Dake's Legacy — Where Dake's Teachings Traveled

A woman in my church sat down one Tuesday night with the television on. A preacher was talking about her rights in Christ. He said she had a legal claim on God’s promises. He said a believer who knows her rights never has to live in defeat.

She liked that. She wrote it on the back of an envelope. It sounded like the Bible. Parts of it are.

She could not tell you. The preacher probably could not either. He did not read it off a page that morning. He picked it up somewhere, years back, from somebody who picked it up somewhere else. That is how sentences travel. They go from a book to a sermon, from a sermon to a Sunday school lesson, from a lesson to a notebook. Nobody stamps them with a return address. After three or four jumps, the sentence has no fingerprints on it at all.

This chapter is about that journey. It asks one plain question about the study Bible we have been reading together for twenty-two chapters now. Where did its teaching go?

I have to answer that question more carefully than anything else in this book. Up to now, the job has been fairly simple in shape, even when the material was hard. I opened Dake’s page, read what it said, and weighed it against Scripture. The words were right there.

Influence is different. It is a claim about people who are not Finis Dake. Some of them are still living. Some have families, churches, and reputations. The moment I say “this preacher got that idea from Dake,” I have said something about another person’s mind that his own words may not back up. That kind of claim, made loosely, wrecks books and hurts people.

So before I go one step further, I am going to tie my own hands. I will state the rule out loud so you can hold me to it. It is the strictest rule in this book.

The Record and Its Sources

The rule is simple. No exhibit, no claim. Every time this chapter says a person used Dake, borrowed from Dake, or taught what Dake taught, that statement has to rest on a named source with a date. If I cannot produce the source, I will either soften the claim to match what I actually have, or I will cut it. I will not build an argument out of two sentences that happen to sound alike.

That rule costs me a lot. I have heard stories about Dake’s reach for thirty years. Most of them I cannot document, so you will not find them here. I think you will trust this chapter more for the gaps than you would for the gossip.

Let me also be clear about one boundary. This chapter does not re-argue any doctrine. The Godhead was handled in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7. Healing was weighed in Chapter 17, the prayer laws in Chapter 18, the race notes in Chapter 20 and Chapter 21. Here I am only tracing where things went. Whether they were right was settled earlier, from Scripture, at length.

First, Dake’s own books, quoted from the copies in my hands. These are the best evidence in the chapter, because they are exact. They tell us what was sitting on the page, waiting to travel.

Second, the publisher’s own promotional material. Advertising is not neutral history. But when a publisher says something about its own Bible’s reach, that is real evidence of what the company claimed, on a dated page. I will quote it as their claim, not as my finding.

Third, published reporting and reference work from named authors in dated publications. Two carry most of the weight. A 1994 news report in Christianity Today is one.¹ A 2004 article in the Christian Research Journal, carefully footnoted, is the other.² Behind both stands a standard reference work, the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements.³

Fourth, statements by the publisher about a public controversy, used as the company’s own account of events in which it was involved.⁴

Those four kinds of evidence support three grades of claim. I am keeping them apart on purpose.

The Story in the Evidence

1. What Was Sitting on the Page

Start with the material itself. Before anything can travel, it has to exist in a form that travels well.

God’s Plan for Man was built to move. It was not a book you read once and put on the shelf. It was a mail-order course. Fifty-two lessons, one per week, mailed out a section at a time.⁵ The lessons were organized by subject, numbered, and cross-referenced. That matters more than it sounds. A course arranged by topic, with numbered points, is a course a pastor can preach from on Sunday morning.

The publisher knew it, too. Read the foreword to the 1977 printing and pay attention to what it is really selling.

Read that last sentence again. Not a devotional guide. Not a study aid for a small group. A storehouse of sermon material for a great many preachers. That is the publisher’s own description of what the course had become.

The same foreword boasts of more than ten thousand subjects, sermon outlines, and questions fully answered, backed by more than thirty-three thousand Scripture references.⁷ Sermon outlines. The word is right there in the advertising. This material was packaged for preachers and sold as preaching stock.

I should be honest about one small detail. That foreword speaks of Dake in the third person, as “the author.” It is the publisher’s page, not his. One respected article cites it as Dake’s own words; the resident text shows otherwise.⁸ A small point. But if I want you to check my citations, I need to check theirs.

One more feature of the design is worth naming, because it explains why this material preached so easily. Dake wrote in numbered lists.

Open the table of contents before you read a single word. Lesson Nineteen offers thirty things grace cannot do. Lesson Twenty-One lays out forty-five proofs that Christ is not the Father or the Holy Ghost. Lesson Thirty-Three describes sixty phases of salvation. Lesson Thirty-Five answers seventy-five modern fallacies.⁹

A numbered list is not just a way to organize an idea. It is a ready-made sermon. Hand a tired pastor a heading, seven points, and a Scripture under each one, and you have handed him Sunday morning. He does not have to build a thing. He reads the points and fills in the stories.

I am not looking down on pastors. I have been one. Saturday night is real, and so is the pull of a book that has already done the work for you. But this helps explain why this particular volume traveled the way it did. Most commentaries hand a preacher an argument he has to wrestle with. This one handed him an outline he could carry straight to the pulpit.

2. The Reach, Sized to the Evidence

How far did the material go? Here I have to be modest, because my numbers are partial and old.

In January 1994, Christianity Today reported that the Dake Bible had sold more than thirty thousand copies in 1992. The same report described the work as having gained popularity through its adoption by Word-Faith teachers.¹⁰ A trade-press figure cited a decade later put annual sales close to forty thousand.¹¹ Both are single-year snapshots from the 1990s, not lifetime totals. I am not going to pretend they say more than they do.

The reference literature tells me more than the sales figures. The Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, a standard scholarly reference, judged Dake’s impact on conservative Pentecostalism to be very large. It described his notes as basic fare for many well-known preachers, and standard equipment in Pentecostal churches.¹² Charisma magazine had already given the volume the name it still carries in conversation: the Pentecostal study Bible.¹³

That is a reach claim I can stand behind. Not “every Pentecostal owns one.” Not “the whole movement runs on it.” Something quieter and, I think, more honest: one privately published study Bible became, for a large stream of churches, the reference book on the shelf. When a question came up, this is what people reached for.

And the pattern was there from the beginning. Open the back pages of Bible Truths Unmasked from 1950. The Bible Research Foundation printed testimonials from its course students, initials only, as advertising.

Sermon material and doctrine. A missionary said that in 1950, and the publisher was proud enough to print it. On the same pages, a pastor in Kingston, Jamaica, reported that his executive board had resolved to require all its ministers to take the course.¹⁵ Another pastor wanted every member of his church to take it.¹⁶

Take those for what they are. They are advertising, chosen by the seller, printed without full names. They prove what the company wanted to say about itself. But they also show us the intended path, drawn by the people who drew it: from the course, to the minister, to the pulpit, to the pew.

3. The Clearest Echo

Now I want to show you the strongest single piece of evidence I have. And I want you to notice why it is the strongest.

In September 1987, just weeks after Dake died, the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart published a memorial in his magazine. Swaggart wrote that Finis Dake was a scholar unparalleled. I owe my Bible education to this man.¹⁷

That is grade one evidence, and it is about as clean as this kind of evidence gets. Nobody inferred it. Nobody pieced it together from things that sounded similar. A preacher with an enormous audience put it in print, over his name, in a dated publication. He told us where his Bible education came from.

Let that sit for a moment. When Swaggart wrote those words, his television broadcast was reaching millions. And the man he credited with his Bible education is the man whose notes taught that the Godhead consists of three separate beings, each with His own body, soul, and spirit. The same notes placed God in a located body on a material planet. The same notes gave thirty reasons why the races should stay apart. All of that is documented, in Dake’s own words, in the chapters behind this one.¹⁸

Now here is the discipline. Swaggart’s sentence does not tell me which doctrines he took and which he left on the table. It does not make him responsible for page 159. Gratitude is not the same thing as endorsement, and a man who says he learned his Bible from a teacher has not signed off on every note in that teacher’s margin. What the sentence proves is transmission. This material was in the pipeline. A preacher who used it said so.

That is what a receipt looks like. It proves exactly what it says. Not one inch more.

4. The Pattern, and Its Limits

Around that one clear case, a wider pattern shows up in the published record. Let me lay it out, and then I will tell you honestly what it does not prove.

In 1994, Christianity Today reported that the Dake Bible’s surge in popularity was likely connected to its adoption by leading Word-Faith teachers. The report named Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, and Benny Hinn.¹⁹ The Christian Research Journal said the same thing a decade later.²⁰ That journal also recorded warm praise for the Bible from within the Word-Faith world, including a minister who called it a reference tool with lists and information you could not easily find elsewhere.²¹ Praise came from outside that stream, too. A Pentecostal archivist at a denominational research center noted the volume’s helpful charts and study tools.²² And the publisher’s promotional copy has long carried endorsements from charismatic pastors.²³

Those are grade one and grade two claims about use. They are well attested. Then comes a harder claim, made by a named theologian in a published book. Michael Horton, writing in The Agony of Deceit, charged that The Faith teachers borrowing from Dake's Annotated Study Bible deny [the Trinity].²⁴

That is a serious charge, and I report it as one. It is grade two: a scholar’s judgment, published under his own name. It deserves to be weighed. But it is not the same thing as a transcript.

Here is where I stand, honestly. I can show that the Dake Bible circulated widely in this stream. I can show that named teachers valued it. I can show that published critics judged its doctrine to have traveled into that teaching. What I cannot hand you is a broadcast clip where a named preacher teaches Dake’s exact Godhead and credits Dake as his source. If that kind of material ever comes into my hands, it belongs in a later edition, quoted in full. Until then, the claim stays where the evidence puts it.

5. How a Margin Becomes a Pulpit

This is the part that matters most, because it explains why influence like this leaves almost no trail.

A study Bible note is a strange thing. It is one man’s opinion, printed on the same page as the Word of God, bound in the same leather cover. Nothing tells your eye where the inspired text stops and the commentary begins except a change in type size.

Now put that page in front of a busy pastor on Saturday night. He is not comparing three commentaries side by side. He is looking up a hard verse, and the answer is right there in his own Bible, laid out in a numbered list. Sunday morning, he preaches that answer. He does not say, “According to Dake’s note on Acts 17.” Preachers almost never cite study notes from the pulpit. Why would they? The note came out of a Bible.

That is the whole mechanism in three sentences. A note does not travel under its author’s name. It travels under the authority of the page it sits on.

Dake’s own writing made the effect sharper. He taught his readers that his method was not interpretation at all.

Think about what that does to a reader. Every commentary claims to explain the Bible. This one claims it is simply repeating what the Bible already says. If the note is not a “theory of men” but just what God says, then a preacher who repeats the note is not passing on Dake. He is preaching the Bible. There is nothing to cite. There is no human author to name.

The full treatment of that reading method, and where it breaks down, belongs to Chapter 4. I raise it here only because it powers the transmission. A method that says it is not a method leaves no paper trail.

And there was real material ready to travel. Some of it reads today like a rough draft of teaching that showed up later under different names. In Lesson Twenty-Two, under the heading “A Christian’s Power of Attorney,” Dake laid out the believer’s authority in the courtroom language of agency law, complete with a sample legal form.

Prayer on a purely legal basis. Rights. Authority. No defeat, no sickness, no want. That was on the page in 1949.

A supplement earlier in the same course had already laid out what it called the laws of prosperity, promising that all men can have guaranteed success if they obey them.²⁷ Whether that machinery holds up under Scripture was weighed in Chapter 17 and Chapter 18. I am not reopening it here. My point is only historical. The vocabulary was on the page, in a course sold to preachers as sermon stock, decades before it filled the airwaves.

Is that proof of descent? No. It is grade three, and I am labeling it grade three. Similar language can spring up in two places from a shared Bible passage or a shared era. Other writers were teaching in the same key. What I can say is narrow and, I believe, fair: the material was there, it was designed for preaching, and it was in the hands of preachers.

6. The Sober Coda

The first is about the race notes. Chapter 22 tells how they were quietly removed from printings after 1987, with no public acknowledgment. What belongs here is what happened when the old notes reached a pulpit inside the very stream this chapter has been tracing.

According to the company’s own account, in February 1998 Dake Publishing learned that Dr. Frederick K. C. Price, a prominent African-American pastor and television teacher in the Word-Faith movement, planned to devote at least thirty weeks of a series called “Race, Religion, and Racism” to the original note on New Testament page 159. The company wrote to him two days later. It expressed regret and apology for commentary that had been taken as supporting slavery, racism, or discrimination.²⁸

I include that because it cuts against the simple version of this story. The stream that received this Bible was not a single mind. One of its best-known voices spent thirty weeks on the air answering what those notes had said about his own people. Any telling of Dake’s legacy that leaves that out is not history. It is a case for the prosecution, and that is not what I am writing.

The second fact is quieter, but just as important. Dake’s teaching did not stop traveling when he died in 1987, or when the notes were revised.

I want to be fair. The family says plainly what they did, and that honesty counts. But look at what the paragraph describes. Eight years after Dake’s death, his notes were being pulled from the margins, sorted by topic, stitched together with new writing by other hands, and published as a book with his name on the cover. His angelology gets weighed in Chapter 19. What matters here is the traffic. The material kept moving, in new packaging, for new readers, years after the man was gone.

That is the shape of the legacy. The notes about the races were taken out. The doctrine of God was not. And the doctrine of God was always the deeper problem.

What It Means, and What It Does Not

Let me say what I think the record shows. Then I will be just as clear about what it does not show.

It shows that a study Bible written by one man, published by his family, became a working reference for a very large number of Pentecostal and charismatic churches. It shows that preachers with national audiences valued it, and that at least one credited it with his Bible education. It shows that published critics, in dated sources, judged its doctrine to have entered a broad teaching stream. And it shows the route those doctrines traveled: not by citation, but by quiet absorption.

An unexamined margin becomes an unexamined pulpit. Nobody in this story had to be dishonest for the thing to work. The pastor trusted the note. The class trusted the pastor. The teenager in the third row trusted the class. Twenty years later that teenager is teaching, and she is passing on a doctrine of God she has never tested. It never occurred to her that it needed testing. It came from a Bible.

That is not a Pentecostal problem alone. It is a human one, and every tradition has its own version. Reformed believers absorb their study Bible’s notes without questioning them. So do Baptists and Methodists and everyone else. We examine least the helps we trust most, precisely because we trust them.

What makes this case sharper is the claim the notes made for themselves. A commentary that says “here is my reading; weigh it” invites testing. A note that says it is simply repeating what God already said does not.

This chapter does not prove that any named preacher holds a false doctrine of God. That would require his own words in my hands, and they are not. Each teacher answers for what he actually said. If you want to know what a living teacher believes, read him. Read him the way this book read Dake.

This chapter does not prove that everyone who used the Dake Bible absorbed its errors. The volume is full of ordinary material. A preacher can use a concordance for forty years and never take on the compiler’s theology. Many people use this Bible exactly that way, and at least one senior Assemblies of God official has suggested as much.³⁰

And influence is not an argument. If Dake’s doctrine of God is wrong, it is wrong whether one preacher repeated it or a thousand did. If it is right, a thousand critics will not change that. The weighing happened in Parts II and III, from the Scriptures, and it stands or falls there.

Look at who they were testing. Not a stranger. Not somebody they suspected. They were checking Paul, and Paul turned out to be right. The habit was not suspicion. It was care.

Isaiah gave the same rule in one sentence. It is the rule I have tried to keep through this whole book.

Paul put it even shorter to a church he loved: Test all things (1 Thessalonians 5:21, NKJV). Not the things you suspect. All of them. That includes the notes in the Bible somebody gave you. It includes the sermons you enjoy most. It includes this book.

Answering the Objections

That objection is fair enough that I built the chapter’s rule around it before I wrote a word. If anything here reads like a verdict on a living person, I have broken my own standard, and I would want it corrected.

Second objection: “Influence proves popularity, not error. A lot of people used it. So what?”

I agree completely. Popularity proves nothing about truth. A million copies of a wrong note do not make the note right. A hundred copies of a right one do not make it wrong. That is exactly why this chapter does not try to settle anything about doctrine. The doctrine was tested against Scripture across nine chapters, one attribute at a time. This chapter answers a different question: not whether the teaching was true, but where it went.

Both objections make the same good point from different angles. Numbers are not arguments. I want that rule to hold when it helps my case and when it does not.

Third objection: “You are overstating this Bible’s importance. Most Pentecostals have never owned one.”

That may well be true. My numbers are two single-year snapshots from the 1990s. My reference-work support is one dictionary entry and one magazine label. That is what I have, so that is all I have claimed. I have not said most Pentecostals own one. I have said the volume became a standard reference in a large stream of churches, which is what my sources support.

If somebody has better data, in either direction, this chapter should be updated to match. That is how the rule works. It cuts against me too.

Where This Leaves Us

The temptation with a subject like this is enormous. It would be easy to line up famous names, print their photographs, and let the reader draw a line from Dake’s margins to whatever teaching she happens to dislike. It would feel satisfying. It would also be dishonest. And it would hand every defender of these notes a legitimate reason to throw out this whole book. A case that overreaches at the end gets dismissed at the beginning, where it was right.

So the chapter holds only what the receipts hold. A study Bible traveled far. Preachers used it and said so. Critics judged that its doctrine traveled with it. Notes went from the margin to the sermon without a footnote, because notes never carry footnotes when they sit on a sacred page. That is enough. It is true. It is sobering. And it does not require me to accuse anybody of anything.³¹

Paul told Timothy to commit what he had received to faithful men who could teach others (2 Timothy 2:2, NKJV). Teaching is a relay race. Whatever you carry, you hand on. That is the honor of it and the danger of it, both at once. Jesus warned about the other kind of relay, where the blind lead the blind and both end up in the ditch (Matthew 15:14).

You are in that relay. So am I. Somebody handed you what you believe about God, and you did not check most of it. You did not check it because you trusted the person it came from. Usually that trust is well placed. Sometimes it is not. And the only way to find out is to look.

So look. Not at a televangelist. At your own margins. Open your Bible to the page you teach from most and read the note under the verse. Read it slowly, as a note. Ask who wrote it. Ask what he meant by his words. Then read the verse again without the note, and see if the verse says what the note says it says.

That is not disloyalty to your Bible. That is the Berean thing, applied to the only teacher whose influence on you is certain: the one printed at the bottom of your own page. Do it, and the relay gets a little cleaner in your hands.

The strongest defenders of these notes have real arguments. They deserve more than the brief answers I have given them here in passing. Chapter 24 gathers their whole case and takes it seriously. And then, in Chapter 25, there is the question my friend Ray will ask. It is the one you may be asking now: what do I do with the Bible on my table?

Notes

↑ 1. Perucci Ferraiuolo, “Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake's Bible,” Christianity Today, January 1994. Retrieved and read in full at drafting. This is a news report, not a scholarly study; it is used here for the facts it reports and attributes, and its judgments are labeled as its own.

↑ 2. Jeff Spencer and Steve Bright, “Dake's Dangerous Doctrine,” Christian Research Journal 27, no. 5 (2004). Retrieved and read in full at drafting. The article is footnoted to primary sources, including page-level citations of God’s Plan for Man and the Dake Annotated Reference Bible, which is why it is relied on here in preference to undated online material.

↑ 3. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Regency Reference Library, 1988), s.v. “Dake, Finis Jennings.” Not resident in any project library; its wording is known here through Spencer and Bright (note 2), who quote it. The assessments are therefore paraphrased rather than quoted at length.

↑ 4. Dake Publishing, “Answering the Charge of Racism,” a statement issued on the company’s website. Cited by Spencer and Bright at their note 66; the version consulted at drafting was an archived reproduction rather than the live page. See note 28 below, and Appendix C for the edition record.

↑ 5. Foreword to God’s Plan for Man, 1977 printing, front matter (unpaginated): “God’s Plan for Man . . . was first published in loose leaf form. There were 26 books with 52 lessons in all — one for each week of the year — and these, being designed like a Correspondence Course for home study, were mailed out to the enrollment on a bi-monthly basis.” Quoted from the resident text.

↑ 6. Foreword to God’s Plan for Man, 1977 printing, front matter (unpaginated). Quoted from the resident text. The optical text recognition of this printing breaks words across lines without hyphens (“denomina / tions,” “minis / ters,” “funda / mental”); those splits are rejoined here, and a doubled comma after “Inc” is corrected, without any change to the wording. The em dashes are the printed page’s own. The 1977 printing carries a 1949 copyright by Finis Jennings Dake and a 1977 renewal.

↑ 7. Ibid. The same page states that the course contains “more than 10,000 subjects, sermon outlines, and questions fully answered” supported by “more than 33,000 references to Scripture passages.” Compare the 1950 advertising in Bible Truths Unmasked, which gives the reference figure as 31,214; the number grew with the editions.

↑ 8. Spencer and Bright cite the foreword as Dake’s own (their note 11). The resident 1977 text speaks of him throughout in the third person, as “the author,” and describes editorial decisions made about his work, which marks it as a publisher’s foreword. The distinction matters for attribution: the “storehouse of sermon material” claim is the publisher’s boast about the book’s reception, not Dake’s claim about himself.

↑ 9. Contents of God’s Plan for Man, 1977 printing, front matter. The listings cited are for Lessons 19, 21, 33, and 35; the numbered-list form runs through the whole course and carried over into the study Bible’s notes. Its best known instance is the thirty-reasons note documented in Chapter 20 and transcribed in Appendix B.

↑ 10. Ferraiuolo, “Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake's Bible.” The article gives the 1992 sales figure and connects the rise in usage to adoption by Word-Faith teachers; the connection is the reporter’s, and is presented here as his.

↑ 11. Spencer and Bright, “Dake’s Dangerous Doctrine,” reporting annual sales of nearly 40,000 copies and citing Keel Germaine, “Dake Bible Fills Niche,” CBA Marketplace, January 1997, 12. Both figures are single-year snapshots roughly thirty years old at the time of this writing, and neither is a lifetime total. Current circulation data was not available at drafting.

↑ 12. Burgess and McGee, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, s.v. “Dake, Finis Jennings,” as quoted in Spencer and Bright. The dictionary’s phrases about the notes becoming basic fare for preachers and standard equipment in congregations are paraphrased here rather than reproduced.

↑ 13. Richard Love and Jennifer Bryon Owen, “The Pentecostal Study Bible,” Charisma and Christian Life, January 1988, 39, as cited in Spencer and Bright. Ferraiuolo notes that the volume was billed under the same description.

↑ 14. Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, Inc., 1950), 128, in the back-matter advertising under the heading “What Others Think of the Lessons.” Testimonials are printed with initials and a state or country only, as reproduced here. Page per the printed markers in the resident text.

↑ 15. Ibid., 126–27, attributed to “Rev. H. C. S., Kingston, Jamaica, B. W. I.” The writer reports that his board, on seeing the course and its price, resolved that all its ministers be required to take it.

↑ 16. Ibid., 126, attributed to “Rev. J. R. R., Alabama.” The same pages carry endorsements over full names, including Lillian B. Yeomans and Chas. E. Robinson of Springfield, Missouri, and a notice in The Moody Bible Institute Monthly, all commending Revelation Expounded rather than the course.

↑ 17. Jimmy Swaggart, “In Memory: Finis Jennings Dake 1902–1987,” The Evangelist, September 1987, 44, as reproduced in Spencer and Bright, “Dake’s Dangerous Doctrine,” note 16. The original issue was not in hand at drafting; the wording is given as the Journal reproduces it, and the same sentence is reported in other published summaries.

↑ 18. For the Godhead notes see Chapter 6; for the located and embodied God, Chapters 8 and 9; for the page 159 note, Chapter 20 and the complete transcription in Appendix B.

↑ 19. Ferraiuolo, “Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake's Bible.” The report names the three teachers and offers the connection as a probable explanation of the sales increase, not as a demonstrated fact.

↑ 20. Spencer and Bright, “Dake’s Dangerous Doctrine,” reporting that leading Word-Faith teachers had embraced the study Bible and its teachings.

↑ 21. Ibid., reporting comments by Larry Ollison, then midwest regional director for the International Convention of Faith Ministries, from correspondence with the authors dated July 25, 1997. Ollison’s praise is for the volume as a reference tool; the Journal does not report him endorsing Dake’s doctrine of God.

↑ 22. Ibid., reporting comments by David G. Roebuck, director of the Pentecostal Research Center at Lee University, from correspondence with the authors dated July 23, 1997. His remark concerns the volume’s tools and charts.

↑ 23. Publisher’s promotional copy for Dake’s study notes, as carried on a retail product listing consulted at drafting, which reproduces an endorsement attributed to Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church, Columbus, Ohio, describing the Dake Bible as one of the greatest literary works made available for believers. This is the weakest-sourced item in the chapter: it is a retailer’s reproduction of a publisher blurb, and it is used only as evidence of what the promotional copy says. To be confirmed against the publisher’s own site.

↑ 24. Michael Horton, The Agony of Deceit, quoted in Ferraiuolo, “Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake’s Bible.” The bracketed words are as they appear in that report. Horton’s book was not in hand at drafting; the quotation is given as Christianity Today reproduces it, and the underlying page citation should be verified against the book before any reprinting. The same report records Horton comparing Dake’s view of the Trinity to Mormon teaching.

↑ 25. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, 37 (page per the embedded markers in the resident file). Lesson Three is titled in the contents “False and true methods of Bible interpretation — utter simplicity of the Bible — 30 rules to follow.” Obvious artifacts of the optical text recognition (broken hyphenation, stray spacing) have been silently repaired; no wording is altered.

↑ 26. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-Two, 394; the lesson opens at 393 under the heading “A Christian’s Power of Attorney” and includes a specimen power-of-attorney form dated January 2, 1949. The ellipsis marks omitted intervening sentences on the legal analogy; nothing within the quoted sentences is altered.

↑ 27. Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Supplement Six, 217: “The following are the laws of prosperity whereby all men can have guaranteed success in life if they will obey these laws.” The contents page lists Supplement 6 as “Ten great laws of prosperity and success,” beginning at 217; the printed page marker 216 immediately precedes the supplement heading in the resident text.

↑ 28. Dake Publishing, “Answering the Charge of Racism.” The company’s account gives February 16, 1998 as the date it learned of the planned series, and February 18, 1998 as the date of its letter. The letter, as the company reproduces it, expresses regret and apology for commentary interpreted as supportive of slavery, racism, or discrimination. Some secondary accounts date Dr. Price’s series to 1996; the dates given here are the publisher’s own, and the discrepancy is unresolved at drafting. Dr. Price died in 2021. The publisher’s page also records the company’s dissatisfaction with press coverage of its letter and with Dr. Price; those complaints are not evaluated here.

↑ 29. Preface to Heavenly Hosts, a Dake Publishing compilation, copyright 1995 by Finette Dake Kennedy, Annabeth Dake Germaine, and Finis Jennings Dake, Jr. The volume is posthumous and compiled: the preface states that portions of the narrative were constructed by the editors to join Dake’s material. The misplaced apostrophe in “Gods’ Plan for Man” is as printed in the resident text. Citations of this and the other compilations elsewhere in this book follow the same convention.

↑ 30. Ferraiuolo, “Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake’s Bible,” reporting a comment by George Wood, then newly appointed general secretary of the Assemblies of God, to the effect that users of the volume likely take what they want from it and pass over the rest. The same report records Wood stating that Dake’s opinions conflict with his denomination’s statement of fundamental truths, which is one reason this book insists that Dake’s system is not the Pentecostal position but a departure from it.

↑ 31. On the standing rule governing this chapter: every claim of use or borrowing above rests on a named source with a date, and each is graded in the text. Claims that could not be documented at drafting were cut rather than softened into insinuation. A full list of the sources consulted for this chapter, including the ones that yielded nothing usable, appears in Appendix F.

Dake’s Legacy

Where the Sentence Came From