hebrew

Everything above turns on one small word. So let us do the word study, and let us do it honestly. Here is Dake’s own dictionary entry for it, quoted in full.

I have to give Dake his due here, because that last sentence is better than a lot of what gets said on my side of this argument. He admits the word can mean one in number. He says the passage has to decide, not the dictionary. That is exactly the right rule. I will hold him to it in a moment. And I will hold myself to it too.

First, a correction about the Hebrew. Echad is simply the ordinary number one.¹⁵ It is the word for one place, one day, one man. It is not a special word for group unity. There is a related Hebrew verb that means to unite, and Dake has folded that verb’s meaning into the number itself. That is why his gloss reads “to unify, collect, be united in one.” The number does not carry all that on its own.

Two verses show the plain sense right away. In Genesis 1:9 the waters are gathered into “one place.” Nobody thinks that place is a committee of places. And in Ecclesiastes 4:8 a lonely man is described this way.

That is echad describing a man with nobody else in the room. So the idea that the word always signals group unity is simply wrong.

Now let me be just as hard on my own side. Some defenders of the Trinity argue that echad always means a compound unity, and that a different Hebrew word would have been used if simple oneness were meant.¹⁶ That argument asks more of the word than it can carry. Dake would be right to reject it. “One flesh” in Genesis 2:24 does show that echad can cover a union. But a husband and wife are two beings. If that is our model for the Godhead, we have drawn Dake’s picture, not the church’s.

So the word by itself settles nothing. That is Dake’s own rule, and it is correct. Which means we have to go to the sentences around it.

And the sentences are not ambiguous. Deuteronomy 4 is the same sermon, by the same preacher, to the same crowd, two chapters before the Shema. “There is none other besides Him.” That is not a note about cooperation. Then comes the Shema itself, and the very next line commands total love for that one LORD, with all the heart and soul and strength. One object of love. Undivided.

Then look at how Jesus’ own hearer took it. The scribe in Mark 12 hears Jesus quote the Shema and answers back in his own words.

There it is. A paraphrase of echad, by a man standing in front of Jesus. He heard “one,” and he restated it as “there is no other but He.” And Jesus told him he had answered wisely.¹⁷ If any reading of Deuteronomy 6:4 was ever approved out loud, it was that one. And it is not a reading about agreement. It is a reading about how many.

3. The Three Who Are the One

Here is where the Bible gets demanding. And here is where I have to be careful not to shave off half of what it says.

The same Scripture that insists there is one God also presents the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as truly distinct from each other, and each of them as truly God. The Father is God, and nobody argues about that. The Son is God. John says the Word was God, and that all things were made through Him. Thomas fell at the risen Jesus’ feet and said, “My Lord and my God.” The Father Himself says to the Son, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.” Paul says the whole fullness of deity lives in Christ in bodily form. And the Spirit is God: Peter tells Ananias he lied to the Holy Spirit, then says in the next breath that he lied to God.¹⁸

John says it another way, and it is worth slowing down for. No one has ever seen God, he writes. But the only begotten Son “has declared Him.” Hebrews puts the same thought into one line: the Son is the brightness of God’s glory and the exact expression of His person.¹⁹ Sit with that word “exact.” You cannot be the exact expression of a being you merely resemble. A photograph of my brother is not my brother. The Son is not a second God who happens to match the first. He is the one God going out.

The three are also plainly distinct from one another. The Son prays to the Father. The Father sends the Spirit. The Spirit testifies about the Son. None of that is play-acting. The church has never said it was.

So Scripture does two things at once. It says God is one. And it presents three who are God and who are not each other. Any doctrine worth holding has to keep both halves. Modalism keeps the first half and loses the second. Dake keeps the second and loses the first.

The clearest single sentence on this is the one Jesus gave His disciples at the very end of Matthew. Dake noticed it too, and built an argument on it.

He is partly right, and I will say so gladly. The repeated “and of” really does mark three, not one. That is exactly why the church says three persons rather than one person in three costumes. Dake wrote that argument against the Oneness teaching of his day, and on that specific point he was defending the truth.²¹

“The name.” Singular. One name, three who share it.²² Dake’s own illustration gives it away. A gift from John and James and George is a gift from three men who share no name at all. They share a species. But that is not what Jesus said. He did not send us to baptize into three names, or into a family, or into an agreement. He sent us into one name.

Paul does the same thing with a blessing. Grace from the Lord Jesus Christ, love from God, fellowship of the Holy Spirit, all in one breath, all resting on one people. And he does it once more in Corinth, where he takes the Shema itself and folds the Son into it. “There is no other God but one,” he writes. Then he says it again, in two pieces: “one God, the Father,” and “one Lord Jesus Christ.” The Shema said “the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Paul splits that confession across the Father and the Son and does not think he has added a God.²³

4. One Being, Three Persons: The Words the Church Uses, and Why

This is the place where people usually get lost. So I am going to keep it as simple as I can.

You can ask two different questions about anything. You can ask “what is it?” and you can ask “who is it?” Those are not the same question. You are a human being. That answers “what.” You are one particular person with your own name. That answers “who.”

The church’s whole sentence about God is built on keeping those two questions apart. Ask what God is, and there is one answer: one divine being, one God, undivided. Ask who God is, and there are three answers: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Greek words are ousia for the being and hypostasis for the person.²⁴ One being, three persons. That is the whole formula.

Now watch where this differs from three men. Three men share a kind of being. Each has his own being, his own supply of humanity, his own separate existence. That is why three men can be counted as three. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit do not share a kind. They share the one being of God, whole and undivided. That is why they are not three Gods.

That distinction is the exact one Dake’s system does not have. On his page, the three persons are the same in essence the way all men are the same in essence. Same sort, three copies. I will quote him saying exactly that in the next section, because a major defense rests on the wording.

There are three classic ways to break this, and the church has had to say no to all of them. Say the three are only masks on one person, and you lose the three. Say the Son is a lesser being made by the Father, and you lose His deity. Say the three are three separate beings who agree, and you lose the one. The creeds were written to guard all three walls at once.²⁵

5. His Prooftexts, Read on Their Own Ground

Dake did not build his Godhead out of nothing. He built it out of passages where two or three of the persons show up at the same moment. Those passages are real. They deserve a real answer, not a wave of the hand.

Now open Daniel 7 yourself and read the rest of what he is quoting from. The Ancient of Days has a garment white as snow and hair like pure wool. His throne is a flame of fire. Its wheels are burning fire. A river of fire pours out from in front of Him.²⁷

If the hair proves anatomy, the wheels prove machinery. If we are taking this picture as a physical description, then God’s furniture is on fire and rolling. But Daniel is seeing a vision, and he says so in the first verse of the chapter. In the same vision, four kingdoms appear as four animals crawling out of the sea, and one of them has iron teeth. Nobody reads those as zoology. We are not applying the genre selectively when we decline to measure God’s hair.

And here is the part I find striking. Daniel 7 really does show two persons. I confess it without flinching. One like a Son of Man comes to the Ancient of Days and receives an everlasting kingdom. All peoples serve Him. The word for that service is the same Aramaic word used for religious service to God.²⁸ So Daniel 7 gives us two distinct persons, and the second one receives worship, and Israel’s Scriptures say worship belongs to God alone. That is not a tritheist text. It is one of the strongest Trinitarian texts in the Old Testament.

Now read the verse. “Then the LORD rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the LORD out of heaven.” Some readers take the doubling as a Hebrew way of adding weight to the sentence. Others have heard two persons in it, and I have no quarrel with them. So let us grant Dake his reading and say two persons are in view. Now look at what Moses calls them both. He calls them both the LORD. One name, the covenant name of Israel’s God, used of both. If these were two separate Gods, then Moses gave two Gods a single name and never mentioned it to anyone. This is Matthew 28:19 sitting in Genesis. Two persons, one name.

His other Genesis anchor is the plural: “Let Us make man in Our image,” and “man has become like one of Us.” He draws a firm conclusion from it.

“Of the same kind.” Four words. He did not hide it. That phrase makes the persons of the Godhead members of a species, the way three men are members of ours. But look at what happens in the very next verse of Genesis 1. The plural counsel is followed right away by a singular act: “So God created man in His own image.” Plural in the deciding, singular in the doing. That pattern runs from the first page of the Bible to the last. And it is exactly the pattern the creed was written to describe.

The baptism of Jesus works the same way. The Son stands in the water, the Spirit comes down, the Father speaks from heaven. Three, at once, distinct. I believe every word of it. But the scene does not hand us three bodies and three locations. The Father’s voice is a voice. The Spirit descends “like a dove,” and that word “like” is doing real work.³¹

Stephen’s vision in Acts 7 gets read the same wrong way. Look at what Luke actually wrote. Stephen “saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” He saw glory, and he saw a man. Jesus has a real human body forever. That is the Incarnation, and I am glad to confess it. “The right hand” is the seat of honor, the way Psalm 110 uses it. It is a rank, not an address.³²

Last comes John 17, which Dake cites for his idea of divine unity. Jesus prays that His people may be one, “as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You.” Dake reads that as proof that divine oneness is the same kind of oneness believers share with each other. But look at the little word “as.” It marks a pattern to copy, not a measurement to match. If the two unities were the same in kind, then believers would be as much one God as the Father and the Son are. Nobody believes that. The argument proves far too much. And notice what Jesus is actually describing: not a shared plan, but mutual indwelling. “I in them, and You in Me.”³³

One more thing belongs here, and honesty makes me raise it even though it helps Dake’s critics less than you might expect. His most-quoted proof is 1 John 5:7, the verse about three who bear record in heaven. That reading is missing from the earliest Greek manuscripts. Most textual scholars regard it as a later addition.³⁴ I am not going to build on that. I will only note two things. First, the doctrine of the Trinity never needed that verse. Second, even as Dake printed it, the verse says the three “are one.”

6. The Church’s Sentence

Now let the church speak. She has already said this, in words built for exactly this question.

A creed is not a rival to the Bible. It is a fence. When a teacher starts using biblical words with new definitions, a creed is how the church says what those words have always meant. The Athanasian Creed is the sharpest of them on this subject.

See what that creed forbids. It forbids two things, not one. Do not confuse the persons, and do not divide the substance. The first wall keeps out the teaching that God is one person wearing three masks. The second wall keeps out the teaching that God is three beings in an alliance. Dake spent his life pushing against the first wall. He went straight through the second.

The Nicene Creed says the same thing about the Son in one phrase: he is “of one substance with the Father.” The Greek word behind that is homoousios. It means “of the same being.”³⁶ Not of the same sort. Of the same being. That one word was fought over for most of a century. It was fought over because everything depends on it.

What One God Gives You

I have spent most of this chapter taking something apart. Let me now say what the true doctrine hands you. Because it is not a technicality. It is your daily life with God.

It gives you one loyalty. You never have to wonder which member of the Godhead you are on good terms with today. There is no ranking to manage, no politics in heaven. When you love God with all your heart, all of it lands on God.

It gives you one love at the cross. This may be the sweetest part. If God is three separate beings, then Calvary is a negotiation. The Son is the one who came through for you while the Father held out for justice. That is not what the Bible says. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The love that sent, the love that came, and the love that now lives in you are one love. They are one God.

It gives you one name over your baptism. Whatever water you went under, you went under one name. You did not join an alliance. You do not have to keep three sets of terms.

It gives you God Himself in the room. The Spirit who lives in you is not a junior member sent to represent the head office. He is God, present, personal, undivided. This is where I want my Pentecostal brothers and sisters to hear me. The doctrine I am defending is not the cold one and Dake’s is not the warm one. It is the other way around. The historic Trinity is what makes Pentecost so large. God did not send a delegate to fill His people. God came.

And there is one more thing. It is quieter, and worth saying. On Dake’s system, the unity of God is a unity of agreement. But agreement is something that wills do. And what wills do, they can stop doing. Dake would never have said the three might fall out, and I do not accuse him of teaching it.³⁷ But the structure has no floor under the promise. If the oneness of God is a standing agreement, then it is something being maintained. If the oneness of God is what He is, then it cannot fail. And neither can He.

Answering the Defenses

Four replies come back whenever this chapter’s argument is made in public. Each of them deserves to be stated at full strength. So I will do that first, and then answer.

I take that seriously. So let us find out what he means by “substance.” He tells us, in the lesson on the Holy Spirit. The wording is not ambiguous.

There it is. Sameness of essence, explained by angels, men, animals, and demons. All men have the same kind of nature. In just that same way, he says, the persons of the Godhead are the same in essence. That is sameness of sort. And sameness of sort is exactly what the creed’s word does not mean. Three men of one nature are three men. Three divine persons of one nature, in this sense, are three Gods. The word “substance” survives in his definition. The meaning does not. That is the same-words tactic in one line, and Chapter 5 shows how the whole system runs on it.

The second defense is about logic. Dake makes it himself, in a voice that many of his readers find bracing.

Half of that I agree with, and I want to say so warmly. Christians sometimes do hide behind the word “mystery” to avoid thinking hard. “It is a mystery” has ended too many Bible studies that should have kept going. Dake’s impatience with lazy answers is one of his best qualities.

But there is a difference between a mystery and a contradiction. A contradiction says the same thing is true and false at the same time. One person who is three persons would be a contradiction, and the church has never taught that. One being who exists as three persons is not a contradiction, because being and person answer different questions. It is bigger than we are. That is a different complaint. And I would expect that of God. What Dake offers instead is not a cleaner answer. It is a plain denial of the Shema, which says there is no other besides Him.

The third defense is about culture. It says the Hebrews thought in pictures and stories, and that the creeds are Greek philosophy draped over a Jewish book. I understand the appeal. Dake’s whole method rides on it. But look at where the sentences actually come from. “There is none other besides Him” is Hebrew. “Besides Me there is no God” is Hebrew. “Hear, O Israel” is Hebrew. A heaven full of related divine beings who share a nature and cooperate, on the other hand, is the Greek picture, and the Roman one, and the Canaanite one. The creeds were written to keep the Hebrew sentences standing against exactly that picture. On this particular question, the committee heaven is the pagan idea. The one undivided God is the Jewish one.

The fourth defense is more recent. Thoughtful people raise it. It says love needs someone to love, so God must have been more than one being before creation, or He was lonely. The reply is short. Three persons in one being love each other really and eternally. Jesus says so plainly: “You loved Me before the foundation of the world.”⁴⁰ Love among the persons is secured by the doctrine as the church holds it. What three separate Gods give you is not eternal love. It is an eternal society of deities. That is the thing the prophets spent their lives preaching against.

Conclusion, and the Words

We put Dake’s own definition on the table: three separate and distinct persons, one in a union of the sort any two people can share. Then we let the Bible answer the counting question. It answered in Moses, in Isaiah, in Paul, and in James, and the answer was always the same. There is no other besides Him. We tested his reading of the Hebrew word for “one,” granted his own rule that context decides, and found the context deciding against him. We saw the three who are the one God, and the single name we are baptized into. We learned the two questions the church keeps apart (“what” and “who”) and watched his system collapse them. We read his proof passages on their own ground and found Daniel 7 arguing for the creed, not against it. And we heard the creed itself: not three Gods, but one God.

If you own this Bible, here is what that means in practice. A Dake note with the word “Trinity” in it is not evidence that the note teaches the Trinity. You have to check his definition first. Every time. That is not suspicion. It is the ordinary care you would use with any writer who prints his own dictionary.

My friend Ray has taught adult Sunday school out of his grandfather’s Dake Bible for thirty years. He asked me once to stop telling him what people say about Dake. Show me the pages, he said. Then show me the Scriptures. That is all this chapter has tried to do.

And I want to end where Israel began. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” That sentence is not a riddle to be solved. It is not a committee to be joined. It is the ground you stand on. The God who says “I know not one” is not one of three. He is God, and there is no other. He has come near to you in the Son and lives in you by the Spirit. He is not divided. Nothing in your Bible’s margins is worth trading that for.

Next we take up the first of the attributes his system reshapes: the claim that God the Father has a body, and that men have seen it.

Notes

↑ 1. Scripture in this chapter is quoted from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted, per the convention stated in the front matter. Dake’s own Scripture quotations, inside his material, are his King James text and are reproduced exactly as he printed them.

↑ 2. The full documentation of Dake’s Godhead, including his statements that each person of the Godhead has His own personal spirit body, soul, and spirit, is gathered in Chapter 6. This chapter cites those exhibits briefly rather than reprinting them, and adds only what its own argument requires.

↑ 3. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), Lesson Four, “Definition of the Terms Used,” item 8, p. 51. Page per the embedded running-head markers in the resident text file. Obvious OCR breakage in the extracted text (“individual ity”) has been rejoined; no wording is altered.

↑ 4. Ibid., Lesson Four, item 7, p. 51. The two definitions stand consecutively on the same page, and item 7 supplies the sense of “union” that item 8 then applies to the Godhead.

↑ 5. An angel refuses worship at Revelation 22:8–9, and Peter refuses it at Acts 10:25–26. Jesus receives it at Matthew 14:33, Matthew 28:9 and 17, and John 20:28, and the Lamb receives it together with the One on the throne at Revelation 5:13–14. The pattern is consistent enough that it functions as an argument in its own right.

↑ 6. I deliberately name no denominational statement at page level here. The doctrinal statements of the major Pentecostal fellowships are published and easily found, and a reader can check his own. The cumulative defense that Dake’s Godhead simply represents Pentecostal teaching is taken up in Chapter 24.

↑ 7. Deuteronomy 4:35, 39 (NKJV). The placement matters to the argument: both verses fall in Moses’ address two chapters before the Shema, in the same discourse and to the same hearers.

↑ 8. Isaiah 43:10; 44:6, 8; 45:5 (NKJV). See also Isaiah 45:21–22 and 46:9. The formula recurs across these chapters with slight variation, always in first-person divine speech.

↑ 9. 1 Corinthians 8:4–6; James 2:19 (NKJV). The structure of 1 Corinthians 8:6 is discussed below under move 3. James 2:19 is usually cited to show that bare assent is not saving faith, which it does. It also assumes, without stopping to argue it, that “there is one God” is the plain content of monotheism.

↑ 10. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven (“The Doctrine of the Trinity”), section I, 1, p. 480. On the same page, under his entry for the divine name, he writes that the Hebrew word for “Lord” in Deuteronomy 6:4 “does not tell us how many persons are in the ‘One [Unified] Lord.’” Lesson Twenty-seven begins at p. 480 per the volume’s table of contents.

↑ 11. Ibid., Lesson Five, “The Drafting of God’s Plan,” p. 77. The sentence stands in a passage arguing from the plural form of the Hebrew word for God and from the plural pronouns of Genesis 1:26 and 11:7.

↑ 12. Ibid., Lesson Four, Point II, p. 55.

↑ 13. Search performed across all nine resident files of the GPFM project library, using regular expressions tolerant of the OCR’s internal spacing (for example, “th ree G ods”). The strings “three Gods,” “tritheism,” “tritheist,” and “polytheism” return zero matches in every file. This is a negative result about this library only, and it is recorded rather than argued from: it means Dake does not answer the charge in these pages, not that he would have accepted it.

↑ 14. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, “Definition of the Terms Used,” item 3, pp. 49–50. The entry runs across the page break; the running-head marker for p. 50 falls inside it, after the words “one in number.”

↑ 15. Hebrew echad is the cardinal numeral “one,” used attributively and predicatively throughout the Old Testament. A distinct but related verbal root carries the sense “to unite, go one way.” Dake’s gloss (“to unify, collect, be united in one, one in number”) blends the verbal sense into the numeral and then treats unity as the numeral’s leading meaning. His transliteration “achad” is his own; most modern works write echad. For the plain numeral in use, see Genesis 1:9 (“one place”) and Ecclesiastes 4:8, whose Hebrew reads, quite literally, “there is one and there is not a second.”

↑ 16. The argument usually contrasts echad with yachid (“only, solitary”), claiming the latter would have been used had absolute oneness been meant. The contrast is overstated: yachid characteristically means “only one of its kind” or “beloved only child” (Genesis 22:2), not “numerically simple,” and echad is the ordinary numeral. A doctrine this important should not be rested on a word study that will not bear the weight.

↑ 17. Mark 12:32–34 (NKJV). Jesus’ response is that the scribe answered “discreetly,” and that he was not far from the kingdom of God.

↑ 18. On the Father: 1 Corinthians 8:6; John 17:3; Ephesians 4:6. On the Son: John 1:1–3; John 20:28; Hebrews 1:8; Colossians 2:9. On the Spirit: Acts 5:3–4. On John 1:1, the Greek clause kai theos en ho logos places the predicate noun first and without the article, which marks it as a statement of what the Word is, rather than an identification of the Word with the person of the Father. Dake’s own use of Colossians 2:9 for his doctrine of the divine body belongs to Chapter 8; the Spirit’s personhood and deity, and his treatment of them, belong to Chapter 14.

↑ 19. John 1:18; Hebrews 1:3 (NKJV). The Greek noun behind “express image” in Hebrews 1:3 is charakter, the die-struck impression on a coin, and the noun behind “person” there is hypostasis, the same word the later creeds use for the persons of the Godhead, though used here of the Father’s own being.

↑ 20. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, section II, p. 486.

↑ 21. The surrounding pages are an extended argument against the Oneness (“Jesus only”) position on baptism. His polemical language there is sharper than anything this book will quote of him elsewhere, and it is not reproduced here, since the point at issue is his exegesis and not his temper. That he opposed modalism firmly is a matter of record and is credited as such.

↑ 22. Matthew 28:19 (NKJV). The Greek is eis to onoma, “into the name,” with onoma singular, followed by three genitives joined by “and.” Both features are load-bearing: three who are named, one name into which the disciple is baptized.

↑ 23. 2 Corinthians 13:14; 1 Corinthians 8:4–6 (NKJV). The Shema in the Greek Old Testament uses the words “Lord” and “God” of the one God of Israel; Paul distributes both terms, assigning “God” to the Father and “Lord” to Jesus Christ, inside a sentence that has just denied that any other God exists.

↑ 24. Greek ousia, “being, essence”; hypostasis, “person, individual subsistence.” The two words were not always distinguished in early Christian usage, and the fourth-century settlement was in part a decision about vocabulary. The distinction between the two questions, “what” and “who,” is older than the terminology and is what the terminology exists to protect.

↑ 25. The three classic errors are modalism (also called Sabellianism), Arianism, and tritheism. A doctrine-by-doctrine comparison of Dake’s positions with the historic confessions is set out in Appendix E.

↑ 26. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, section III, 2, pp. 486–487. The running-head marker for p. 487 falls inside the passage. The fuller version of this exhibit, with its surrounding argument from simultaneous appearances, is printed in Chapter 6.

↑ 27. Daniel 7:9–10 (NKJV). Daniel 7:1 identifies the whole chapter as a dream and visions of the head, and 7:15–17 supplies the chapter’s own interpretive key, in which the beasts are kings.

↑ 28. Daniel 7:13–14 (NKJV). The Aramaic verb rendered “serve” in verse 14 is used elsewhere in Daniel for religious service rendered to a deity (see Daniel 3:12, 14, 17–18, of the refusal to serve Nebuchadnezzar’s gods).

↑ 29. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, section III, 2 (1), p. 486; the bracketed words “[another one]” are his own insertion. The verse is Genesis 19:24 (NKJV). Chapter 6 prints the surrounding argument, in which appearances of God are said to prove a plurality of persons, at greater length.

↑ 30. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Five, p. 77. The Scriptures under discussion are Genesis 1:26, Genesis 3:22, and Genesis 11:7, with the singular act at Genesis 1:27 (NKJV). Older interpreters have read the plural in several ways, including a plural of deliberation and an address to the heavenly court; the historic Christian reading hears the persons of the Godhead in it, and this book has no objection to that reading. The objection is to the added premise that persons of the same kind must be beings of the same number.

↑ 31. Matthew 3:16–17 (NKJV); compare Luke 3:22, “in bodily form like a dove,” where the simile is retained even as the visible manifestation is stressed.

↑ 32. Acts 7:55–56 (NKJV); Psalm 110:1. The question of whether the Father has a visible body, and Dake’s catalog of divine appearances, belongs to Chapter 8.

↑ 33. John 17:21–23 (NKJV). The Greek comparative particle kathos (“just as”) introduces a pattern; it does not assert identity of degree or of kind. Dake cites John 17:11 and 21–23 for his definition of “one” at God’s Plan for Man, p. 50.

↑ 34. The disputed words at 1 John 5:7–8, often called the Johannine Comma, are absent from the Greek manuscript tradition until very late and are not represented in the ancient versions. The New King James Version prints them with a marginal note. Dake cites the passage repeatedly as his plainest proof of three persons, including at God’s Plan for Man, pp. 51, 65, and 480. Readers who hold to the Received Text will keep the verse; the argument of this chapter does not depend on either decision.

↑ 35. Athanasian Creed (Quicunque Vult). The creed is not by Athanasius and is Western in origin, probably of the fifth or sixth century; it is used here as the church’s most precise summary on this one question, which is the use the Reformation confessions also make of it. Traditional English text as printed in the Book of Common Prayer; public domain. Article numbering varies slightly between editions, so the text is cited here by name rather than by article number. The archaic spelling “Catholick” is retained from the traditional text and means “universal,” not Roman Catholic. Ellipses mark omitted articles; nothing within the quoted articles is altered.

↑ 36. Nicene Creed, traditional English text: “Being of one substance with the Father.” The Greek term is homoousios, from homos (“same”) and ousia (“being”). The rejected alternative, homoiousios, meant “of similar being,” and the difference between “same” and “similar” is precisely the difference this chapter has been tracing.

↑ 37. This is my inference from the structure of his doctrine, and I mark it as mine. I have found no statement in the resident sources in which Dake contemplates disagreement among the persons of the Godhead, and I do not attribute one to him. The related question of how his system limits God by the free wills of moral agents is documented in Chapter 11.

↑ 38. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-five, “The Holy Ghost Has a Personal Spirit-Body,” p. 448. The running-head marker for p. 449 falls a few lines below the quoted sentences.

↑ 39. Ibid., Lesson Four, Point II, p. 55. On the same page he lays down the rule that governs his readings of the appearance passages: “Common honesty demands that we accept ONE, TWO, and THREE separate and distinct persons wherever they are seen with the eyes and referred to in plain human language by the first, second, and third personal pronouns.”

↑ 40. John 17:24 (NKJV); see also John 17:5.