Chapter 23

Dake’s Legacy

Where his teaching went, and what the record can show

Picture a woman at home on a weeknight with a Christian television program on. The preacher tells her she has legal rights in Christ. She holds a claim on God’s promises, he says, and a believer who knows her rights never has to live in defeat. She writes the line on the back of an envelope because it sounds like the Bible, and parts of it are. If you asked her where the sentence came from, she could not tell you. The preacher might not know either.

Some of it was printed in Finis Dake’s course in 1949. In a lesson headed “A Christian’s Power of Attorney,” Dake described prayer in the language of a court of law.

All men have the legal and redemptive right to use the name of Jesus in asking and receiving from God. This puts prayer on a purely legal basis. . . . If modern Christians could only wake up and realize their rights in the New Testament, and would exercise their full authority according to their rights, there would be no failure, no sin, no bad habits, no unhappiness, no defeat, no sickness, and no want among them. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-Two, p. 394¹

Where did Dake’s teaching go once it left his pages? How far it traveled does not change what it was, and what it was has already been weighed. The three separate divine beings of his notes are tritheism, which the church has always called heresy (Chapter 6). His God with a body, who lives in one place and travels to others, is heresy as well. His God who learns what free creatures will do, and is limited by them, is false teaching. His laws of prayer and healing are harmful false teaching. After his death the race note was reworded and finally replaced (Chapter 22). The doctrine of God in the same notes was never revised, and it is still in print.

What was on the page

The lesson on the believer’s power of attorney even supplies a sample legal form. Earlier in the course, Supplement Six sets out what Dake calls “the laws of prosperity whereby all men can have guaranteed success in life.”² Chapter 18 tests that system against Scripture. My point here is about history. Legal rights in prayer, the believer’s full authority, and a life with “no defeat, no sickness, and no want” were all in print by 1949. That was decades before the same words filled religious television.

I cannot prove from that alone that any later preacher took the words from Dake. Similar language can grow in two places from the same verses, and other teachers were writing in the same years. What the page does show is that the material existed, that it was written in a form preachers could use, and that it was in preachers’ hands.

A course made for preachers

God’s Plan for Man began as a course by mail. It came in twenty-six booklets holding fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year, mailed to students every two weeks.³ Its lessons were arranged by subject and full of numbered lists. The table of contents alone promises thirty things grace cannot do, forty-five proofs that Christ is not the Father or the Holy Ghost, sixty phases of salvation, and seventy-five modern fallacies.⁴ A list like that is close to a finished sermon. A preacher who has a heading, a set of points, and a verse under each point has most of what he needs for Sunday.

The publisher understood this and said so. The foreword to the 1977 printing describes what the course had become.

The same foreword advertises “more than 10,000 subjects, sermon outlines, and questions fully answered.”⁶ The course was sold to ministers as preaching material, in the publisher’s own words. The foreword is unsigned and speaks of Dake as “the author,” so it is the publisher’s claim and not his. One well-researched article quotes it as Dake’s own words, which shows how easily the two voices run together.⁷

How far it reached

The plan to reach preachers was there from the start. In 1950 the back pages of Dake’s book Bible Truths Unmasked printed letters from students of the course, signed with initials only. One came from a missionary.

They have helped me continuously in sermon material and in doctrine. . . I have found my Bible much more precious to me and much more meaningful than it ever has been before. Rev. W. C. M., Missionary to Guatemala, as printed in Bible Truths Unmasked (1950), 127⁸

On the page before it, a minister in Kingston, Jamaica, reports that his executive board resolved to require the course of all its ministers.⁹ A pastor in Alabama wanted every member of his church to take it.¹⁰ These letters are advertising, chosen by the seller, so they prove only what the company wanted readers to believe. They still show the route the company had in mind, from the course to the minister and from the minister to his people.

In the 1950s Dake had a radio program on WGST in Atlanta. His study Bible, copyrighted in 1963, carried the same teaching into the margins of Scripture itself. When he died in 1987, the Atlanta Constitution reported that “‘Thousands’ of churchgoers carry and use the Dake Bible, according to Warren Roberts of WSSA radio.”¹¹

By then the Bible had a reputation in Pentecostal churches. In January 1988 Charisma ran an article about it under the title “The Pentecostal Study Bible.”¹² The same year, the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements judged Dake’s impact on conservative Pentecostalism to be very great, and called his notes a staple of Pentecostal congregations and of many prominent preachers.¹³

The sales figures I have are old and few. In 1994 Christianity Today reported that the Bible had sold more than thirty thousand copies in 1992.¹⁴ A trade report in 1997 put sales at nearly forty thousand copies a year.¹⁵ Both are single years from the 1990s, not lifetime totals. Together with the dictionary’s judgment, they support a modest claim. For a large part of the Pentecostal world, this one privately published study Bible became the reference book on the shelf, the one people opened when a question came up.

The clearest echo

The strongest single witness comes from a preacher speaking for himself. In September 1987, soon after Dake died, the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart published a tribute to him in his magazine. Swaggart wrote: Finis Dake was a scholar unparalleled. I owe my Bible education to this man.¹⁶ Nobody had to infer that connection. A preacher with a national audience put it in print over his own name.

Gratitude does not prove agreement with every note, and that sentence alone does not tell us which of Dake’s teachings Swaggart took. A second source goes further. Michael Horton’s The Agony of Deceit (1990) quotes Swaggart on the Godhead. As Horton quotes him, Swaggart taught that each divine person has “His own personal spirit body, personal soul, and personal spirit.” He described them as “three different persons exactly as you would think of any three other people,” and he said that “the word ‘one’ in this passage means one in unity.”¹⁷ Dake’s note on the Trinity says that each person of the Godhead has “His own personal spirit body, personal soul, and personal spirit.”¹⁸ If Horton quotes Swaggart accurately, a man who said he owed his Bible education to Dake taught Dake’s Godhead in Dake’s own words.

What reporters and critics have said

Around that one case is a wider pattern in the published record, and every part of it is somebody’s report or judgment. The 1994 Christianity Today article named Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, and Benny Hinn as leading Word-Faith teachers whose adoption of the Bible probably explained its rise in sales. The reporter offered that as a likely explanation and did not claim to have proved it.¹⁹ In 2004 the Christian Research Journal repeated the claim, naming the same three men, and gave no source for it.²⁰ The 1994 article also quoted Michael Horton’s sharper charge: The Faith teachers borrowing from Dake's Annotated Study Bible deny [the Trinity].²¹ Hank Hanegraaff has traced Word-Faith teaching on healing to Dake as well.²²

Praise for the Bible as a tool is better documented. The Journal recorded a Word-Faith minister who valued its lists and information that could not easily be found elsewhere, and a Pentecostal historian who spoke well of its charts and study helps.²³ In 2006 the publisher’s own packaging carried endorsements from well-known charismatic preachers.²⁴ None of that praise is about the doctrine of God. One church leader suggested in 1994 that most readers simply take what they want from the volume and pass over the rest. The same leader, George Wood of the Assemblies of God, also said that Dake’s opinions conflict with his denomination’s statement of faith.²⁵

So the record shows wide use of the Bible in the Word-Faith movement and beyond it. It shows praise from named leaders, and the published judgment of critics that its doctrine traveled with it. It does not give me a named living preacher teaching Dake’s Godhead in his own words and naming Dake as his source. Each teacher answers for what he has actually said. If you want to know what a living teacher believes about God, read his own words, as I have read Dake’s.

How a margin note becomes a sermon

A note in a study Bible is one man’s opinion, printed on the same page as the Word of God and bound in the same cover. Only the size of the type tells the eye where Scripture stops and the comment begins. A preacher who looks up a hard verse finds an answer waiting in his own Bible, often already sorted into points. When he preaches that answer, he almost never says that it came from a note. A note does not travel under its author’s name. It travels under the authority of the page it sits on.

Dake made that effect stronger, because he taught his readers that his method was not interpretation at all.

We maintain that the Bible needs no interpretation apart from its own interpretation of what it says. The Bible interprets its own terms; and its own symbols, parables, allegories, figures of speech, etc. So in these lessons we shall take a different attitude toward the Bible from that usually taken. We shall let God's own Word be the final word of authority on every question. We shall let what God says mean what He says and reject any theory of men to the contrary. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, p. 37²⁶

Every commentary claims to explain the Bible. Dake claimed to be letting the Bible speak, with every “theory of men” set aside. A reader who accepts that claim will pass the note along as Scripture, because on Dake’s own account there is no human author to name. Chapter 4 shows how his method works and where it breaks down. Here it explains why so much of his teaching traveled without his name attached.

Nobody in this process has to be dishonest. A pastor trusts the note, and a class trusts the pastor. Years later a young woman from that class is teaching a doctrine of God she has never tested, because it came out of a Bible. Every tradition has its own version of this. Reformed, Baptist, and Methodist readers absorb their own study notes in the same way, and most of us examine least the helps we trust most.

The teaching after Dake

In 1995, eight years after his death, Dake’s family published Heavenly Hosts, a book on angels gathered from his writings, including “the extensive commentary notes in the Dake Annotated Reference Bible.” Its editor said plainly that “portions of the narrative have been constructed in order to provide a necessary flow from point to point.”²⁷ Other compilations followed. The notes were sorted by topic, joined with new writing, and published as books under his name, for readers who never saw the course. Chapter 2 prints the editor’s preface, and Chapter 19 weighs the angelology.

The race note changed in the same years. The publisher spoke about it outside the Bible. In 2000 Charisma reported a letter of apology from the company to Frederick K. C. Price, a prominent African-American pastor and television teacher in the Word-Faith movement. The magazine quoted one sentence of the letter: “We agree that racism has no place in the body of Christ, or anywhere else.” It also reported the publisher’s claim that a 1997 edition had been rewritten to remove any racial overtones.²⁸ Chapter 22 sets out what the printings show and what the Bible itself never told its readers. For this chapter the letter matters for another reason. The movement that took up this Bible did not take it up as one mind, and the apology went to one of its own best-known teachers.

The doctrine of God was never revised. Across the printings I own, Dake’s theology outside the race notes changed very little. The newer typeset edition still prints the note “89 Proofs of A Divine Trinity,” with its three persons who each have a spirit body, soul, and spirit. It still says, in its note on Solomon’s prayer, that “God’s body cannot be everywhere present.”²⁹ The race note was reworded and then replaced. The notes that make God three beings in bodies stayed, and they were always the deeper problem.

What the record means

A study Bible written by one man and published by his family became a working reference for many Pentecostal and charismatic churches. It was sold from the start as material for sermons, and at least one preacher with a national audience credited it with his Bible education. Reporters and critics judged that its doctrine went where the book went. The route it traveled was mostly quiet absorption, not citation, so most of its influence cannot be traced to a name.

None of that makes the doctrine more or less true. If Dake’s doctrine of God were right, a thousand critics would not change it. It is wrong, and it would be wrong if only one preacher had repeated it. Chapters 6 through 14 weighed it against Scripture, and the case rests there, not on the size of his following. What the record adds is a warning. A teaching printed beside the text of Scripture can travel for decades under Scripture’s authority while almost no one tests it.

Questions a reader may ask

Isn’t this guilt by association?

It would be if I charged the teachers named here with Dake’s errors because they used his Bible, and I have not done that. Using a book is not the same as holding everything in it, and a preacher can open a concordance for forty years without taking on the compiler’s theology. Where a teacher’s own words are the question, his own words have to be produced. Swaggart’s tribute is his own, and his words on the Godhead are given as Horton reports them. Everything else here is reported as the report of the person who made it.

Doesn’t influence prove only popularity?

Yes, and I agree with the point. Many copies of a wrong note do not make it right, and a few copies of a right one would not make it wrong. That is why this chapter settles nothing about doctrine. The doctrine was tested against Scripture one teaching at a time in the chapters before it. The question here is a different one: where the teaching went.

Isn’t the Bible’s importance overstated?

Perhaps many Pentecostals have never owned one. My figures are two single years from the 1990s, and my support from reference works is one dictionary entry and one magazine article. So I have claimed only what those sources support: the volume became a standard reference in a large part of the Pentecostal world. If better figures turn up in either direction, they should replace mine.

Testing the notes we trust

The best answer to all of this is in the chapter of Acts that Dake’s race note claimed for itself. Luke praises the Jews of Berea for the way they received the apostle Paul.

These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Acts 17:11 (NKJV)³⁰

The man the Bereans tested was Paul himself, and he was right. Checking him was an act of care for the truth he preached. Isaiah gave Israel the same rule long before.

To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. Isaiah 8:20 (NKJV)

Paul told the Thessalonians, Test all things (1 Thessalonians 5:21, NKJV). That includes the notes in a Bible someone gave you, the sermons you enjoy most, and this book. Paul also told Timothy to commit what he had received to faithful men who would teach others (2 Timothy 2:2). Teaching is handed on, and whatever we carry, we pass to the next person. Jesus warned about the other kind of handing on, where the blind lead the blind and both fall into the ditch (Matthew 15:14).

So open your Bible to the passage you teach from most and read the note beside it. Ask who wrote it and what he meant by his words. Then read the verse again without the note, and see whether it says what the note says it says. The Scriptures under Dake’s notes give us one God, not three. He fills heaven and earth, He knows the end from the beginning, and He does not change, so every promise on those pages rests on Someone who will keep it. Chapter 24 takes up the strongest arguments of Dake’s defenders, and Chapter 25 asks what a reader should do with the Bible in his hands.