The Spirit of the Dake Bible

At the first one, a Wednesday night service, a young woman came forward weeping. A well-meaning older man knelt down beside her. He started asking questions. Had she confessed every sin? Was she holding anything back? Had she really surrendered all of it? She cried harder. She tried harder. She went home empty. The next Wednesday she was back at the same rail, trying again.

The second altar is in Acts 2. About a hundred and twenty people were gathered in an upper room. Peter was among them, only weeks removed from swearing three times that he had never even met Jesus. Thomas was there, the man who would not believe without touching the wounds. Every man in that room had abandoned Jesus on the worst night of their lives. None of them had earned a thing. And then the sound came, like a violent wind filling the house, and Luke records it in one line: they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

I want you to hold those two pictures side by side for the rest of this chapter. The gap between them is not about worship style. It is not about being loud or being quiet. It is about the doctrine of God. And in the study Bible so many of my Pentecostal friends carry to church, that gap is built right into the notes.

Finis Dake taught about the Holy Spirit in Lesson Twenty-Five of God’s Plan for Man. He opens with four sentences that lay his whole position on the table. Pay close attention to the last one.

A separate body. He does not mean that as a figure of speech. He does not mean picture language. Dake means a real spirit body, with shape and parts, located in one place, separate from the body of the Father and the body of the Son.

That is the claim this chapter documents and answers. I want to show it from his own pages, trace what it does to the rest of his teaching about the Spirit, and then set it beside Scripture and the historic Christian faith. The larger case for three separate divine beings was built in Chapter 6, and I will not rebuild it here. My subject is narrower. For Pentecostal readers, though, it may also hit closer to home. What happens to the Holy Spirit inside Dake’s system? And what happens at the altar because of it?

Why It Matters

I believe the gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today. I believe God heals people. I believe in prophecy and in tongues. I hold three degrees from Assemblies of God schools. This chapter is not a cleverly disguised argument for cessationism.² Nothing I say here is aimed at the altar, or the expectancy, or the gifts. The Pentecostal conviction that God still speaks and still moves is right. I hold it myself.

What concerns me is the doctrine of God underneath the experience. That is a different question entirely, and it matters more than most people in the pews realize.

First, the indwelling. Every believer has heard that the Holy Spirit lives in them. But if the Spirit has His own spirit body, and bodies can only be in one place at a time, then what does it actually mean when Scripture says He dwells in you? Dake has an answer. It is probably not what most of his readers expect.

Second, prayer. Can you talk to the Holy Spirit? Millions of charismatic believers do, in worship songs and in private devotion. Dake has a rule about that. It follows directly from his doctrine of God.

Third, how you receive Him. If the Spirit is a divine being located somewhere else, then His coming to you becomes a transaction. Something has to bring Him. Dake tells his readers exactly what that something is: a list of conditions you must meet.

None of this is minor. Change the doctrine of God and you change what happens at the altar. That is my argument, and I intend to document it before I try to answer it.

Dake in His Own Words

Exhibit 1: The Third Being

Lesson Twenty-Five is long and careful. Dake wants his students to know that the Holy Spirit is God, not some vague force or influence. He lists twenty-one divine names for the Spirit. He catalogs divine attributes, divine works, and divine offices. He calls the Spirit the Power of God in the Earth and the General Overseer of the Churches.³

And then he says something I honestly want to praise before I push back on anything else.

That is good, and it deserves to be said so. There are whole churches that have treated the Spirit like a power outlet you plug into. Dake refuses that, and he refuses it warmly. He wants the Spirit honored, known, and worshipped. On this point I stand with him gladly, against a lot of sloppy thinking in my own tradition.

But now put that sentence next to the one on the page before it. Yes, the Spirit is a person. And He is a person with His own body, soul, and spirit, separate from the Father’s and the Son’s. Dake is not describing three personal ways in which one God exists. He is describing three individuals with three anatomies. He says so directly in the next section, and he says it at length.

Before he gets to the body, he stacks up sixteen proofs that the Spirit is not the Father and not the Son.³³ Some of those proofs are simply true. The Spirit is distinguished from the Father and the Son at the Jordan, in the Great Commission, and in the promise of another Helper. No orthodox Christian disputes that. The creeds insist on it.

What matters is the conclusion he draws from the word “another” in John 14:16.

Two or more what? That is the whole question. And Dake never asks it. The church has always agreed the word means two or more persons. Dake reads it as two or more beings. Every real distinction Scripture draws between Father, Son, and Spirit gets quietly converted into a distinction between separate individuals. The proofs are real. The conclusion rides in on the back of them without a ticket.

Exhibit 2: The Argument for a Body

Section IV of the lesson carries the heading “The Holy Ghost Has a Personal Spirit-Body.”⁵ Dake opens it not with a verse, but with a chain of reasoning.

Follow the steps. God has a body. There are three persons. Therefore each of the three must have a body. And notice the middle sentence, because it does a lot of heavy lifting. Dake admits that Scripture may not actually say this. He says reason would settle the question on its own.

He then gives twelve numbered proofs. Two of them show just how far he is willing to push the literal reading. In the fourth proof, he reasons from the Spirit’s works to the Spirit’s limbs. Scripture says God does things by His fingers and His hands. The Spirit did those things. So, Dake writes, “it proves that He has fingers, hands, and bodily parts.”⁸

In the tenth proof, he puts the Spirit in a rank. The Spirit is “subordinate to the Father and the Son” and can be sent by them, which proves He is a separate and real person like they are.⁹

But the twelfth proof is the one that reveals the shape of the whole argument most clearly.

Read that again. The Bible’s silence has become the proof. And anyone who disagrees is dismissed in the same breath. Two pages later he adds that it is “not hard to conceive that the Holy Ghost has a spirit-body like the Father still has, and like the Son did have before He became a man.”¹¹ Sections V and VI then give the Spirit a personal soul and a personal spirit, following the same line of reasoning.¹²

So the Godhead on these pages now holds three bodies, three souls, three spirits. And that raises a question the rest of the lesson has to answer. If the Spirit has a body, and a body is in one place at a time, how does He live in you?

Exhibit 3: The Spirit Outside the Man

Dake answers near the end of Lesson Twenty-Five, in a short section titled “How the Holy Spirit Dwells IN Men.” The capital letters are his.

He develops the same idea at greater length in his booklet on Spirit baptism, under a heading called “The Biblical Doctrine of Interpenetration.” This is the fullest statement of the idea I have found anywhere in his work. It needs to be read in full.

Let me put that in plain language, because it is easy to read past what he is actually saying.

The Holy Spirit is not in you. He is outside you. What Scripture calls indwelling is a union of purpose between two separate beings who happen to share the same goals. Dake compares it to a husband and wife becoming one, or to Paul saying he had the Philippians in his heart. Agreement of will, not presence of person.

Fullness, then, works like a dial. Your consecration sets the level. The Spirit’s presence in your life is just a reading on the gauge.

I should note one thing I looked for and did not find. I searched the resident text of God’s Plan for Man and his booklets for a claim that the Spirit serves as the Father’s presence in the world, doing the everywhere-work that the Father’s located body cannot. That teaching is not in these pages.¹⁶ Dake simply lists omnipresence among the Spirit’s divine attributes on the same page where he gives Him a body.¹⁷ But he has already redefined that word for the whole Godhead. Chapter 9 covers that redefinition in full. The short version: for Dake, omnipresence means influence felt at a distance while the body stays put. So the Spirit does not rescue the system from the problem of location. He inherits the same problem.

Exhibit 4: The Spirit You May Not Address

Now watch the doctrine of God show up in something ordinary: how to pray. Dake taught his students how to pray. He held that prayer goes to the Father, in Jesus’ name, by the Spirit’s power. Much of that is standard and good. But he turned it into a hard rule.

I want to be fair. He does soften it a little further down the page. He says we should recognize the Son and the Spirit, worship all three, and commune with all three in the proper way.¹⁹ He is not forbidding all attention to the Spirit.

But look at why he gives this rule. It is not about custom or preference. It is about rank. The Father is the head of the other two, so petitions go to the one in charge. That is what you would expect inside an organization of three separate beings. It is not what you would expect if the three are one God.

Every Pentecostal reader knows the hymns. “Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on me.” That is a prayer addressed directly to the Holy Spirit. On Dake’s page, that habit “should be broken.”

Exhibit 5: The Terms

Which brings us back to the altar. If the Spirit is a divine being who is somewhere else, and if fullness is a level that your consecration sets, then receiving Him becomes a matter of meeting requirements. Dake says exactly that.

In the booklet he puts it even more strongly, and he applies the principle to every promise God has ever made.

The broader machinery of laws and conditions belongs to Chapter 18. I will leave that argument there. What I care about here is what the machinery does to the Spirit. Dake illustrates it with a glass and a pitcher of water. You can fill a glass by pouring water in. The glass is only baptized when you push it under. And then this:

I understand the pastoral worry behind that illustration. Dake is pushing back against lazy religion, and he is right that a believer can grieve the Spirit and lose spiritual power. But look at what the picture teaches. You are the glass. You do not hold the water. You are in it only as long as you keep yourself there. Slip up for a day and you are out.

Now think again about that young woman at the altar on Wednesday night, being asked what she was still holding back. She was not being poorly pastored by accident. She was being pastored carefully inside a system where the Spirit is a being outside of her, and her level of surrender is what moves Him closer or pushes Him further away.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. Lying to the Spirit Is Lying to God

I want to start where Dake starts: in Acts 5. He quotes this passage himself to prove the Spirit’s deity, and he is right to quote it.²³ But listen carefully to how Peter says it.

Peter does not say Ananias lied to one member of a three-being committee. He says a lie told to the Spirit is a lie told to God. Full stop. The Spirit is not a delegate representing someone else. He is God, present and dealing with a man in a room.

Paul writes the same way. He asks the Corinthians if they realize they are the temple of God, “and that the Spirit of God dwells in you.”²⁴ The temple belongs to God because the Spirit is in it. That argument only works if the Spirit’s presence is God’s presence, not a representative’s.

And then there is a psalm that Dake himself cites for the Spirit’s omnipresence, without ever stopping to hear what it actually says.

David is not talking about influence felt from a distance. He is talking about a God he cannot get away from. Not in heaven, not in the grave, not at the far end of the sea. There is nowhere in creation where the Spirit is absent. A being with a body in one place simply cannot answer that verse. Only God can.

One more passage here, and I think it may be the quietest and strongest of them all. Dake cites this one too, to prove that the Spirit knows everything.³⁵ But read what Paul is actually comparing.

Paul reaches for the closest comparison he can find. How does anyone know your private thoughts? Only your own spirit, the one inside you, knows them.

Now apply it. Your spirit is not a second individual standing across the room with its own body and its own address. Your spirit is your innermost self. It knows your depths because it is not other than you.

That is Paul’s picture of the Holy Spirit and God. The Spirit knows the deep things of God from inside the one being of God, the same way your own spirit knows you. If the Spirit were a separate divine individual with His own body in some other location, Paul’s comparison collapses. He would be comparing an insider to an outsider. Dake quotes this verse for omniscience and walks right past what it teaches about oneness.

2. A Person, and No Body Anywhere in Sight

I want to be careful here, because Dake is half right, and the half he has right matters.

The Holy Spirit is a person. He is not an it. He speaks, telling the church at Antioch to set apart Barnabas and Saul.²⁵ He decides, distributing gifts “to each one individually as He wills.”²⁶ He can be grieved, and nothing impersonal can be grieved.²⁷ He prays for believers with groaning too deep for words. Every one of those is the action of a someone, not a something. Dake is right to insist on it. Any church that treats the Spirit like electricity should hear him.

Nowhere. Not once. No verse describes His face, His hands, His height, or His seat. Dake noticed this himself. His answer was that no verse denies it either, and that reason fills the gap.²⁸ I want to name that move carefully, because it drives the entire lesson. When Scripture is silent, Dake supplies the missing doctrine from what seems reasonable to him. Then he teaches the result as if it were Bible. That method is the subject of Chapter 4. Here you can watch it build an entire anatomy out of nothing.

And Scripture is not just silent. It offers a picture that points the other direction. Jesus Himself chose it.

The Lord’s own image for the Spirit’s work is wind. Real. Powerful. Felt everywhere. Impossible to pin down to one spot. That is not a description of a body with fingers and hands. I would say gently to any reader of Dake’s notes: when the Bible gives you a picture and you replace it with a diagram, you have not been more literal. You have been less biblical.

3. What the Church Has Always Meant by “Person”

When Dake reads the word person, he hears what most of us hear in everyday English. A person is a separate individual. Over there. With a body. Three persons, then, means three individuals. Given that starting point, his conclusion follows naturally enough. Three individuals, three bodies.

But the church did not use the word that way. The creeds translate a Greek term, hypostasis, which means a real and distinct way of existing within one being. It does not mean a separate being. The word for what the three share is ousia, meaning being or essence. One ousia. Three hypostaseis.²⁹ One God, existing eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That is not three Gods trying to act polite about it. It is one God. Chapter 7 lays out the biblical and creedal case in full, so I will not repeat it here. But I want the Spirit’s article from the Nicene Creed on the table, because it answers this chapter’s exhibits one at a time.

The Lord. Not a subordinate. Worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. That is exactly the honor Dake’s prayer rule takes away. And notice what the creed says about where the Spirit comes from. He proceeds from the Father. That is a statement about an eternal relationship, not about a trip from one place to another. The church confessed a Spirit who comes from God without ever leaving God.

4. Gift, Not Wage

Now the altar. Paul put a question to the Galatians that settles more than any argument I could build.

He expects the answer to be obvious. They received the Spirit by hearing and believing. Not by completing a checklist. Paul treats any other version of the story as a step backward into slavery.

Look at the picture in that verse. A father. A child asking. A gift given because the father is good, not because the child reached the right score. Jesus is not describing a transaction with terms and conditions. He is describing a family.

Now, someone will point out that Scripture does state conditions. That is true. Peter said repent and be baptized, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.³¹ I agree with that gladly. Repentance and faith are real, and God calls for them.

But notice the word Peter picks for what comes next. He calls it a gift. Repentance is not a payment that obligates God to deliver. It is turning around to receive what He is already holding out. The difference is the difference between a son asking his father for bread and a customer meeting the terms of a contract. Both involve conditions in a sense. Only one involves a father.

Here is the test I would put to any teaching about the Spirit: Does it end with a believer confident in God’s goodness, or with a believer endlessly auditing herself? The young woman at that Wednesday altar knew the conditions by heart. That was the whole problem.

5. He Will Make His Home With You

Read it slowly. We will come. Not a delegate. Not an agent sent while the others stay behind. The Father and the Son will come, and they will make their home in a person.

On Dake’s system, that sentence has to be softened into agreement of purpose, because two spirit bodies cannot fit inside a human being. On the church’s reading, it can simply be believed. The one God, who is spirit and is everywhere, takes up residence in His people. The Holy Spirit is how He does it. This is not a lesser presence than what Dake describes. It is an infinitely greater one.

So here is the payoff, and I say this to anyone reading with a Dake Bible open. You are not in a relationship with a divine being who visits when your consecration level is high enough. God the Holy Spirit is in you. He was in you on the day you felt dry. He was in you on the day you fell flat. He was in you on the day you felt nothing at the altar. He is not a level on a gauge. He is a Person who has moved in.

Answering the Defenses

A second defense is stronger, and I have heard it from people I respect. The Spirit really is how God dwells in us, they say. Dake teaches that the Spirit indwells believers. So what is the problem?

The problem is what his system forces the word indwell to mean. I agree completely that the Spirit is how God indwells His people. The New Testament says so on page after page. What I will not accept is the substitution. In Dake’s system, the Spirit’s union with you takes the place of a Father and a Son who cannot be present, because their bodies are in heaven. John 14:23 says the opposite. The Father and the Son come and make their home in the believer. That is no problem at all for the historic doctrine of God. It is a very serious problem for a Godhead made up of three located beings.

A third defense is about motive, and it deserves respect. “You will quench revival with your creeds. Leave the fire alone.”

I would answer with a question. Which Pentecostal denomination confesses Dake’s Godhead? Not one that I know of. The Assemblies of God, in its own Statement of Fundamental Truths, confesses one God eternally existing in three persons and specifically warns against language that implies three separate Gods.³² The creed is not an outsider’s fire extinguisher aimed at the Pentecostal flame. Pentecostals built it into their own doctrinal statements because they knew what they believed about God. Nothing in this chapter asks anyone to want less of the Spirit. It asks the opposite. The Spirit you are seeking is not a third God in a spirit body somewhere above you. He is the Lord. And He is already here.

Conclusion and the Words

Dake taught that the Holy Spirit is a third divine being with His own body, soul, and spirit, ranked under the Father and the Son. He taught that this Spirit never enters a believer, because bodies cannot occupy bodies, and so indwelling really means agreement of purpose. He taught that praying to the Spirit is a habit to be broken. And he taught that the Spirit’s fullness is obtained by meeting conditions and lost when they lapse. Every one of those claims is quoted above with a page number. Every quotation comes from his own books.

Against all of that, Scripture says the Spirit is God. Lying to Him is lying to God. No one can flee from Him anywhere in creation. And He is given by a Father who delights to give Him. The church has confessed the Spirit for sixteen centuries as the Lord and Giver of Life, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.

Keep the altar. Keep the expectancy. Keep the gifts, and keep asking God for more of Himself. That prayer is right and He answers it. What I would ask you to set down is the meter. Not the hunger. The meter. The one that reads your consecration level back to you and tells you how much of God you have earned this week.

Ray taught through Lesson Twenty-Five with his class one quarter, and he told me afterward that the part he could never square was the glass illustration. He believed the Spirit lived in him. The illustration kept putting Him back outside.

He was reading his Bible better than his notes. The Spirit he was looking for was never on the other side of a condition. He was already in the room. He was already in the man.

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), Lesson 25, “The Truth About the Holy Spirit,” p. 444. Page numbers throughout are the book’s own printed page numbers, which survive as running heads in the resident digitization; the lesson’s opening page is independently confirmed by the volume’s table of contents, which lists Lesson 25 at p. 444.

↑ 2. On the book’s continuationist commitment and its refusal to treat Pentecostal faith as the problem, see Chapter 1. Where Dake defends the present-day reality of the gifts against the cessationism of his era, I think he is right, and I say so.

↑ 3. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, pp. 444–445. The catalogs run across Points I.2 (names and titles), I.3 (attributes), I.4 (divine works), and I.6 (divine offices), where the Spirit is named “the Power of God in the Earth” and “the General Overseer of the Churches.”

↑ 4. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point II, p. 445.

↑ 5. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV, heading at p. 447, argument running to p. 451.

↑ 6. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV, p. 448.

↑ 7. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV, p. 448. “Lesson Four” is Dake’s own cross-reference to his treatment of God’s body, soul, and spirit, which Chapter 8 documents.

↑ 8. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV.4, p. 450. The full sentence reasons from the works ascribed to the Spirit, by way of the bodily language used of God’s action, to the conclusion quoted.

↑ 9. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV.10, p. 450. Compare his statement at p. 284 that the Father is “the head of Christ and the Holy Spirit,” discussed below at note 18.

↑ 10. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV.12, p. 450.

↑ 11. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, p. 451.

↑ 12. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Points V and VI, p. 451: “The Holy Ghost Has a Personal Soul Like Man” and “The Holy Ghost Has a Personal Spirit Like Man.” Both sections argue from the premise established in Lesson Four rather than from any text describing the Spirit’s anatomy.

↑ 13. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point VIII, p. 453. Capitalization is Dake’s throughout.

↑ 14. Finis Jennings Dake, The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Publishing), section 14, “The Biblical Doctrine of Interpenetration.” The resident copy is a modern Dake Publishing digital edition and carries no printed page numbers, so it is cited by section heading per the project’s degrade-gracefully rule. The resident text reads “could no enter”; the omitted t is an artifact of the digitization, and I have restored it silently. The parallel passage in God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 4, p. 50, teaches the same doctrine in the same terms.

↑ 15. The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, section 14.

↑ 16. The search covered the three-volume resident text of God’s Plan for Man, Bible Truths Unmasked, Heavenly Hosts, and the Spirit-baptism booklet. I record the negative finding because fairness requires it: a charge that Dake makes the Spirit a substitute presence for an absent Father would not be supported by these pages, and I do not press it.

↑ 17. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point I.3, p. 444, listing “Omnipresence (Ps. 139:7-10)” among the Spirit’s divine attributes.

↑ 18. God’s Plan for Man, p. 284, in the lesson material on prayer. The two sentences are consecutive in the original.

↑ 19. God’s Plan for Man, p. 284: “Give them their proper scriptural place and worship all three persons in the Godhead and commune with all three in the proper way, but address all petitions to the Father in the name of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.” I quote it here so the reader can weigh the qualification alongside the rule.

↑ 20. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 30, “The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” Point VI, p. 552.

↑ 21. The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, section 16, “Biblical Evidences of the Spirit Baptism,” under the evidence headed “Get everything prayed for.”

↑ 22. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 30, Point V, p. 550. The booklet carries the same illustration in section 13; I quote the God’s Plan for Man wording because the booklet’s digitization garbles the opening words of the sentence.

↑ 23. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point I.1, p. 444, where Acts 5:3–4 heads his proof that the Spirit is spoken of as God.

↑ 24. 1 Corinthians 3:16 (NKJV). Dake cites the same verse at Lesson 25, p. 444.

↑ 25. Acts 13:2 (NKJV).

↑ 26. 1 Corinthians 12:11 (NKJV).

↑ 27. Ephesians 4:30 (NKJV); on the Spirit’s intercession, Romans 8:26–27.

↑ 28. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point IV, pp. 448 and 450, quoted above at notes 6 and 10.

↑ 29. Greek ousia (being, essence) and hypostasis (person, subsistence). The formula settled at Constantinople in 381 and carried into the Latin West as una substantia, tres personae. The full grammar, and the reason the distinction is not a word game, belongs to Chapter 7; a working glossary appears in Appendix D.

↑ 30. Nicene Creed (Niceno-Constantinopolitan, 381), third article, traditional English text. I have given the Western form; the phrase “and the Son” is bracketed out here because the filioque is a genuine in-house dispute between East and West and is not at issue in this chapter.

↑ 31. Acts 2:38–39 (NKJV). Note the noun Peter chooses: the gift of the Holy Spirit.

↑ 32. Assemblies of God, Statement of Fundamental Truths, art. 2, “The One True God,” which confesses one God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and expressly warns against language implying three separate Gods. The point is not that a denominational statement settles doctrine; it is that Dake’s Godhead is not the Pentecostal confession, and never has been.

↑ 33. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point III, “The Holy Spirit Is Not the Father or the Son,” pp. 445–447, running to sixteen numbered items. The volume’s table of contents advertises the lesson as offering “16 proofs not the Father or the Son.”

↑ 34. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point III.3, p. 446. Dake’s argument rests on Greek allos (“another of the same kind”), which the resident digitization prints as “alios”; the reading is a scanning artifact and I have not built anything on it. His lexical point about allos is correct as far as it goes. It establishes personal distinction, which the creeds already confess, and says nothing about how many beings are in view.

↑ 35. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson 25, Point I.3, p. 444, citing 1 Corinthians 2:10–11 among the proofs of the Spirit’s omniscience.