The Christ of the Dake Bible

Two sentences about the same baby in the manger. Both are short enough to write on a card.

The first: In Jesus Christ, one person lives in two natures, fully God and fully man, and neither nature cancels the other. Bishops worked that sentence into shape at Chalcedon in the year 451, and the church has been saying it ever since.¹

The second: When the Son became a man, He gave up the attributes of God, or at least the power to use them. That sentence belongs to Finis Dake. He wrote it in the lesson he called "The Truth About Jesus Christ." And I want to put it on the table whole, in his own words:

Read that slowly. Notice what it does not say. It does not say Jesus stopped being God. Dake says the opposite, and I will hold him to it, in his favor, before this chapter is done.

But notice what it does say. The Son kept the nature but put down the equipment. He gave up knowing everything. He gave up being everywhere. He gave up being able to do everything. He held on to His deity in name while setting down everything that makes deity what it is.

Both sentences fit on a card. Only one of them was written by the New Testament. This chapter is about finding out which one.

The method is the same one we have used all through this book. I will show you his pages first, with page numbers. Then we will open the Scriptures together. I will not ask you to take my word for what Dake taught about Christ. Lesson Twenty-One runs from page 370 to page 392 in God's Plan for Man, and I have read every page of it more than once. You will see enough of it here to check me.³

But before we start, let me say something plainly. This chapter is not a charge that Dake denied the deity of Christ. He did not deny it. He affirmed it warmly, at length, and more than once. Some of the strongest pages in Lesson Twenty-One are the pages where he does exactly that. I print them in my fifth exhibit, and I want you to read them as gladly as I did. What I am going to argue is something narrower, and I think more serious: Dake's Christ is divine in name but stripped in practice. And He is one of three separate divine Beings, which is a frame that no amount of praise can fix.

Why It Matters

First, the universe. Paul says that in Christ "all things consist." The writer of Hebrews says He is "upholding all things by the word of His power." If the Son truly put down the power to do that, then somebody else was holding the stars together for thirty-three years. And whoever that was, it was not the One the Bible names for the job.⁴

Second, the cross. Paul told the Ephesian elders to shepherd "the church of God which He purchased with His own blood." That phrase is the highest price tag in the Bible. It is high because of who paid it. Dake believed that. He wrote that the atonement has infinite value because Christ is God.⁵ I agree with him. But an infinite payer who has set down His infinite powers is a strange kind of guarantee. The value of Calvary rides on who the man on the cross actually is at the moment He hangs there.

Third, your prayers. If the Christ who walked in Galilee had emptied Himself of all knowledge, then His knowledge of you was borrowed. He knew what the Spirit showed Him, when the Spirit showed Him, and no more. That is a smaller comfort than the one John gives us. John says He knew all men. He did not need anyone to tell Him about anyone. He knew what was in a man.⁶

Fourth, and this is the one that matters most to me: the Pentecostal treasure. A lot of us grew up on the Spirit-anointed Jesus. We were taught He was baptized in the Jordan, led by the Spirit, and healed by the Spirit's power. We were taught that this is why Peter could say God anointed Him "with the Holy Spirit and with power." That teaching is true. It is right there in Acts 10:38. I believe it. I preach it.

So let me say this now and mean it. I am not here to take the anointed Jesus away from you. I am here because I believe Dake's system charges you too much for Him. It asks you to buy the Spirit-filled Christ by trading away the Christ who fills all things. You do not have to make that trade. The church never has.

Dake in His Own Words

Six exhibits. I went to the lesson itself, not to anyone's summary of it. Where the wording matters I have quoted more, not less.

Exhibit 1: The Son as One of Three Separate Beings

Lesson Twenty-One opens by pointing back to Lesson Four, where Dake laid out his doctrine of God. The first sentences set the frame for everything that follows:

In plain English: Christ is one of three separate Beings. Each has His own spirit body, His own soul, and His own spirit. Before Bethlehem, the Son had the same kind of spirit body the other two still have.

I am not going to argue that frame here. Chapter 6 documents it in full and Chapter 7 answers it from Scripture. I quote it now because it sets the terms for everything else in this chapter. Whatever Dake says about Christ from here on, he is saying it about one of three separate divine Beings. Hold that thought. It comes back at the end.

Exhibit 2: What "Emptied" Means on His Page

Dake gets to the emptying under his heading "The Kenosis of Christ." He starts with the Greek:

Then he draws the conclusion he wants from the word: "God emptied Himself! What a strange idea in connection with God!"⁹

Two pages later he answers the question head-on, under the heading "Of What Did Christ Empty Himself?" He starts by listing what other teachers say. They say Christ kept omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, eternity, and immutability during His earthly life, and they give texts for each one. Then he sweeps the whole list off the table:

Not one passage. That is a big claim about a big pile of Scripture. I will come back to it.

Then comes the sentence I opened the chapter with, the one about divesting Himself of His divine attributes. And Dake makes sure no one thinks he means less than he says. He spells out the results one by one. He says the Son could not have kept His exalted position, or He could not have been exalted back to it. He says that if the Son had not laid aside His glory, He could not have had it restored. Then this:

A few lines later, in the same paragraph: "If He had not laid aside His equality as God, then He could not have been unequal with God as manifested in the days of His flesh."¹²

So the list of what was surrendered is not vague. Knowledge, wisdom, power, glory, presence, changelessness, deathlessness, and equality with God. Dake does keep one thing back. He says, more than once, that the divine nature itself remained: "It could not be that Christ laid aside His divine nature, for then He would cease being God."¹³

That statement is real. I want it on the record. He is not an Arian. He is not saying Jesus was a creature. He is saying Jesus was God with everything that makes God God set down on the ground for thirty-three years. And he teaches the same thing in his booklet on the Holy Spirit, where he puts it even more bluntly: "Apart from the baptism of the Spirit, Christ was as helpless as any human being."¹⁴

Exhibit 3: The Union He Describes, and the One Will

Earlier in the same lesson, Dake takes up the union of the two natures. I want to be fair here, because he states the church's position accurately:

That is a good summary of Chalcedon, and he wrote it himself. Give credit where it belongs.

But look at the phrase "the orthodox theory." He is reporting someone else's position, not confessing his own. And on the same page he restates the union in his own terms. One clause changes everything:

One will. That is not a small adjustment. The church settled this question at a council in Constantinople in 681. It settled it the other way. If both natures are complete, and a complete human nature includes a human will, then Christ has two wills, human and divine. The human one freely submits to the divine one.¹⁷

I do not think Dake was trying to restart a seventh-century argument on purpose. I think he was following his own doctrine of man. In his system, God has a body, a soul, and a spirit, and man was made with the same three on a smaller scale. So the divine and the human in Christ are the same kind of thing, just different in degree. They fold together into one set. It is tidy. It is also why he cannot leave the two natures truly complete.

Then he does something that stopped me when I read it. He admits the extent of the emptying is disputed, and then he argues that the dispute does not matter:

That closing question deserves an honest answer, and I will give it one later. But first, look at what the question assumes. It assumes there is no real difference between a King who takes off His crown and a King who has no crown to take off. Dake makes the same point again at the end of the lesson. Teachers who hold that Christ kept the attributes and only surrendered their independent use are, he writes, teaching "in substance, the same that we do."¹⁹

Exhibit 4: Nothing of Himself

What did the earthly Christ actually do, in Dake's telling? Everything by the anointing. Nothing by Himself. He says so directly:

"Perfectly helpless in Himself." He presses the same point in his numbered proofs: "Christ Himself claimed no power or exercised no personal attribute of deity apart from the full anointing of the Holy Spirit."²¹ And his summary list at the end of the lesson says it twice: Christ laid aside His attributes (or at least limited their use) and did His works "solely by the anointing of the Spirit and not by the free self-exercise of the attributes of His deity."²²

What about the passages where Jesus plainly knows things nobody told Him? Dake has an answer ready. Those were gifts of the Spirit working through Him, the same nine gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12, "which Christ possessed to the full."²³

Exhibit 5: When Sonship Began

Between the discussion of the two natures and the kenosis, Dake inserts a section headed "The Theory of Eternal Sonship Discussed." His position is not hard to find:

He works through the birth narratives, then states his conclusion without hedging:

So on his account, God had no Son until about two thousand years ago. What existed before that was three eternal persons, "unbegotten of each other from all eternity," who divided up the work. One took the headship part. One took the mediator's part. The third took the part of direct operation.²⁶

The Nicene Creed says otherwise. It confesses the Son as "begotten of the Father before all worlds," and it means that as a description of eternity, not of Bethlehem.²⁷ Now, I want to size this charge carefully, because sizing it fairly is part of my job. Denying eternal Sonship is not the same as denying eternal deity. Dake is clear that the second person was always God. And other writers well inside orthodoxy have wrestled with this question, too. Some of them have landed where Dake landed.²⁸ By itself, this would be an error worth arguing about. It would not be a wall.

But it does not stand by itself here. In Dake's system the three are already separate Beings. Take away the eternal relation of Father and Son and you take away the last thing connecting them as one God. What remains is three divine individuals who agreed, before time began, about which role each would play. That is a committee. And a committee is not the God of Israel.

Exhibit 6: The Things He Got Right

Now the exhibit I have been wanting to write, because it is true and because you need to see it.

Dake opens Lesson Twenty-One with page after page defending the deity of Christ. He lists the divine names and titles given to Jesus and says they prove Him divine by nature. He lists the divine offices: Creator, Mediator, Saviour, Judge, Life Giver. He notes that men and angels worship Him, "but they both refuse all such worship for themselves." He states flatly that "He is expressly called 'God' and 'Lord.'"²⁹ He affirms the virgin birth, the sinlessness, the real death, the bodily resurrection, and a body still human afterward. And he closes the lesson by saying that the kenosis teaches "that Christ was always divine," "that He could not cease being God in nature," and "that He retained His divinity when becoming incarnate in flesh."³⁰

He also gives one of the better short reasons for the incarnation I have seen in a course book. Christ needed two natures so He could truly represent both sides. "As God He can uphold the dignity of Deity, and as man He can be truly sympathetic and meet the needs of man. Because He is God His atonement has infinite value and effect."³¹

I believe every word of that last sentence. So does the church. Remember it, because in a moment I am going to argue that Dake's kenosis is the one thing standing between him and it.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. Philippians 2, Walked Slowly

Start with the verb. "Made Himself of no reputation" translates one Greek word. It means He emptied Himself. Now ask the question every reader should ask: emptied Himself of what?

Paul does not tell us. He gives no list. There is no "of His omniscience," no "of His power." The only object in the sentence is Himself. He emptied Himself. And then Paul tells us how, with a participle hanging right off the verb: taking the form of a bondservant.

That word "taking" carries the whole argument. The emptying happens by the taking. He did not put something down and then pick something else up. He emptied Himself by taking on our nature. We talk this way in everyday English. A king empties himself by moving into the servants' quarters. A surgeon empties herself by taking a post in a village clinic. Nobody hearing those sentences thinks the king lost his rank or the surgeon forgot her training.

Look at the two forms, too. Paul says He was in the form of God, and that He took the form of a servant. He never says He left the first form. Dake adds that. Paul only gives us an addition.

And notice what Paul is actually doing with this passage. He is not writing Christology for its own sake. He is asking the Philippians to have this same mind among themselves. That argument only works if Christ kept who He was while stooping. If Christ had actually stopped being able to do what God does, He would not be an example of humility. He would be an example of loss. You cannot ask someone to copy that.

2. What the Earthly Jesus Is Said to Be Doing

Dake claimed that not one passage teaches Christ had or used the divine attributes of Himself while on earth. So let us test that claim.

"Consist" means hold together. Paul writes it in the present tense about the Christ he preaches. Not "held together once." Not "will hold together someday." It is a present-tense claim. And Hebrews says the same thing in one long breath:

Read that as one sentence, which is how it was written. The upholding and the purging are not two different eras. The One who was upholding all things is the same One who purged our sins. He never let go of the world in order to die for it.

Then there is what Jesus says about Himself, out loud, in Galilee. "Before Abraham was, I AM." That is not a memory of what He used to be. It is a present-tense claim to the divine name, and His hearers picked up stones because they understood it perfectly. He also tells Nicodemus about "the Son of Man who is in heaven," while He is standing on the ground right in front of him.³³ And John tells us He knew all men and needed no one to tell Him about anyone, because He knew what was in a man. That is not described as a gift arriving from outside. It is described as something He simply was.

All the fullness. Not most of it. Not the nature with the powers stored in a drawer somewhere. And the word "bodily" ties that fullness to the body He took.³⁴

What about John 17:5, where Jesus asks the Father to glorify Him with the glory He had before the world was? Dake presses that verse hard. But glory is not the same as attributes. Glory is splendor that can be seen. On a mountain in Galilee, three men watched His face shine like the sun. He did not receive His glory back that day. He let it show through. The rest of the time He wore it under our skin.³⁵

3. One Person, Two Natures, and Why It Answers Everything

Here is the church's answer in three plain sentences. In Jesus there is one person. That one person has two complete natures, one divine and one human. Whatever is true of either nature is true of Him, because He is the one who has them both.

Try it on the hard verses and watch what happens. He got tired at a well, and He holds the universe together. He slept in a boat, and He commanded the wind that rocked it. He wept at a tomb, and He called the dead man out of it. He grew in wisdom as a boy, and He knew what was in a man. None of those pairs is a contradiction. They are two natures in one person. That is exactly what the church confessed at Chalcedon: two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, "the property of each nature being preserved."³⁶

"Fully God and fully man" is not fifty-fifty arithmetic. It is not a mixture at all. Two full things, one person.

Now let me go back to Dake's question, the one he waved away. What is the difference between laying the attributes aside and keeping them without the power to use them? Here is the difference. A King who takes off His crown is still the King, and everything He does while dressed down is a King's doing. A King with no crown to take off is a claimant. The first one can stoop. The second one has nothing to stoop from.

And there is a deeper problem in Dake's careful sentence about keeping the nature while giving up the attributes. A nature is not a box that holds its attributes the way a drawer holds socks. The attributes are the nature, described one quality at a time. Take the three sides off a triangle and you do not have a triangle with its sides in storage. You have no triangle. So when Dake says Christ kept His deity while giving up knowing, doing, being present, staying the same, and living forever, I do not think he has said something modest. I think he has said something that cannot be said.

The same logic applies to the will. Dake gives Christ two complete natures but one will. Yet willing is not a spare part. A human nature without a human will is not a complete human nature. If Christ had no real human will, the temptations in the wilderness are theater and Gethsemane makes no sense. "Not as I will, but as You will" is a real human will bending, in real pain, to the Father. Take that away and the hardest prayer in the Bible becomes a script.³⁷

4. What Is at Stake at the Cross

God's own blood. That phrase only makes sense when you hold the two natures together. God does not have blood in His nature. The man Jesus does. And because the man Jesus is one person with the Son of God, His blood can be called God's own. That is why one afternoon on a hill outside one city can pay for the sins of every century.

Dake wanted that conclusion. He wrote that the atonement has infinite value because Christ is God. I agree with him. But infinite value has to come from an infinite person who is actually infinite at the moment He pays. If the Sufferer had set down His deity's powers before He climbed that hill, the payment was made by a divine nature in name and a human nature in fact. Dake's instincts about the cross are right. His kenosis is what keeps him from keeping them.

And one more piece of arithmetic. Isaiah's God says, "I, even I, am the LORD, and besides Me there is no savior." Not "no savior besides the three of us." Besides Me. In the Bible's counting, a divine being who is one of three is not the LORD who says that. This is why I said at the start that no amount of praise survives the frame. Dake praises Christ, and I am glad he does. But he praises Him as one of three Gods, and the LORD has already said there is no other. Chapter 7 works that out in full.³⁸

5. What This Gives You That the Other Takes Away

The high priest of Hebrews 4 has two qualifications. You need both. He has been where you are: tempted in every way, so He sympathizes with your weakness. And He has passed through the heavens. He sits on the throne of grace. If He were only the second, He could help but not understand. If He were only the first, He could understand but not help. Because He is both, you are told to come boldly.³⁹

Dake's Christ can sympathize. That is the half he protects, and he protects it well. What his system cannot promise you is that the One who sympathizes never stopped being all-powerful. Chalcedon promises you both. It does not charge you one to get the other.

Answering the Defenses

Three defenses are worth stating properly. The last one is the one I care about the most.

This is the strongest defense, and it deserves real respect. But the two-natures teaching answers every one of those texts without surgery, and it answers them more simply than the alternative.

"My Father is greater than I" is said by the Son during His humiliation, about the mission He was on. Growing in wisdom is said of His human nature, which is what human natures do. Not knowing the day belongs to the same nature and to the mediatorial office He held, where He spoke only what the Father gave Him to speak. Notice what the church's reading does not have to do. It does not have to delete a single verse. It reads the limitation verses of His humanity and the deity verses of His deity, and both stay on the page.⁴⁰

Dake's reading has to choose. It cannot let "in Him all things consist" and "before Abraham was, I AM" mean what they say about the Christ who was standing right there. It has to file them under before, after, or gifts. It is his reading, not the church's, that has to explain something away.

"You are attacking an ally. Dake defends the deity of Christ on nearly every page of that lesson. Why are you going after a man who is on your side?"

Half of that is true, and I have printed the evidence for it at length in Exhibit 6. He does defend the deity of Christ. Against the unitarian and modernist teaching of his day, he defended it bravely. I want to say that plainly and not take it back.

But then do the arithmetic. Praising one of three separate divine Beings is not praising the God of Israel. The frame decides what the praise means. If I say wonderful things about a man's brother, I have still not said them about the man. The whole reason this book is called Another God is that the words of praise are right and the One being praised has been quietly replaced. That is not an attack on an ally. It is the reason the ally needs to hear it.⁴¹

The third defense is the one I take the most seriously, because I hear it raised in the churches I love.

Keep the treasure. Every bit of it. Jesus truly ministered as a man anointed by the Holy Spirit. Peter said so in the house of Cornelius: God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil. The church has always taught this. Believers really are called to walk in that pattern, and I believe the gifts are for today.⁴²

Here is the only correction I am making. None of that requires an emptied deity. A real human nature, filled with the Spirit and living in total dependence on the Father, is enough to explain everything the Gospels report about how Jesus ministered. The two-natures teaching is what protects your model, because it is the doctrine that says His humanity was genuine and not a costume. Dake's kenosis does not add anything to your Pentecost. It only charges you the Son's deity for a ticket you already own.

The cumulative case Dake's defenders make is gathered and answered in Chapter 24.

Conclusion: The King Who Kept the Crown

Here is what the pages show, and I have quoted enough of them that you can check every line.

Dake taught that the Son is one of three separate divine Beings. He taught that in becoming man, the Son divested Himself of His divine attributes (or at least the power to use them). He named what went: knowledge, wisdom, power, glory, changelessness, deathlessness, equality with God. He taught that Christ was perfectly helpless in Himself and worked only by the Spirit's anointing. He taught that the two natures produced one consciousness and one will. He taught that there is no eternal Sonship. And he taught, warmly and often, that Christ is God, that He was always divine, and that He could not cease being God in nature.

That last sentence is true. It is also the sentence his own system spends twenty pages undoing.

Watch the words when you read his lesson. "Emptied Himself" on Dake's page means a subtraction. "Emptied Himself" in Philippians means an addition, made by taking a servant's form. Same two words. Opposite directions. He does the same thing with "Son," which on his pages begins about two thousand years ago, and with "Trinity," which Chapter 6 shows means three separate Beings on his pages. Test the words. That is what this whole book asks of you. This chapter is one more reason why.

And then go back to the manger. The old carol tells you to look at the flesh and find the Godhead there. That is what the church has always said you are looking at. Not a God who parked His power somewhere and came in on foot. Not one of three, taking His turn. The Word, who was with God and was God, wrapped in cloths, holding the stars together with the hand His mother was holding.

He never put the crown down. He wore it under our skin the whole way. Into Nazareth. Into the wilderness. Into Gethsemane. Up the hill. Into the grave. And on the third day the crown came out into the open, and it has not been hidden since.

That is who you have. Chapter 14 turns to the third person of the Godhead and asks the same question of the same notes.

Notes

↑ 1. The Definition of Chalcedon (Fourth Ecumenical Council, A.D. 451), traditional English text. The Definition is quoted more fully at note 36 below. On the creeds as the church's summary of Scripture rather than a rival authority, see the master statement in Appendix E.

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, © 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake, copyright renewed 1977), Lesson Twenty-One, "The Truth About Jesus Christ," 386–87. Page numbers throughout this chapter are the book's own printed page numbers, taken from the running-head markers embedded in the resident text file and cross-checked against the volume's index (which lists "The kenosis of Christ, p. 384–86," "Of what did He empty Himself, p. 386," and "What kenosis teaches us, p. 389") and its table of contents (which places Lesson Twenty-One at p. 370). The resident copy is an OCR text; obvious scanning breakage has been silently repaired in every quotation (split words rejoined, stray spaces closed), with no change to any wording. The first-publication and renewal dates are taken from the resident front matter.

↑ 3. Lesson Twenty-One occupies God's Plan for Man, 370–92, and is followed by its own question set. All quotations in this chapter are drawn from the resident text in the GPFM project library and from the resident booklet The Truth About Baptism in the Holy Spirit. The Study Bible scans and page photographs of Dake's Christology notes named in this chapter's source plan (the Incarnation and Kenosis archives and the New Testament page photographs on sonship and kenosis) were not available at drafting; nothing has been quoted or cited from them, and no claim here rests on them.

↑ 4. Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3 (NKJV). Both passages are quoted in full below (Section D.D, Move 2).

↑ 5. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 373. The sentence is quoted in full at note 31 below.

↑ 6. John 2:24–25 (NKJV): "But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men, and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man."

↑ 7. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 370. The reference to "Lesson Four" is Dake's own; that lesson carries his doctrine of God, including the body-soul-spirit anatomy he assigns to each of the three, and it is documented in Chapter 6.

↑ 8. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 384. Dake gives the Greek as kenao; the lexical form is kenoō (to empty), and the form in Philippians 2:7 is ekenōsen, third person singular aorist active. The variation is a transliteration habit of older reference works and not a substantive error. His gloss ("to empty, evacuate, become nothing") is a fair report of the lexicons. The dispute in this chapter is not over the word's range of meaning but over what Paul's sentence says was emptied.

↑ 9. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 384.

↑ 10. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 386. The list he is answering appears on the same page and cites, among others, Matthew 18:20 and 28:20; John 1:48; 2:24–25; 3:13; 8:58; 17:5; Colossians 1:17; 2:3; and Hebrews 1:3; 13:8.

↑ 11. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 389.

↑ 12. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 389.

↑ 13. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 387. The full sentence continues: "Paul did not say He ceased being God, but that He laid aside His God-form and emptied Himself of everything that would hinder Him from being a true and real human being."

↑ 14. Finis Jennings Dake, The Truth About Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales), under the heading "Proofs Christ Was Helpless as Any Other Man Before the Spirit Came upon Him." The booklet is a resident source in the GPFM project library. In the same section Dake writes that Christ "laid aside His God-form, including the natural and all-powerful attributes of God and all the glory He had with the Father before the world was created, and limited Himself by taking human-form and all its limitations during the days of His flesh," and that "Jesus was born with no more power, wisdom, knowledge, or divine power than any other newborn baby." The wording matches the God's Plan for Man teaching and shows it was not a passing comment in one lesson but a settled position across his works.

↑ 15. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 372, under his heading "The Union of the Two Natures of Jesus Christ."

↑ 16. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 372. In the printed text the clause follows an analogy from human parentage: as a father and mother impart traits to one child, "so the human and the divine were united in the one person of Jesus Christ."

↑ 17. The Third Council of Constantinople (A.D. 681) confessed two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ, the human will following and freely submitting to the divine rather than opposing it. The council's concern was precisely the one raised here: a nature without a will is not a complete nature, and Chalcedon had already confessed both natures complete. Readers should note that Dake nowhere engages this council, and I do not suggest he intended to reopen it; the clause appears to follow from his anthropology rather than from any historical argument.

↑ 18. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 373. The passage is given as printed, apart from repaired OCR spacing.

↑ 19. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 389: "Those who hold to the theory that Christ possessed all the attributes of deity and that He merely surrendered the independent exercise of them and that He surrendered to the control of the Spirit in the use of them teach, in substance, the same that we do." The resident text prints "possesed," an evident typographical or scanning slip, corrected here.

↑ 20. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 372–73. The sentence begins on the first page and ends on the second.

↑ 21. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 388, the seventh of his numbered proofs.

↑ 22. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 390, points 5 and 6 of the list under his heading "What Does Our Lord's 'Kenosis' Teach Us?" The list begins on p. 389.

↑ 23. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 387, the second of his numbered proofs. The resident text prints "tvhich" for "which," a scanning artifact, corrected here. The nine gifts he has in view are those of 1 Corinthians 12:4–11; his fuller treatment of them belongs to Lesson Twenty-Six and is engaged in Chapter 14.

↑ 24. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 381, under his heading "The Theory of Eternal Sonship Discussed." Capitalization is his.

↑ 25. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 384.

↑ 26. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 383: "The truth then is this: there were always three distinct and eternal persons unbegotten of each other from all eternity; that only one of these eternal persons of the Deity became a man and the Son of another of these eternal Beings by the power of the third; and that one took the headship part, another took the mediative part, and the third took the part of direct operation in the plan of creation and redemption of all things." He adds on the same page that this arrangement "was in the plan of the Trinity" before it began to be worked out.

↑ 27. The Nicene Creed (Constantinopolitan text, A.D. 381), traditional English rendering: "begotten of the Father before all worlds... begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father." Public domain.

↑ 28. I have deliberately named no one here. The denial of eternal Sonship, and the related discussion of eternal generation, have both surfaced among writers otherwise firmly within Protestant orthodoxy, but none of that literature is held in the project libraries, and this book does not attribute positions to real people it cannot document from a source in hand. The point does not need names. Dake's denial contradicts the Nicene wording; it is not Arianism, and nothing here charges it as such.

↑ 29. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 370–71, sections headed "The Deity of Jesus Christ" (divine names and titles, divine attributes, divine offices, divine character, works, worship, and the express titles "God" and "Lord") and "The Humanity of Jesus Christ" (human names, real flesh and blood, a human body after the resurrection, and human limitations and passions).

↑ 30. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 389, points 1–3 of the same summary list cited at note 22. The resident text prints "Fie" for "He" in point 2, an obvious scanning artifact.

↑ 31. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 373: "His twofold nature gives Him fellowship with both parties and capability of representing both to reconcile both. As God He can uphold the dignity of Deity, and as man He can be truly sympathetic and meet the needs of man. Because He is God His atonement has infinite value and effect."

↑ 32. Philippians 2:5–7 (NKJV), which retains the King James rendering "made Himself of no reputation" for heauton ekenōsen. The verb is literally "emptied Himself"; the ESV reads "made himself nothing." I have kept the NKJV because it is the wording Dake's readers will have in front of them, and because his own argument leans on the KJV phrase. The grammatical point stands in any translation: the object of the emptying is the reflexive pronoun, and the participle labōn ("taking") is best read as expressing the means by which the emptying occurred. Dake's exposition supplies an object the sentence does not contain.

↑ 33. John 8:58; John 3:13 (NKJV). The clause "who is in heaven" in John 3:13 is present in the Byzantine and Textus Receptus traditions and therefore in the KJV and NKJV, and absent from the earliest Alexandrian witnesses and so from most critical editions. I raise it because it is the text Dake himself lists and dismisses (note 10 above), and because it stands in the Bible his readers carry. The argument of this section does not depend on it; John 8:58, John 2:24–25, Colossians 1:17, and Hebrews 1:3 carry it alone.

↑ 34. Colossians 2:9 (NKJV). Paul writes in the present tense, of the exalted Christ, and the adverb "bodily" (sōmatikōs) ties the indwelling fullness to the body He assumed and did not lay down. Compare Colossians 1:19, where it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell. The point pressed here is the one Paul presses: the fullness of deity and a real body are found together in one Christ.

↑ 35. John 17:5; Matthew 17:1–8 (NKJV). The Transfiguration is the standard answer of the church to the glory question: what happened on the mountain was disclosure, not restoration. Dake treats John 17:5 as proof of a real surrender of glory (see God's Plan for Man, 386, 389).

↑ 36. Definition of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), traditional English text: one and the same Christ, made known in two natures, "inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person." The four adverbs are guardrails: two protect the natures from being mixed, and two protect the person from being split.

↑ 37. Matthew 26:39 (NKJV). The Third Council of Constantinople (A.D. 681) is the relevant council; see note 17 above. The Gethsemane prayer is the clearest exhibit for two wills in one person: "Not as I will, but as You will" is only coherent if the speaker has a will distinct from the Father's that He is choosing to submit. If He had only one will, and it was already united divine-and-human, the prayer records nothing but agreement with Himself.

↑ 38. Isaiah 43:11 (NKJV). The argument from Isaiah's monotheism to the inadequacy of the three-beings frame is developed in full in Chapter 7.

↑ 39. Hebrews 4:14–16 (NKJV). The passage carries both qualifications in two verses: "we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin" (sympathy from His humanity), and "let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace" (authority from His deity).

↑ 40. John 14:28; Luke 2:52; Mark 13:32 (NKJV). The two-natures grammar that handles these texts has been standard since Chalcedon: what is said of Christ's human nature (growth, ignorance in His mediatorial office, subordination to the Father during the mission) is true of the person in His human nature, and what is said of His divine nature (pre-existence, omniscience, sustaining the universe) is true of the person in His divine nature. Both sets of texts remain on the page without deleting either.

↑ 41. The full case for the title Another God and the 2 Corinthians 11:3–4 frame is set out in Chapter 1.

↑ 42. Acts 10:38 (NKJV). This book is written by a convinced continuationist, and nothing in this chapter argues against the anointing of the Spirit on Christ or on His church. See the covenant set out in Chapter 1, and the pastoral close in Chapter 25.