Answering the Defenders

Finis Jennings Dake loved the Bible. He worked at it the way a farmer works a field: early, late, and without much rest. He spent more hours in the text than most of his critics have spent doing anything. He wrote his notes for plain believers, and plain believers were helped by them. He called Jesus Christ God. He defended the supernatural when the seminaries were busy explaining it away. He believed in healing, in the gifts of the Spirit, and in a Bible that means what it says. His critics, so the defense runs, lift single sentences out of a thousand pages and wave them like proof. The race notes belonged to a South that no longer exists, and his publishers took them out. And the fruit is on the ground for anyone to count: preachers equipped, sinners saved, sick people healed, everyday people who learned to study the Bible for themselves. The man is dead. He cannot answer back. Why not leave him alone?

That is the case. I have not built a scarecrow. I have heard every piece of it from people I love, and parts of it are simply true. A case that strong deserves a real answer, not a hand wave.

Dake printed a rule that I want to follow. On the title page of Bible Truths Unmasked, right under his name, he set this line:

Fair enough. I accept the demand. This book has spent twenty-three chapters quoting him at length for exactly that reason. Now this chapter will put his defenses first, and my answers second.

Good. Then let the Scriptures decide. He asked for that standard. Every defense in this chapter will be weighed by it.

Why It Matters

A friend at church says, "He believed in the Trinity, you know." A pastor says, "He just took the Bible literally." A comment under an article says, "Critics always clip him." These sentences come from good faith. The people saying them are not trying to fool anyone. They are protecting a good man's name and a book that helped them. That instinct is not a vice. It is loyalty, and loyalty is a good thing.

There is a second reason this chapter exists. A weak answer to a strong argument does more harm than no answer at all. If I brush past these defenses, a reader who has heard them all his life will decide I had no reply. And he will be right to decide that. So I will take the defenses one at a time, in the order a defender would raise them.

There is a third reason, the largest one. The Bible gives a rule for exactly this kind of situation. The rule is not "count the fruit" or "weigh the reputation." It is simpler.

Not to the hours. Not to the sincerity. Not to the testimonies. To the law and to the testimony. Dake would have said amen to that verse louder than I ever could. He printed his own version of it: "Nothing is left to human reasoning alone, or proved by human authority."⁴ That is the measuring line for this chapter. He handed it to me himself.

One more thing hangs on all of this. Every one of these defenses ends with somebody praying. If the notes are right, the believer at prayer is talking to one of three separate divine beings. If the church is right, that same believer is met by the one undivided God, with nothing of Him held back. Those are not two ways of saying the same thing. You can feel the difference the first time you are scared at two in the morning.

The Defenses, One at a Time

1. "He affirmed the Trinity. Read his own words."

This is the first defense and the strongest. It looks like a matter of plain record. Dake did not hide from the word "Trinity." He used it constantly. He argued for it against people who denied it. He wrote a whole lesson to prove it, and he closed that lesson like this:

Stop right there and he sounds like any Sunday school teacher on a good day. Three persons. One God. Each fully divine. I have heard defenders read sentences like these and close the book. I understand why they do.

This is the defense Leon Bible builds on. In the appendices of his book on Dake, Bible compares Dake's definition of the Trinity with the Moody Handbook of Theology and concludes: "Without doubt, Dake's view of the Trinity is compatible with the orthodox view as stated in Moody. There can be no argument here."⁸ He quotes Dake's definition that the Trinity means "the union of three persons... in one (unified) Godhead or divinity, so that all three persons are one in unity and eternal substance, but three separate and distinct persons as to individuality."⁹ At first glance, that sounds right.

But Bible quotes only the sentence that uses the words. He does not quote the sentences that define them. In any book, some sentences use words and other sentences define them. The defining sentences are the ones that govern. Here is the defining sentence for the word that carries this whole argument.

Read that again slowly. A person, for Dake, is a rational being with a body. Not a mode of existence. Not a relation within one being. A separate individual with his own body, his own feelings, his own legal standing.

Now put that definition back into his affirmation. "Three persons in the Godhead," on his page, means three rational beings, each with a body. He says so himself, ten pages later:

And in the summary lesson he repeats it as the settled result: three persons, "each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit in the sense that all other persons have them."¹² Watch that last phrase. "In the sense that all other persons have them." Not in some higher, mysterious way. In the ordinary way you and I have a body.

Then look at the word "one" in his closing sentence. He tells us what he means by that word too. The three are one "as believers are supposed to be." His proof text is John 17:21. Believers are one in love, in purpose, in shared life. They are not one being. If that is the kind of oneness God has, then God is not one God. He is three Gods who agree perfectly. That is the whole question in this book. And it is not a conclusion I forced onto him.

This is exactly what Leon Bible hides. He quotes Dake saying the three are "one in unity and eternal substance" but never quotes Dake explaining that "one" means "not one in number" but only "one in unity," like a husband and wife becoming one flesh.¹³ He creates comparison charts that make Dake look orthodox by matching the surface phrases. He never sets Dake's own definitions beside those phrases. The words match. The meanings do not.

Two things before I move on. First, I did not make this the center of the argument. He did. He said the nature of God was the most important subject in the Bible, and he gave it lesson after lesson. Second, let me concede something gladly. Dake affirmed the full deity of Jesus Christ, and he defended it with force. He was not a Jehovah's Witness and he was not a Oneness teacher. Anyone who says so has not read him.¹⁵ The charge in this book is narrower than that, and heavier. It is that he divides the one God into three.

The full documentation is in Chapter 6. The biblical and creedal answer is in Chapter 7. The same-words pattern is mapped in Chapter 5. I will not re-argue any of that here. I only want the defense answered on its own ground. And on its own ground it fails. His best sentences cannot rescue him, because his own definitions are printed a few pages away.

2. "He simply took the Bible literally. You prefer scholars to Scripture."

Behind that rule is a story he tells about himself as a young man. He was taught things that did not match the plain words of his Bible, so he decided God could speak human language as clearly as men do. He stopped interpreting and started reading.¹⁷ If you have ever sat under teaching that spiritualized away a promise you needed, you know why that decision felt like coming up for air.

I want to honor the instinct. God does mean what He says. The Bible is not a code book for experts. A plumber with a concordance can understand the gospel. Dake was right to say so.

But the rule has to be tested. "Take it literally when it is at all possible." Well, it is possible to read "the LORD is my rock" as a claim about geology. It is possible to read "you shall take refuge under His wings" as a claim about feathers. Nothing in those verses prints a label that says "warning, this is a picture." What tells us they are pictures is the kind of writing they are, and the rest of Scripture, and ordinary sense. The rule cannot run itself. Something else always has to decide when "literal" is the right reading. That something else is the reader's own judgment.¹⁸

Try the rule on a sentence our Lord spoke. "I am the door."¹⁹ Is a literal reading possible? A door is a common object. The words are clear. But nobody looks for hinges, and nobody should. We know it is a picture because doors do not lay down their lives for sheep. That judgment is correct. It is also a judgment the reader made before the rule ever got to speak.

The full case is in Chapter 4. For this chapter, one point is enough. The charge against Dake is not that he read the Bible too plainly. The charge is that he read the Bible's picture-language for God as though it were a physical description, and then built a doctrine on it.

And the second half of this defense is simply not true of this book. I have not answered Dake with scholars. Look at what the answer chapters actually do. They open the Bible. Deuteronomy 6:4 in Chapter 7. Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 23 in Chapter 9. Isaiah 46 in Chapter 10. Acts 17:26 in Chapter 21. The creeds show up as witnesses to what the church has always read in those texts. They never show up as a rival authority.²⁰

3. "Critics quote him out of context."

I have read short articles about Dake that quote six words and move on. I have seen his sentences passed around without a page number, without a lesson, sometimes without even naming the book. That is not fair to any writer. It is especially not fair to a man who published more than a thousand pages of detailed argument.

This book was built to make the charge impossible. Every claim about what Dake taught is anchored in his own words, in a block quotation, with the work and the page number. Where the wording is the whole point, the paragraph is printed whole. Where the page itself is the evidence, the photograph is printed too. Every Study Bible citation names the edition, because the editions differ.²¹

Now let me do what the defense asks. Print the context and see whether it helps him:

Read that whole run of questions. The case gets stronger, not weaker. Three separate persons. Three separate bodies. Three separate souls. Three separate spirits. One in unity. Nothing was clipped. Nothing on the pages around it softens it. Context does not rescue his hardest sentences. Context supplies more of them.

Leon Bible never quotes this passage. His comparison charts in Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry match Dake's surface phrases with orthodox definitions. He lines up "one in unity and eternal substance" next to the Moody Handbook and declares the two identical.²³ But he never prints the paragraphs where Dake tells you what he means by "unity." He never quotes "not one in number, but one in unity." He never quotes the sentence about three separate bodies. That is not honest scholarship. It is selective quotation doing the very thing the defense accuses critics of doing.²⁴

So here is my open invitation, and I mean it. Check every citation in this book. The page numbers are real. The photographs are printed. The sources are listed in Appendix F. If I have clipped a quotation anywhere, I want to know about it.

4. "The race notes were his times, and they are gone now."

Its two halves are both partly true. Segregation was the law and the assumption of the world Dake lived in. And the note is gone from today's printings.²⁵

Both halves are answered fully in other chapters. The note itself, photographed and transcribed, is in Chapter 20 and Appendix B. The Bible's answer is in Chapter 21. The removal record is in Chapter 22. Here I only want to give the edge of each reply.

On his times: his times also had Acts 17:26. The men who printed that note owned the same Bible I own. The verse says God made every nation of men of one blood. Dake's own rule was that a doctrine must rest on plain Scripture. Thirty reasons stacked underneath a verse that says the opposite is not a plain reading of anything.²⁶

On the removal: taking racism out of a study Bible is good, and I say that without irony. But it was done in silence. No preface said the note had been there. No notice told the reader what had changed, or why. A quiet correction protects the author's name. An open one would have told the truth and freed the reader to ask: if that note could sit there for a generation, what else in these margins should I test?

5. "The fruit proves the tree. Look at the lives touched."

Beyond the numbers, there is the thing nobody can measure. Sunday school teachers who finally felt equipped. Young preachers who found a verse when they needed one. Believers who prayed for the sick because a note told them God still heals, and who watched Him do it. I am not going to sneer at those people. Some of them raised me in the faith.²⁷

But Scripture will not let us stop counting there. The reason is sobering. God Himself once set up a case where the signs came true and the teaching was still wrong.

The sign works. The doctrine is still tested. And our Lord said something harder, about people who will stand before Him with a list of results:

I am not quoting those verses at Dake. I am quoting them at the argument. If wonders done in Jesus' name do not settle a case, then book sales and grateful letters cannot settle one either.

But let me say the other half as clearly as I can. If you were converted with a Dake Bible open in your lap, you were converted. If you were healed while somebody prayed from a Dake note, you were healed. Nothing in this book takes any of that back. God has always worked through imperfect instruments, and every teacher any of us has ever sat under was one. The question was never whether God blessed people through this book. He plainly did. The question is whether that blessing settles what the notes teach about Him. Scripture says it does not.

And here is the part of this defense I most want you to see. Much of the good that came through the Dake Bible came through the Scripture on the page, not through the notes in the margin. The center column was never in dispute. When a woman read Isaiah 53 in that Bible and believed, she was helped by Isaiah. Giving the notes credit for the Bible's fruit is like thanking the frame for the painting.

6. "Leave the man alone. He cannot answer you."

This is not really an argument. It is a scruple, and a decent one. There is something ugly about arguing with the dead. They cannot clarify. They cannot correct a misreading. They cannot say, "That is not what I meant."

First, he is still teaching. His notes are open on pulpits and kitchen tables this Sunday. A book that keeps teaching keeps being answerable. The reader who is being taught has a right to a second opinion.

Second, his own words are the fairest hearing print can give a dead man. He cannot restate his view, so this book lets him state it himself, at length, in his own sentences, with his own definitions attached. That is more of a hearing than most critics give the living.

Third, he did the same thing himself. He named living, admired men and said flatly that they were wrong:

Look at how he does it. He quotes them. He admires them out loud. Then he says they are wrong. I have tried to write this entire book in that same posture, with one addition: I have quoted him at greater length than he quoted them, so nobody has to take my word for anything.

The Weighing

He affirmed the Trinity, and his own definitions turn the affirmation into something else. He took the Bible literally, and the rule could not tell him when literal was the right reading, so his judgment decided and then hid behind the rule. His critics have sometimes clipped him, and full context makes his case worse, not better. His times shaped him, and his times had the same verse his note contradicted. His fruit is real, and Scripture will not accept fruit as a verdict. He is dead and cannot answer, and his notes have not stopped speaking.

Set all six side by side and one shape appears in every one. Each defense is true as far as it goes. Each one stops a step early. He used the word "Trinity." Step further and read his definition. He honored the plain sense. Step further and ask who decides when the plain sense applies. Critics do clip him. Step further and print the whole paragraph. His times were what they were. Step further and open the verse his times also had. The fruit is real. Step further and read what our Lord says about fruit. He cannot answer back. Step further and notice that his book has not stopped talking.

Leon Bible's defense follows the same pattern. He quotes the surface, compares it to orthodoxy, and declares a match. He never follows the definitions one step further. His comparison chart matches Dake's phrase "one in unity and eternal substance" against the Moody Handbook, but he never sets Dake's own explanation beside it: "not one in number, but one in unity."³⁰ In another appendix, Bible argues that Dake cannot be a tritheist because "nowhere in Dake's writings do we find him saying that there are 'three gods.'"³¹ That is true the way it is true that no one calls his own system "polytheism." But what do you call three separate beings, each with his own body, soul, and spirit? The name you give it does not change what it is.

Now the finding of this book, stated as carefully as I know how. Finis Dake used the vocabulary of the historic Christian faith and, on his own printed pages, gave those words meanings the church has never confessed: three divine Persons who are separate beings, each with His own body, soul, and spirit, one only in the way that agreeing persons are one.³²

Let me say plainly what that finding does not include. It does not include the charge that he denied the deity of Christ. He did not. It does not include his Arminianism. A believer can hold that salvation may be forfeited and stand in the middle of Protestant orthodoxy, in the company of millions.³³ It does not include his premillennial hope, his belief in healing, or his conviction that the gifts of the Spirit are for today. I share the last two of those. And it does not include his industry, which was extraordinary.³⁴

There is a difference between defending Dake and defending the people who love his Bible. The two get confused constantly. This book has never been against the second group. Not for one page. The reader I have kept in view all along is a Sunday school teacher with a soft-covered Bible and three generations of pencil in the margins, who has taught faithfully for thirty years and would be sick to learn he had been passing on a teaching about God that the church has never held. Nothing in this chapter is aimed at him. He was handed something, and he trusted the people who handed it to him. That is what any of us would have done.

And that is why the defenses matter so much. When we defend a teaching because good people hold it, we have stopped defending the teaching and started defending the people. That is love doing a job it was never given. Love the people. Test the teaching. The two were never in competition.

Two Things You May Still Want to Say

By this point in the book, two questions usually come up. Neither one is a defense of Dake. They are the reader's own questions, and they are fair.

The first is practical. "All right, what do I do with my Dake Bible?" That is the right question. I am not going to answer it at the tail end of an argument chapter, because it deserves better than that. The whole of Chapter 25 is my answer. I will only say this much now: nobody is asking you to burn anything, and the Scripture in the center of the page was never the problem.

That verse is not addressed only to Dake's notes. It is addressed to this book too. I would rather be tested than believed. The Bereans in Acts 17 were commended for checking an apostle.³⁵ If Paul could be checked, I can be checked. So can any margin note in any Bible on any shelf.

The Words, One More Time

Everything in this chapter came down to one word. Let me set it on the table before I close.

That is this whole chapter in one box. The defenses are not stupid, and the people who make them are not dishonest. The defenses simply stop one step too early. They show that Dake used the church's words. Nobody disputes that. They never ask what he meant by them. That is the only question that decides anything.

I will end where I began, with the line he printed on his own title page. "Before you convince me of error, first demonstrate that you understand what I say." I have tried to earn that for twenty-four chapters. I have quoted him at length. I have printed his definitions. I have conceded what he got right and kept his in-house positions out of the charge. And having understood him as well as I know how, I have to say that the God on those pages is not the God of Scripture. The difference is not small.

The best defense of Finis Dake, taken seriously and weighed honestly, turns out to be a case for reading him more carefully. That is the only thing this book has ever asked anyone to do.

And there is a mercy in it. The God the notes shrank is larger than the notes. He is one, not three. He is everywhere, not somewhere. He knows the end from the beginning. And He is able. That God does not need defending from His own people. He only needs to be seen. And He is easiest to see in the very Book that Dake spent his life telling ordinary readers they could understand for themselves.³⁸

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, Inc., 1950), title page. The line is printed under the author's name and his list of works, and is attributed on the page to "Chas. G. Finney." Dake chose the epigraph; the wording is Finney's. Publication details are taken from the resident copyright page: "Copyright 1950 By Bible Research Foundation, Inc., P. O. Box 4446, Atlanta 2, Georgia, U. S. A."

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, or Eternal Mysteries Simplified, enlarged ed. (copyright 1950 by Finis Jennings Dake), Preface. The resident copy carries the later imprint of Dake Bible Sales, Inc., Lawrenceville, Georgia. No printed page numbers survive in this digitization, so citations are given by section heading. Dake writes of himself in the third person throughout the preface.

↑ 3. Scripture in this chapter is quoted from the New King James Version unless noted. Scripture quoted inside Dake's own material is his King James text and is reproduced as he printed it.

↑ 4. God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, Inc.; copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake, renewed 1977), Foreword (unpaginated front matter). The full sentence continues: "The Bible is recognized as its own interpreter, and there is a continual emphasis on 'rightly dividing the word of truth.'" The foreword is publisher's front matter rather than Dake's own composition and is cited here as the course's self-description.

↑ 5. Leon Bible, Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Publishing, 2006). Bible's arguments are reported throughout the critical articles at DakeBible.org (https://learntheology.com/dake/responding-to-dakes-defenders), which quote and cite his appendices at length: Appendix Nine ("Trinity"), Appendix Ten ("Tri-theism"), and Appendix Eleven ("The Mormon Doctrine of God"). Where this chapter engages Bible's defenses, it relies on these detailed secondary reports, which quote his text with page references. Where those reports quote Dake himself, the quotations are verified against the resident God's Plan for Man text. The DakeBible.org articles are by the present author and are cited here as his own published work.

↑ 6. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, 500 (page per the embedded running heads in the resident text file). Internal single quotation marks reproduce Dake's own marks around "one Lord" and "one God."

↑ 7. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55–56. The sentence begins at the foot of p. 55 and finishes on p. 56; the running head that falls inside it in the digitized text has been removed from the quotation. Dake's scripture references are reproduced as printed.

↑ 8. Leon Bible, Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry, Appendix Nine ("Trinity"), as quoted in Matthew Friend, "Exposing the Deception: How Leon Bible Misleads Readers About Dake's Trinity Doctrine," DakeBible.org (2025), https://learntheology.com/dake/exposing-the-deception-how-leon-bible-misleads-readers-about-dakes-trinity-doctrine.html. Bible compares Dake's language against four requirements drawn from Paul Enns, The Moody Handbook of Theology (Chicago: Moody Press, 1989).

↑ 9. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 51, definition 8 ("Trinity") in his list of defined terms. The definition is also quoted by Leon Bible in Appendix Nine.

↑ 10. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 50, section I, "Definition of the Terms Used," item 5. The same section defines "God" (item 1), "Godhead" (2), "one" (3), and "in" (4). Lesson Four begins on p. 49 per the resident contents page.

↑ 11. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 60.

↑ 12. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, 498, under the heading "Over 500 Scriptures Proving a Divine Trinity." The full sentence reads: "There are over 500 plain scriptures that refer to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as being THREE SEPARATE AND DISTINCT PERSONS, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit in the sense that all other persons have them." Capitals are his.

↑ 13. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 51: "The Hebrew word for one is echad, meaning a united one, not an absolute one." He also cites Genesis 2:24 as a parallel for the sense of "one." See also the Dake Study Bible note on Deuteronomy 6:4, where Dake writes: "The doctrine of the Trinity is simply stated as one in unity, not in number." Leon Bible's omission of these defining statements is documented at length in Matthew Friend, "How Leon Bible Misrepresents Dake's Tri-theism," DakeBible.org (2025), https://learntheology.com/dake/how-leon-bible-misrepresents-dakes-tri-theism.html.

↑ 14. The method is developed at length in Chapter 5 and gathered as a reference list in Appendix D. It is not a trick invented for Dake; it is ordinary reading. When any writer supplies a definition, later uses of the term are read in light of it.

↑ 15. Dake argues the point at length: the Son is called God (Isa. 9:6; Heb. 1:8; John 20:28), and he presses those texts against those who denied Christ's deity. The disagreement in this book is about the unity and simplicity of the divine being, not about the deity of the Son.

↑ 16. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 782, in the exposition of Daniel 7. The same rule appears in the publisher's foreword to the volume and again in the preface to Revelation Expounded in capitals: "THAT OF TAKING THE BIBLE LITERALLY WHEREIN IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE."

↑ 17. Dake, Revelation Expounded, Preface: "As a young man the author was taught many things that were contrary to the plain Scriptures themselves when taken literally." He describes deciding that God "meant what He said and said what He meant."

↑ 18. The technical name for this difficulty is that the rule is not self-applying: it supplies no criterion for the possibility it appeals to. Chapter 4 works this out with examples from Dake's handling of divine body-language, of Daniel 7, and of Genesis 1.

↑ 19. John 10:9 (NKJV): "I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture." Dake himself read this figure as a figure. The point is not that he missed a metaphor here, but that recognizing it required a judgment his stated rule does not supply.

↑ 20. On the relation of creed to Scripture in this book, see Chapter 7. The creeds are treated as the church's summary of Scripture, always shown resting on texts, never set above them.

↑ 21. The edition rule matters because the text of the Dake Bible is not stable across printings. Pre-1988 printings are the baseline for what Dake taught; printings from 1988 onward are evidence of what his publishers changed. See Chapter 22 and Appendix C.

↑ 22. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 55. The digitized text carries the usual scanning artifacts (words split by column breaks). These have been rejoined and nothing else has been altered.

↑ 23. Leon Bible, Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry, Appendix Nine, as reported in Friend, "Exposing the Deception," DakeBible.org. Bible compares Dake's definition with Paul Enns's four-point criteria and concludes the views are compatible. The present author's response, demonstrating what Bible's charts omit, appears in that article and in Friend, "Another Article on How Leon Bible Misleads Readers About Finis Dake's Trinity Doctrine," DakeBible.org (2025), https://learntheology.com/dake/another-article-on-how-leon-bible-misleads-readers-about-finis-dakes-trinity-doctrine.html.

↑ 24. The pattern is consistent across Bible's appendices. In Appendix Eleven, on the charge of similarity to Mormon theology, Bible argues that Dake's teaching is different because Dake says God has a "spirit body" rather than the Mormon "flesh and bones." But both doctrines give God a body with parts, limit Him to a location, and make the Godhead three separate beings. The distinction is in material, not in structure. See Friend, "Dake and Mormonism: How Leon Bible Misleads Readers," DakeBible.org (2025), https://learntheology.com/dake/dake-and-mormonism-how-leon-bible-misleads-readers.html.

↑ 25. Dake died in 1987. The note at Acts 17:26 on New Testament p. 159 of the pre-1988 printings is documented, photographed, and transcribed in Chapter 20 and Appendix B; the removal and the replacement note are documented in Chapter 22 and Appendix C.

↑ 26. Acts 17:26 (NKJV): "And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings." The exegesis, including the second clause, is in Chapter 21.

↑ 27. Bible Truths Unmasked, back matter advertisement for the correspondence course: "the fruit and cream of the author's life's work" of more than seventy-five thousand hours of study. The labor claims are documented and weighed in Chapter 2; they are cited here only because the fruit defense leans on them.

↑ 28. The context of Matthew 7:22–23 is the test of a tree by its fruit (vv. 15–20). The fruit our Lord names in the verses that follow is not results but obedience to the Father's will (v. 21). Deuteronomy 13:1–3 makes the same point from the other direction: a sign that comes to pass is not a warrant for the teaching attached to it.

↑ 29. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 53. The pages that follow quote several such writers directly in order to disagree with them.

↑ 30. Dake, Dake Annotated Reference Bible, note on Deuteronomy 6:4, as quoted in Friend, "How Leon Bible Misrepresents Dake's Tri-theism," DakeBible.org: "The doctrine of the Trinity is simply stated as one in unity, not in number." See also God's Plan for Man, 51, on echad. Leon Bible's Appendix Ten argues that Dake cannot be a tritheist because tritheism "denies the unity of the essence of God and holds to three distinct Gods," and since Dake uses the phrase "unity and eternal substance," the charge fails. The present author's response is that Dake redefines "unity" as agreement in purpose (not unity of being), which is exactly what tritheism holds.

↑ 31. Leon Bible, Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry, Appendix Ten, as quoted in Friend, "Exposing the Deception," DakeBible.org. The present author's response: Dake does not use the phrase "three Gods" because he has redefined "one God" to accommodate three separate beings. The absence of the label does not change the substance of the teaching.

↑ 32. The naming of this teaching, with the care the naming requires, is done in Chapter 6. The historic confession it departs from is set out in Chapter 7 and compared line by line in Appendix E.

↑ 33. Conditional security is an ordinary Arminian position, held by whole denominations of orthodox Christians, and this book has never treated it as heresy. Where the book does press Dake on a related point, the issue is different: his extension of human free agency into a limit on God's power and knowledge. See Chapters 10 and 11.

↑ 34. On the industry and its documentation, see Chapter 2; on the reach of the finished Bible, Chapter 23.

↑ 35. Acts 17:11 (NKJV): "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." The commendation is given to hearers who checked an apostle.

↑ 36. God's Plan for Man, Foreword: "First publisher of the work was Bible Research Foundation, Inc., a non-denominational, non-profit organization, orthodox and fundamental in faith, devoted to propagating the Gospel through its published Bible truths."

↑ 37. The historic definition and its wording, including the Athanasian Creed's refusal of three Gods, is handled in Chapter 7, which owns it. The Greek terms behind the confession (ousia, "being," and hypostasis, "person") are glossed there.

↑ 38. 2 Timothy 2:15 (NKJV): "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." The phrase was one of Dake's favorites, and the publisher's foreword to God's Plan for Man claims it as the course's continual emphasis. The counsel for the reader who wants to do exactly that is Chapter 25.