My Impressions of the Encounter Between Joshua Sijuwade and Dan McClellan

I was watching another conversation involving Dan McClellan, but this time it was with Joshua Sijuwade about the development of the Trinity, and honestly, this conversation clarified the debate much more for me.

What Joshua was defending was not the very simplified “layman Trinity” that people usually attack online. He was defending what he called conciliar Trinitarianism, meaning the Trinitarianism articulated in the councils and broadly held throughout the first millennium of Christianity.

And what fascinated me is that this model is much more precise than the caricatures people often debate against.

Joshua’s point was basically this:

According to conciliar Trinitarianism, there is one God, the Father, because there is only one monarchia, one ultimate source or font of divinity.

The Son and the Spirit are distinct persons who possess the exact same divinity as the Father, but relationally:

the Father possesses divinity fundamentally
the Son possesses the same divinity by eternal generation/begetting
the Spirit possesses the same divinity by eternal procession.

So the distinction is grounded in relation and monarchy, while the unity is grounded in essence.

And what struck me is that Dan McClellan basically conceded that this model is much more coherent and much less problematic than the kind of Trinity most laypeople articulate.

But then Dan responded by saying that if you stop random Christians on the street, they probably will not explain the Trinity this way.

And honestly, I found that completely irrelevant.

Laymen misunderstand literally everything.

Ask random people to explain:

evolution
quantum mechanics
constitutional law
philosophy of mind.

Most people will explain them badly.

That says nothing about whether the actual scholarly or authoritative model is coherent.

So to me, that objection has no bearing on whether conciliar Trinitarianism itself is philosophically coherent. It is simply a problem of poor catechesis and education among lay Christians.

The much more interesting disagreement came later in the discussion.

And what became clear is that the disagreement is not really about whether Jesus is an agent, image, representative, or mediator of God.

Joshua explicitly agrees that Jesus is all of those things.

The disagreement is about whether Jesus is:

merely a divine image/agentor
a divine image/agent plus possessing the exact same divinity as the Father.

And honestly, this suddenly clarified the entire debate for me.

Because this connects directly to the issues I already had while watching responses to Dan McClellan earlier.

Dan’s broader framework basically says:

High Christology does not necessarily imply inclusion into the divine identity because Jewish literature already contains exalted agents.

And again, I agree that exalted agents exist in Judaism.

That part is not controversial.

But my hesitation has always been this:

Does the exalted-agent framework actually explain the entire cluster of things attributed to Jesus?

Because the issue is not: “Is Jesus an agent?”

Of course he is.

The issue is: “Is Jesus only an agent?”

That’s the real debate.

And Joshua’s articulation of conciliar Trinitarianism directly addresses that point.

Because his argument is not: “Jesus is not an agent.”

His argument is: “Jesus is the divine agent plus.”

Meaning:

Yes, Jesus is the perfect image, mediator, and representative of God.

But he is also said to possess the exact same divinity as the Father.

And honestly, this maps much more naturally onto the concerns I already had with the exalted-agent model.

Because again, when I look at Jewish exalted agents, I see:

partial delegation
limited prerogatives
explicitly derived authority
qualified representations of divine power.

But with Jesus, the concentration and proportion of divine prerogatives feel qualitatively different.

Take the Shema.

Paul reformulates it in 1 Corinthians 8:6 and includes Jesus within its identity language.

Why was Moses not included in the Shema if agency alone suffices?

Why did Jewish traditions not rewrite the Shema around Enoch or Metatron?

Neither Moses, nor Metatron, nor the Angel of the Lord, as far as we know, was ever included into the Shema the way Jesus was.

That is really worth pausing on.

Then there are the unqualified claims Jesus makes:

“I am.”“I am the bread of life.”“Glorify me with the glory I had with you before the foundation of the world.”

Again, I am not a Greek expert, and I’m still exploring the debate carefully.

But many of these claims feel much less qualified than the kinds of claims typically made about exalted agents in Jewish literature.

And the “before the foundation of the world” statement especially still bothers me for the exalted-agent framework.

Because agency fundamentally implies representation.

A mediator mediates to someone.

But before creation, before the world existed, before humans existed, before creation itself existed, what exactly is being mediated?

Why does Jesus already possess glory “with” the Father before creation?

That sounds much stronger than simply: “God planned me beforehand.”

Another thing that really caught my attention in this conversation is that Dan leans heavily on the idea that many of the philosophically precise distinctions later found in conciliar Trinitarianism are not explicitly articulated in the earliest Fathers or in the earliest Christian writings.

Now, maybe that is true.

But honestly, I don’t think that settles the issue at all.

And here I think something said earlier in another conversation between Than and Tim becomes very important. I think it was by Trent Dougherty

The quote was:

“We are not cognitive prisoners of the past.”

That line really stuck with me.

Because it means later conceptual articulation is not automatically invalid simply because it is later.

Sometimes later reflection functions as higher-order evidence about earlier data.

We can trace the genealogy of concepts and recognize that later terminology may simply articulate more precisely what earlier people were already pointing toward without possessing the same conceptual grammar.

And this reminds me of examples from epistemology.

Before Freud, people could still observe psychological repression even though they lacked the word “repression.”

Before the concept of sexual harassment existed, people still recognized the phenomenon even though they lacked the conceptual vocabulary.

The phenomenon existed before the terminology.

Or take something even simpler like birth and conception.

The anatomically precise understanding of human reproduction came much later.

But does that mean when ancient people talked about birth or conception they were talking about something fundamentally different from what we now know birth actually is?

Of course not.

Even though they lacked the later conceptual framework, they were still referring to the same underlying reality.

And I think this matters enormously for the Trinity debate.

Because even if early Fathers like Irenaeus or Ignatius of Antioch did not yet use terms like homoousios, that does not automatically mean the later term is disconnected from what they were pointing toward.

The later articulation can still identify the same reality more precisely.

And honestly, this is exactly what conciliar Trinitarianism seems to me to be doing.

The New Testament already presents:

Jesus as divine
yet distinct from the Father
yet not another God.

Post-apostolic Christianity continues wrestling with the same data.

The councils later articulate this with more philosophical precision:

distinction grounded in monarchy and relation
unity grounded in essence.

And what is interesting is that Dan himself does not really seem to reject the distinction side of the equation.

He seems to agree that the New Testament presents both distinction and unity between the Father and the Son.

The real disagreement is about the nature of the unity.

Joshua argues that the unity is unity of essence and divinity.

Dan argues that the exalted-agent framework sufficiently explains the data without requiring this “plus” of shared divine essence.

And honestly, this is where I still remain unconvinced by Dan’s framework.

Because I think the exalted-agent model still struggles to explain the “plus” aspects of Jesus’ identity in the New Testament.

Especially things like:

inclusion into the Shema
preexistent shared glory
the concentration of divine prerogatives
the proportion of seemingly unqualified divine claims.

At least from where I currently stand, the conciliar model actually seems to explain those features more naturally than the exalted-agent model does.

I’m still exploring all this, of course.

But this conversation definitely sharpened for me what the real disagreement actually is.

The debate is not: “Is Jesus an agent?”

The debate is: “Is Jesus merely an exalted divine agent, or is he an exalted divine agent who also possesses the exact same divine essence as the Father?”

And i think Dan Conceded enough that we can safely challenge him and argue safely for the Plus

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WLauwRcfgbY&si=PqZEAnz0hp4VFRBg

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