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10 Tricks This Scholar Uses to Deny the Trinity || SLP632 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Dan McClellan is a scholar of the Bible, but he really does not like the Trinity.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Here's how he characterizes it.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Fundamentally, the Trinity is an attempt to construct a philosophically defensible framework that allows us to solve an algebra problem that we find in the Bible.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: In this video, I'm going to show how Dr.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Dan McClellan gets the Trinity so badly wrong, why the Trinity is not a maths problem.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: It is the good news that God is love and you're invited.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: And along the way, I'm going to highlight 10 different tricks that Dan McClellan has on display in these Trinity videos, but also more broadly in his work.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: He uses these tricks in lots of his videos.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just worth being aware of these sleights of hand.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you give the channel a subscribe if you like talking about the Bible and Jesus and God and how all these things make sense of life?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: So let's dive down into how and why Dan McClellan misunderstands the Trinity.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the first trick that we're going to be uh exploring from Dan McClellan is strawmanning.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: It is to put the alternative position as rejectably as you possibly can, and then you take a flamethrower to that straw man and declare yourself to be the winner.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: This is how Dan McClellan characterizes Trinitarian theology.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Fundamentally, the Trinity is an attempt to construct a philosophically defensible framework that allows us to solve an algebra problem that we find in the Bible.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the fundamental problem is how is it that Jesus can both not be God and also simultaneously be God?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: I actually like that second sentence.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: That second sentence is actually what has driven Trinitarian theology, and it's perfectly understandable.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is clearly presented as of God, and he is God.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: You can try desperately to explain away all the divine claims and actions of Jesus and to try to explain away why everybody was treating him as God in the Gospels or in the epistles.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: To reject the divine claims of Jesus, I think, is just an example of dogma over data.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get to dogma over data in a second, but he is of God in the Gospels and He is God in the Gospels.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: As the Son of the Father filled with the Spirit, he is bringing the name and the nature and the authority and the presence of God in all he does.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's essentially what the Gospels are all about.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to be reflective in any way about Jesus, then you will find yourself doing Trinitarian theology.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody has to do Trinitarian theology, whether they end up as an Orthodox Trinitarian or not.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: When you look at Jesus, you might think that, okay, Jesus is inferior to the one he calls God.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point you are called a subordinationist or an Arian, named after Arius the Arch heretic.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: You might look at Jesus and think that Jesus just is the absolute God who has descended to earth and taken flesh.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, you are what's called a Sabalian, named after Sabalius, a heretic who thought that, or a modalist, that really the three persons are just different modes of the one absolute God.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: You might look at Jesus and he says that he's been sent from the Father, and you might think of Jesus as a separate God, a separate and separable God from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit is likewise separate and separable, and at that stage we would call you a tritheist.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Or you might think that Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, and at that point you are an Orthodox Trinitarian.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: But if you are at all interested in relating Jesus to the one he calls Father, then you are doing Trinitarian theology.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: You might be an Aryan, you might be a modalist, you might be a tritheist, or you might be Orthodox, but you cannot escape Trinitarian theology.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: Not because everybody just loves to do maths problems.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Trinitarian theology is inescapable for anyone who's wanting to answer the question, who is Jesus?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I do think that Dan McClellan is straw manning the Trinitarian position.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's not an algebra problem where we have to solve for X.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: It is the existential problem that is thrust upon the human race when we deal with Jesus, who claims to be from the Father and is the great I am.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: But that's trick number one, straw manning.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: But as Dan addresses the issue of why Christians embrace Trinitarian theology, we'll observe trick number two, poisoning the well.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: Let's see what Dan says.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: There are two reasons that when we tried to construct this philosophically defensible framework, we ran into internal contradictions that we just couldn't resolve.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: No matter how far down we dug, once we hit bedrock, there was stuff left over.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: There were questions that were raised by the process that could not be resolved.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: The first is that we approached the Bible with the presupposition of univocality, that it all had to be speaking with one single unified and consistent voice and from one single unified and consistent perspective.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so the authors had to be made to be agreeing with each other.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: They could not be representing different perspectives on the nature and the relationship of God and Jesus.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, in a second we will discuss specifically what univocality is, particularly, but for now, let's just notice the broader trick that's called poisoning the well.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes poisoning the well in debate is about framing a person as unworthy of your trust in advance of them actually telling you anything.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you can poison the well by making somebody mistrust a person before they've even had the chance to learn from them.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: But you can not just poison the well as regards a person, you can poison the well as regards a concept or a philosophical idea or a posture or a position that somebody might take.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: You can cast that position in such negative terms that basically the person, even before they've actually considered taking that position, just says, oh gosh, well, I can never draw from that well.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe it's stupid to believe, in this case, that the Bible underneath it all is a unified whole or something like that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if Dan says boo hiss enough to the unity of the Bible and gives it a term like univocality and maybe even puts some scare quotes around it, then it makes that idea sound naive or nuts or nasty or low status or imbecilic.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so then I'm going to be very reticent to actually go anywhere near something that might sound like univocality.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: The well has been poisoned, as it were, and you can see why Dan might want to poison that well, because as soon as you take the Bible seriously as a whole, you might start to become a Trinitarian.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: You might start to see that John's vision of who God is from the beginning is indeed the correct vision, that Jesus is indeed Lord and that the New Testament is actually a correct assessment of what the Hebrew Bible has always been saying.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, if you start to see the unity of the Bible, you'll become a Trinitarian pretty quickly.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's very important to poison this well.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: If you think John is right about Genesis, then you must conclude that in the beginning was the Word.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: In the beginning was the Son of the Father who was in the bosom of the Father, and that no one has ever seen God the Father, but God the Son has always been the one making him known.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: And as soon as you start to see Jesus as Lord in that sense, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, you're basically a hop, skip, and a jump from being a Trinitarian, and we can't have that.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you need to poison that well.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: This trick number two, poisoning the well, is very much like straw manning, but it's it's very strategically deployed.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's a preemptive strike against a position that is very important for Trinitarians to hold.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: But if in advance I'm afraid of ever looking for or affirming the unity of the Bible, then the anti-Trinitarians win.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's the usefulness of poisoning the well.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but let's dive down into this specific issue of univocality.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is trick number three that Dan uses.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: He'll disparage the unity of scripture.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Let's hear him say it again.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: That it all had to be speaking with one single unified and consistent voice and from one single unified and consistent perspective.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: And at this point, we want to say, I don't know, man.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, everybody is dealing with multiplicity and unity at all times.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Every kind of study, um, you need to mark out the domain of your inquiry, and you're gonna draw a line around stuff, and you're gonna say, this stuff belongs within the circle, and other stuff does not belong within the circle, and there's going to be a multiplicity of things that is within the unity that you've already defined.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody's dealing with multiplicity and unity, and especially in the realm of biblical studies, wh what is the Bible, right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: What why these particular books?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And and even if you say, well, I I don't treat them canonically, I don't I don't treat them as uh, you know, exceptional documents, well, you've still got a speciality.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, why ancient Near Eastern tribes and languages and cultures and and and not other like you're going to see certain kinds of unity and you're going to see certain kinds of multiplicity.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody's involved in unity and multiplicity.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's true that Christians see a certain kind of unity.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: We see that Jesus is Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, and that the New Testament is basically correct about its assessment about how the New Testament belongs to the Old Testament and how both witness to Christ.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that is a unity that Christians believe in, but we also believe in a heck of a lot of multiplicity.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: The voices across the whole canon of scripture that testify to this truth testify to it in so many different ways.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, just check out how the name of the Lord is declared in Scripture as one who is abounding in Hesed and Emmet, grace and truth.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: It gets declared in Exodus 34, and then it's taken up by and voiced differently in Exodus and Numbers and Nehemiah and Psalms and Joel and Jonah.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then in John chapter 1, we've got this Greek-speaking guy, John, who is like delivering to us this same truth, but from a very different perspective in a different language with a whole bunch of different conceptuality, but there's a unity, like the Lord is appearing, and he is abounding in Hesed and Emmet, in grace and truth, Caratos and Alathios, right?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Here is uh an incredible unity, but also incredible diversity.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a there's there are polyphonous voices that are singing in harmony with one another, and we do think that there's a harmony, but univocality is just a straw man poisoning of the well to make us not look for and not accept when we see unity.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: But Christians really do believe in diversity and polyphony, actually, when it comes to it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: And and notice how in John chapter one, he he feels free to use a term that the Old Testament never uses.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: He uses this list this Greek word, monoganes, right?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the one and only, the monogones from the Father full of grace and truth.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's a word that was used by Middle Platonists, and it was used by Philo, for instance, as, you know, the word of God, the Logos is the one and only Son, this monoganes.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: And and John feels able to use a different kind of conceptuality, really, to describe the same reality.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And Christians have no problem with that.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: John is using a philosophical Greek term in the first century that was not used by Moses or Isaiah, right?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that's cool.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Christians are absolutely fine with that.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: We believe there's a rich diversity in these library of texts.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: The language of Moses is different and very significantly different to the language of David, which is very significantly different to the language of Isaiah, very significantly different to the language of John.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: The God who John is describing is the God who Isaiah was describing, is the God who Moses is describing.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't insist that if Moses was truly a believer in the Son of God, he should have used the word monoganes.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: We don't insist that Moses should have used a word that only John used.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: But neither do we say that Moses must have used homoousion topatri, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: That he must use the Nicene formulations in order to have something like a Christian doctrine of God.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: We don't think that at all.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Nicaea used language like Usia and Hippostarsis because they were dealing with a certain heretic who'd been duped by a certain philosophical system into denying Christ in his true deity.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: So they used those philosophical terms, but no Christian insists that John needed to use those same philosophical terms, or Isaiah or Moses.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now expecting that kind of univocality would be foolish, don't you think?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, Dan McClellan wants to insist that if John was anything like Trinitarian, he ought to use the language of the fourth century in the first century.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you ask me, that would be a really silly univocality to expect.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: And yet that's precisely the univocality that Dan McClellan expects.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: And all of this comes as part of a ploy to disparage Scripture's unity.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I just think you don't need to.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: You can let the Scriptures testify to themselves with this multiplicity of voices, and the headline story is not actually the fracture and the dissolution and the and the disunity of biblical voices.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think the headline story, and it's a remarkable story, is that there is a deeper unity across the centuries, across the cultures.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a unity that really does come together when the word becomes flesh in John chapter one, which we'll get to in just a moment.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: But that's trick number three to disparage the unity of the scriptures.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Here's trick number four chronological snobbery.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Dan thinks that not only does John's Gospel not really know how to put Jesus and God together, not only does the fourth century Council of Nicaea not know how to put Jesus and God together, but that for millennia we haven't really been able to understand how Jesus and God fit together because we've been ignorant of cognitive science.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what he says.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: The tools we brought to the issue were the canonical philosophical frameworks of the day, and they were inadequate to resolve an issue that arose as a result of intuitions about deity, about agency, about personhood.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Intuitions that we wouldn't be able to adequately interrogate for over a thousand years.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: But we couldn't just scrap it and start over with a new approach because we had imperial and institutional leaders breathing down our necks.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get to the imperial powers in a second, but just notice for now the chronological snobbery of what's going on.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: John, though he was writing about the word who was with God and was God, he can write those things, but he couldn't properly understand what he was writing about.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly the Nicene Trinitarians didn't understand what they were saying, and we had to wait for the development of cognitive science in order to understand personhood, etc.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that's in contradiction to what John chapter 1, verse 9 says, the true light who enlightens everyone was coming into the world.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: The Bible says that there has been a moment of enlightenment.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: That moment happened at the incarnation, it happened in the first century.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess we're forced with a question about whether enlightenment and post-Enlightenment scientific tools have been the real source of enlightenment in this world, or whether Jesus himself has been the true source of enlightenment in this world.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: And people are free to take off the Jesus lenses and put on other lenses and read the scriptures and read reality through the perspective of evolutionary psychology or sociology or Jungian archetypes.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: People are very free to wear those lenses and see if life makes more sense that way, to see if scripture makes more sense that way.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: But I do feel like we've been running the experiment for a very long time now.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the most fruitful view of the scriptures and the most fruitful view of life has been to see things through the lens of Jesus.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Speaking about seeing things through the lens of Jesus, have you done the 321 course yet?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: You can go and discover life according to Jesus by going to 321course.com.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: You start an account, in you go, and having encountered Jesus, the very first thing you learn is about the threeness of God.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: What an appropriate thing to do after watching this video.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: Go and do 321.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: Go to 321course.com, put in your email, pick a password, start an account.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: A thousand plus churches are doing it in person.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: Tens of thousands of people are doing it online.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: Why not be one of them?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: But we're tracking with the signature moves of Dan McClellan.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Trick number one is straw manning.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Trick number two is poisoning the well.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Trick number three is disparage the unity of scripture.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Trick number four is chronological snobbery.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: That brings us to trick number five, the halo effect.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps you know about the halo effect.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's where an expert in one field is considered to be an expert in all fields, whether or not they have expertise.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because their authority or their sense of authority bleeds over into other domains.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I am paying a compliment to Dr.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: McClellan by saying uh he might be subject to a halo effect.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: I am not subject to a halo effect.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: There's no chance of me having a halo effect because I'm not an expert in anything.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: I have no expertise to call from in order to pretend to an authority in a different domain.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: I have no expertise anywhere.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Dan McClellan does indeed have expertise in the realm of biblical scholarship, and I find myself learning a great deal when I hear him uh talking about the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East and ancient cultures, ancient literature, Second Temple Judaism, and he has some real expertise in the cognitive sciences and their application to biblical studies.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: I don't always go where he goes with that stuff, but I can recognize expertise when I see it.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: Having said all that, Dan McClellan is not, as far as I am aware, a scholar of early church history or patristics, theology, Christology, which is fine.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not an expert in those areas either.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they are a great passion for me, but I'm not an expert in those things.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: But I think it would be a mistake to allow Dr.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: McClellan's expertise in one area to provide a halo effect for all his other pronouncements.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: But I do fear that that's happening because uh when he tries to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that's recognizable to either early Christians or modern Christians, it rings incredibly hollow.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: And when he tries to tell a story about the road to Nicaea in 325, I just hear a lot of caricature that is unworthy, really, of a scholar.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Here he is explaining why he thinks the Trinity held sway in Nicaea in 325.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we had an emperor come flying in off the top rope to smash that subscribe button once we had some kind of answer.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, sign on the dotted line, or you're going to be exiled.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was imperial and institutional power that enforced a fundamentally inadequate explanation for what was going on in the Bible.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And ever since, it has been institutional power that has been there to enforce the Trinity and say this is what we believe, and you just have to accept it.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that just doesn't describe history fairly, I don't think.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I don't think it it describes what was motivating those theologians and missionaries, those bishops in 325.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very much hoping to have uh Dr.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: Josh Siowadi on the channel to talk about early church history and the theological and scriptural road that led us to Nicaea.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: So please do subscribe so that you can catch that one.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um but just briefly, in 325 AD there was a council called the Council of Nicaea, and they hammered out some language that was at times quite philosophical because they wanted to counter a heretic called Arius.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: Arius came along and said, I know who Jesus is.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is great, he's exalted, he's just not as god as God is God.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: And Arius said, think about it, Jesus is the son of God.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: And have you ever met a son who is equally old with his father?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: Of course not.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: There must have been a time when the son was not.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: And Arius was a great social media influencer, he could have been a great content creator, he probably would have been a public scholar with a big YouTube channel, and he even got people singing songs.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: There was a time when the son was not.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Arius was very influenced by Middle Platonism, a certain philosophical system that believed in an absolute God, and this absolute God could not really have a father-son union internal to his being.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: For Arius, there was the absolute God, and then Jesus fits underneath him.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he's very exalted, he's very high up, but Christ is the first creature of the absolute God.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so the God-Christ relationship is a relationship that happens external to God.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: The heretic Arius, Christ is very much on the creature side of the creator-creature line.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now, while Arius was getting some traction among Alexandrians and others, anyone who'd read their Bible, all the bishops, the theologians, they were dead against Arius.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: They could see the problem with Arius.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: And the problem with Arius is his Jesus is only a servant of the one God.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And this Jesus must be a recipient of some kind of grace, which must be earned, because the grace from the one God must be given to Christ by an act of will.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, Christ to some degree earns the grace of God and then passes on to us whatever he has.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: But whatever this Jesus can bring us into, he's not bringing us into the eternal life of God.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: The Aryan Christ is only bringing you into his own servitude.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's slavery, it's a denial of the gospel, and the overwhelming majority of theologians and bishops utterly rejected it.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, the bishops affect Affirmed the Nicene Creed, in which they recognized that Jesus is in on the eternal light, life, and love of God.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Athanasius was there at Nicaea.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: He wasn't a bishop yet in 325, but he turned out to be the greatest articulator of the Orthodox faith and the greatest defender of it against Arius and the Arians.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so Athanasius would say to Arius, yes, he is the eternal son, but he is eternally begotten of the Father.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: The eternal life of God is Father begetting Son in the joy of the Spirit.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: But that God from God relationship is internal to the life of God, and it's eternal in the life of God.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is eternally begotten of the Father.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: God from God, light from light, very God from very God.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Begotten, not made.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is definitely on the creator side of the creator creature distinction.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: Christ the Son is of one being with the Father.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: Homa Uzion Topatri.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: One being with the Father.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that he is Hama with the Father means that he is a distinct person, but he is also one with the Father.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: T.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: F.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: Torrence, the theologian, gives a great line about this.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: He says the Father-Son relation falls within the one being of God.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's crucial.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: The Father and the Son inhering and coexisting eternally, wholly and perfectly in one another.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: God is Father precisely as he is eternally the Father of the Son, and the Son is God of God, precisely as he is eternally Son of the Father.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: There is perfect and eternal mutuality between the Father and the Son, without any interval in being, time, or knowledge between them.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: This is not subordinationist, this is not even a eternal functional subordinationist.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: This is a fully divine son receiving all things from the fully divine Father.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: The Father-Son relation falls within the one being of God.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the Father-Son relationship was not a relationship between some divine absolute being and then Christ who exists on the outside of what it means to be God.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, the Father-Son union in the joy of the Spirit is eternal reality, which means love comes first.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: All the almighty power which the living God exercises towards creation and everything that is not God, all that power is conditioned by a love that comes first, a father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: Being in communion comes first.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Love comes first.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: And Christ, a full possessor of this eternal life and love, he took flesh to become what we are so that we can become what he is, brought right into the heart of the eternal life and love of God.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: Arius's Jesus, even though he was exalted, was ultimately a servant of the absolute God.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: He was outside of that which is truly divine.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Which means Arius's Jesus could only ever bring you into servitude towards the Almighty.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: The Nicene Jesus, the Athanasian Jesus, the Jesus of Scripture, becomes what we are, so that we might become what he is, brought to the eternal Father, filled by the Eternal Spirit, united to the Eternal Son.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is what the Christian means by the doctrine of the Trinity.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a maths problem.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's the good news that God is love and you're invited.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And no Christian, and I mean no Christian, is trying to construct a philosophical answer to an algebra problem.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: But Dan sort of gets away with his wild caricatures of theology and history because he's a scholar of the Bible.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's good that he's a scholar of the Bible, but let's not fall for the halo effects.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's trick number five.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Here's trick number six: the appearance of neutrality.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: Do you notice what t-shirt Dan is wearing here?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Data over dogma.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's also the name of the podcast that he's a co-host of.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's a cool slogan, it's a nice t-shirt.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: But Dan knows, I'm sure, that it's not as simple as the slogan makes out.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: The data and our hypothesis that explains the data, aka the dogma, right?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: The data and the dogma, they exist in a kind of dance, right?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: We are not neutral before we come to the data.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: And there are dogmatic convictions that are shaping us and that are directing us towards investigating certain data over other bits of data.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: Convictions that shape how we assess the data and sift the data and synthesize the data.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Dogma and data are in a kind of a dance together.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: But as we turn to our second video, I think we'll notice that there is a pre-existing framework of interpretation that Dan is kind of living with.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that dogma lives loudly within Dan McClellan.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Dogma is not simply the end result of synthesizing the data.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Dogma acts like a pair of lenses, and sometimes those lenses just don't help us to see.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: And you can present all the data in the world to someone with the wrong lenses on, and they just won't see it.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think we'll see that when we see Dan McClellan reacting to a video by Dan Patterson, the uh Australian Christian and apologist.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Dan Patterson's video was a reaction to an earlier Dan McClellan video about Jesus not being God in John's Gospel.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: So here is the video entitled Did I Misread John?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it begins as a perfect example of the seventh trick that I think Dan McClellan uses, which is always be confident.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Am I wrong about Jesus in the Gospel of John?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan, I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And at least one content creator seems to think so.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's take a look.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is not God in the Gospel of John, and no, not even in John 10 30.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm wrong on this one.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's the basic consensus of Johannine scholars who say Jesus does claim to be God in John's Gospel.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's certainly a possibility.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that it is the general consensus of Johannine scholars that Jesus claims to be God in the Gospel of John.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly it's a representative position, probably even a majority position.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that it goes so far as being a consensus, though.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I am working on a large-scale state of the field biblical studies survey that will be able to give me some hard data as soon as it's complete.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: So uh pending on that one, but even if it is a majority view or even a consensus view, I still don't think it makes much sense.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to explain exactly why in this video.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: So notice how Dan McClellan is expressing a minority opinion in this video.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: But I think what we'll see as we go through the video is that Dan McClellan is as sure as he is in any video.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, whether he's in a majority or a minority, whether it's a very marginal view or whether it's a very well-attested view, Dan McClellan seems to always be confident.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, we'll see that Dan can get very forthright indeed, even though his view is a minority opinion.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Trick seven, always be confident.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: But when that confidence is not always indexed to the certainty of your position, I think we have reason to be suspicious.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: Trick number eight, uh, misquote your interlocutor.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what Dan Patterson says, and then we'll see how Dan McClellan uh misquotes him, I think, and then misinterprets him.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly John believed Jesus was God.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, let's see it.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: The first three verses of John's opening prologue speak of Jesus' pre-existence as the Logos, being God alongside God in the beginning and creating everything.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: So two concerns here, and let's start with the one that's easier to dispatch.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, John 1 3 does not say that all things were created by the Logos.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: It very clearly says all things were created the through the Logos.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that that preposition indicates the Logos is a secondary agent of creation.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: The Logos is not the originator, the governing agent of creation, it is the instrument of or the intermediary or the secondary agent of creation.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: God the Father is the originating governing agent of creation.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: The logos is the means by which God the Father created all things.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the text quite explicitly says all things were created through the Logos, which is different from saying all things were created by the Logos.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the content creator, to the degree they are insisting that the text says the Logos created all things, is demonstrably in error there.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you go back, you'll notice that Dan Patterson does not use the word by, um, he doesn't use the word through either.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: He does say that Jesus, the word, is described as creating everything, which is demonstrably true.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: All things were created through him, by him.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: If all things are created through Christ, then Christ, the Anointed One, and the Father are on one side of the creator-creature divide, and all other things are on the other side of the line.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: So it's certainly true that the eternal father-son union can be spoken of as having a certain taxis, a certain ordering.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: The son does not eternally generate the father.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: The father does eternally generate the son.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: The son does not create all things through the father.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: The father creates all things through the son.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: There is a taxis, there is an ordering.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: None of this brings into question Trinitarian theology at all.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, it only makes Athanasius' point.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: The Father-Son union is on the God side of the creator-creature distinction.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Checkmate Arians.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: So Dan Patterson did not say what Dan McClellan took him to be saying, and then Dan McClellan did not actually answer the issue that is thrown up by John 1 and the first three verses.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: So he misquoted his interlocutor and then he evaded the point at hand.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: But then notice how Dan himself invokes univocality straight away.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: In short, to understand John 1 1C as identifying Jesus as God, one has to presuppose the Trinitarian Nicene notion of three persons simultaneously comprising a single essence or being.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that philosophical concept had never been articulated by the time of the composition of the Gospel of John.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: It would not be articulated for over a century later.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so it cannot be what the author of the Gospel of John intended, because it would not have been able to gain any purchase.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody would have understood what was going on there.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody would have gotten it.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: They would have interpreted it in entirely different ways, in ways that were already in circulation.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the biggest problem with trying to read Trinitarianism into John.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't exist yet.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so the author and all of the audience are all going to try to understand it according to interpretive conceptual frameworks that were already in circulation.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: Do you notice here that Dan McClellan is invoking univocality here?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: He's basically expecting John in the first century to be using fourth century language.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if he's not using fourth century language, then he cannot be in any way, shape, or form Trinitarian.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: When Christians expect univocality from the Bible, um, we are fools.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: But Dan is expecting univocality across centuries.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if he doesn't see the exact same language being used, he's going to conclude that John 1 is not Trinitarian.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: Why is he expecting univocality?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's already poisoned that well.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Why is he drinking from it?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: But then Dan goes on to talk about okay, it's not a Trinitarian framework in John chapter 1.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, it's a logos Christology, as though these are like radically different things.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the clearest one is the logos framework, which Philo talks about at some length, and which most scholars agree is to one degree or another undergirding what the author of the Gospel of John is trying to say.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we can see before and after the Gospel of John that Logos theology is not identifying the Logos as God, but a distinct, separate entity and being.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: So they might be the same essence in the sense that one human shares the same human essence as another human, but not in the same sense as God the Father is the same being as God the Son, even if they occupy distinct persons.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: That framework didn't exist yet.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is where I genuinely have a question for Dan.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Does Dan McClellan know that Athanasius had a logos Christology?
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: Does he know that pretty much everybody had a logos Christology in including Arius, right?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so to that degree, like it's very interesting to figure out okay, so this logos through whom God does a whole bunch of stuff, is that logos on the creator side of things or on the creature side of things?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: But to say that John 1 doesn't have any kind of Trinitarian formulation because instead it has a logos Christology reminds me of, you know, the story of um, you know, geologists in Yellowstone National Park who were uh, you know, seeing signs of volcanic ash everywhere.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: There are signs everywhere that there have been volcanic explosions.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: But you can imagine the geologist that says, Well, I look all around Yellowstone National Park and I can't see any volcanoes.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I guess I'm just gonna have to explain away all the ash and all the other signs that there have been volcanic eruptions uh over eons.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, you know the punchline to that story.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know that Yellowstone National Park doesn't have volcanoes within it?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yellowstone National Park is a volcano.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: It it is this kind of mega volcano.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and to look all throughout Yellowstone National Park and to try to identify a volcano that is a discrete entity like within the park would be a massive mistake, wouldn't it?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: They are within the volcano.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: And just because you can't point to a volcano from within Yellowstone National Park, does not mean you should start denying all the evidence for volcanic activity.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: There is evidence of volcanic activity because the whole thing is a volcano.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: And like watching Dan McClellan talk about John's gospel is a little bit like that.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's a little bit like looking at a geologist who's just insisting, no matter how much volcanic ash there is everywhere, how many signs there are that he's living within a volcano.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, it can't be a volcano because I don't see that outline of a volcano and it's it's not using fourth century language in John's gospel.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, it's not using fourth century language in the first century.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: But Dan McClellan here is pointing to pretty much every feature of Trinitarian theology and then saying, oh, but it can't be Trinitarian theology because nobody said the word hippostasis, you know, the philosophical term for person that was used in the fourth century.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because no one says homousion in John chapter 1, therefore it's not using Trinitarian conceptuality.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: And the whole irony is that he is expecting univocality, and it's precisely because he doesn't see universality that he then thinks, well, we must be talking about completely different doctrines of God.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: Let's jump on a little bit in the video.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: The interpretive lens that is required to understand John 1.1c as identifying the logos as a distinct person of the one God of Israel simply didn't exist when the text was written.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't just argue, well, we're gonna presuppose it anyway.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: You can't just say, well, it's what they came up later with because they just didn't have the words for it.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot communicate a conceptual framework that you can't talk about.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's not how that works.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: But then, okay.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, okay, so let's j let's bring John 1 up.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: So in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: He was with God in the beginning.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: Through him all things were made.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Without him nothing was made that has been made.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: Go down to verse 14.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, the monoganes, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth, which is the very name of God.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: John 1, verse 18.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son who is at the Father's side.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: He has made him known.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: From the beginning, God has always worked through his God from God.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: He has always worked through his word, who has constantly been communicating the Father from the beginning.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: He is God in the bosom of God and has been from the beginning.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: You don't need to use the language of Hama Uzi and Topatri.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: You don't need to use the language of Hippostarsus and Uzia.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: You don't need to use that language.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: You can use John's language just fine.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: If you're dealing with a middle platonist called Arius, who's got his dodgy doctrine of God, then you might need to use those philosophical terms.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: But that does not define what the doctrine of the Trinity is.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: The doctrine of the Trinity is defined by Jesus is Lord, even as he is Son of the Father filled with the Spirit.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: He is of God and he is God.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: He's distinct from the Father, but he's fully God.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: And Trinitarian theology, as it developed, said, okay, when we talk in distinction terms, we're using person, hypostasis.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: And when we're talking in terms of the being of God, we're using Usiya terms.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: These are helpful conceptual tools and clarifications along the way, but that doesn't make Trinitarian theology.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is God from God, light from light, very God from very God.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's what makes Trinitarian theology.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: And John's gospel is Trinitarian theology.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: He is the one sent from the Father, who has always enjoyed the eternal life of God from the beginning.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: Through him all things were made.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore he is creator, right?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Co-creator with the Father and the Spirit.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: But he is the one sent from the Father as the Great I Am.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: He is God and He's from God.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: He's distinct from the Father.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: I guess he's a distinct person.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: And yet he is the great I Am.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: I guess he is God.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: This is so much simpler, so much more clarifying, and so much more attractive than anything Dan McClellan brings to bear as an explanatory hypothesis for how to fit together this data.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_02: The dogma of the Trinity unlocks Scripture, gives to you a God who is love, proclaims to you a salvation that is unimprovable in its dimensions, and it has been the most fruitful interpretive lens through which people have done biblical studies in the history of biblical studies.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: By comparison, I don't find Nan McClellan's interpretive lenses to be compelling or helpful or inspiring or life-giving or any of those things.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: But let's keep going.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: So the question is how would the audience, how would the author have understood the notion of the logos as theos in a qualitative sense?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: And again, logos theology is the best candidate for the interpretive lens to understand this.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: And when we impose logos theology, it's kind of an emanationist theology.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a subordinate secondary agent theology which would agree with verse 3.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, certain theologians of Logos Christology go down this subordinationist route, Arius being one of them.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: But what does he mean by emanationists?
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: Athanasius is very happy to say Christ is eternally begotten of the Father.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: But all of this conversation is happening within Logos Christology.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: Logos Christology is not an alternative to Trinitarian theology.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure Dan McClellan understands that.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like which I I don't think I'm smarter than Dan McClellan.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I'm better read than Dan McClellan.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I have greater expertise in any of these things than Dan McClellan.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: But I do suspect he is coming at Scripture with a preordained doctrine of God, which will not allow him to take Jesus seriously.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: I forget the theologian who summarized Athanasius' theology.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: His whole theological method was the only system of thought into which Jesus Christ will fit is the one in which he's the starting point.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you start with the absolute deity and then ask the question, what are we now going to do with Jesus?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: You just can't do it.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Either he's going to dissolve into this absolute being of God, and then you've become a modalist, really.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: He's just one more form of the one God.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: You've lost all distinction.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: Or Jesus kind of sinks down into the realm of creaturiness, at which point you're a subordinationist, you're an Arian.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: The only system of thought into which Jesus Christ will fit is the one in which you take seriously what Jesus says about himself.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: He says in John 17, verse 24 Father, you loved me before the creation of the world.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: John says.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: That the Son who is God, he is God towards God, John chapter 1, verses 1 to 3, he is the God through whom God created all things, he is God in the bosom of God, John chapter 1, verse 18, that the Son-Father dynamic is internal to the life of God, not external.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: There has been infinite and eternal fullness, Father loving Son in the joy of the Spirit, Son loving Father and the joy of the Spirit.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's the doctrine of God that makes sense of the person of Jesus.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: To be Trinitarian is not simply to divinize Jesus, like you pump Jesus up and up and up and up, and you kind of thrust him up into the heavens, you turn him up to eleven and just yeah, pump him full of deity until he's as divine as you can possibly make him.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: That does not make you a Trinitarian, and that's not what Christians are trying to do.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: To be Trinitarian is not simply about the divinity of Jesus.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: To be Trinitarian is to be about the Christianization of God.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is infinitely and eternally in on what it means to be God.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I find John making those sorts of claims about Jesus, and I find the Apostle Paul making those sorts of claims about Jesus, and I find Revelation making those sorts of claims about Jesus, and I find Hebrews making those sorts of claims about Jesus.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: This is who Jesus is.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I find the Psalms making these sorts of claims about who is Jesus.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I find the prophets making these sorts of claims about who is Jesus.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: But to become Trinitarian, you cannot have a prefabricated doctrine of God and then try and fit the Son of the Father in there.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: He will either be out to one side and you're a tritheist, or he'll be underneath and you'll be a subordinationist, or he'll be dissolved within and you'll be a modalist.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: To be a Trinitarian, you need to start with the Father-Son union in the Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make Jesus God, though.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think a lot of people are ready for that discussion.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then at the end of the Gospel in John 20, 28, the Apostle Thomas abandons his doubts in the presence of the resurrected Jesus, confessing him as my Lord and my God.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: An open statement of divine worship that Jesus never corrects.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I address John 20, 28 in my video number McClellan 3098.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I have also addressed this many times in the past.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: And again, we're dealing with this seeming conflation of Jesus and God.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do we understand what's going on here?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: We've got an algebra problem and we've got to solve for X.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: What is the explanation, the conceptual framework that allows us to solve for X?
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a Trinitarian, it's the later developed notion of three persons simultaneously occupying one essence, one substance, one being, one God.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: But again, that framework didn't exist when the Gospel of John was written.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to go and seek out a framework that was in circulation in that time period.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And as I have explained, the most ubiquitous concept of divine mediation, divine presencing in the entire ancient world was the intuitive logic of divine images.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: It is so ubiquitous that it is even something that happens still today.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: And according to that logic, a divine being can be presenced.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, their presence can be manifested, it can be reified, it can be born by either material media that is animate or material media that is inanimate.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: And in my 2022 book, Adonai's Divine Images, I discuss all of the cognitive features of the human mind that contribute to this, and I show that this explains how divine images were understood to work in the ancient world.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm about a third of my way uh through uh Yahweh, or as he would say, Adonise divine images.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, and and I'm I'm kind of I kind of haven't got to the meat of things yet because he begins with cognitive science and uh ways in which societies uh might have come up with concepts of divinity, and a lot of it has to do with ancestors and transcending death through uh attachment to ancestors and and and ideas of deity kind of emerge in an evolutionary sense, and cognitive science has given us the tools to kind of figure some of that out, and the ways in which societies have wanted to presence the deity has largely been through, well, firstly, inanimate objects, and then Dan McClellan moves to looking at the temple and uh ways in which inanimate objects are said to presence the Lord, and only then does Dan McClellan look at the messenger of the Lord, the Malak Adunai, otherwise known as the Angel of the Lord, and only then does he see personal presencing of the name and presence of God in the person of the messenger of the Lord.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: But do you get that order for Dan McClellan?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: There is a kind of a concept, a vague concept of deity that's that has evolutionary utility.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: You study that via the cognitive sciences, you look for evidence in the scriptures of ways in which primitive societies have tried to presence the deity via inanimate objects, and then you start to look at uh primitive ways in which the Bible speaks of that presence being in a shadowy figure like the messenger of the Lord.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, that is not the way that the Old Testament presents things.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the way the Old Testament presents things is, well, John 1.18, no one has ever seen God, but God the one and only, who's at the Father's side, he has made him known.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: That there has been the personal presencing of God in the one and only Son.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that the pre-incarnate Christ has made these Christophanies all throughout the Old Testament.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: One of the names by which Christ has been known in the Old Testament has been the angel of the Lord, the Malak Adonai.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: And here on screen you can see all the places in which the angel of the Lord appears in the Old Testament.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: Let's just rattle through a few of them.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Genesis chapter 16, Hagar is there in the wilderness.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: Then the angel of the Lord told Hagar, Go back to your mistress and submit to her.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: The angel added, I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_02: The angel of the Lord also said to her, You're now pregnant and you will give birth to a son.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_02: So the angel of the Lord is of the Lord.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: He is the sent one of the Lord.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's most literally what Malach means.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: Means angel, messenger, but the one who is sent from the Lord, who speaks about the Lord in the third person.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: But he's also able to make covenant promises like I will increase your descendants.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: And she understands who he is.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Verse 13.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_02: She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: You are the God who sees me.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_02: For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's why the well was called Bealahiroi.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: It is still there between Kadesh and Bared.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: Bealahiroi means the well of the living one who sees me.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's of the Lord, and he is the Lord, and he's the God of seeing.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_02: This actually is how Genesis reveals things.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, John says, Well, this is just the preincarnate Christ.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: We know that no one has ever seen God.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: But the one and only Son who's at the Father's side, he has been making him known.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: He's always been making him known.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_02: He is the eternal word of the Father from the very beginning.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_02: We'll just do two more Angel of the Lord passages.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Genesis chapter 48, I mean, he's he's in Genesis quite a bit, but right at the end, Jacob is blessing Joseph and his boys, and he says, May the God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked faithfully, the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day, the angel who has delivered me from all harm, may he bless these boys.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_02: Who is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: Who is the source of blessing?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: Who is the good shepherd who redeems from all harm?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_02: The angel of the Lord, right?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_02: The sent one of God, who the patriarchs identified as their God.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: Who is the God of Abraham?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: The sent one of the Lord, who also is the Lord.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_02: Go to Exodus chapter 3.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_02: Here is the burning bush.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: Here is the definitional event that marks out the God of the Old Testament as the God of the Old Testament.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: Here is the Lord who brings his people up from Egypt.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: How is he describes verse 2?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: There the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in flames of fire from within a bush.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_02: Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not burn up.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: So who's in the bush?
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_02: The one sent from the Lord, who is also called Lord and God and the great I am.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: Moses was afraid to look at God in Exodus chapter three, but of course no one has ever seen God but the one and only Son, the Monogenez Son.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: The one and only Son who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: He has always been making him known.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_02: All revelation is always from the Father through the Son by the Spirit.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's the way.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: To be Trinitarian is to know this God from God, this light from light, this true God from true God, of one being with the Father, who for us and for our salvation came down into a burning bush, and came down even further into our flesh, came down even further, all the way to the cross.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not univocality because Moses speaks about him in different ways, the way that John describes him, but they're describing the same person.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_02: The same salvation, the same God.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's what explains the scriptures, and that's what explains the doctrine of the Trinity, but Dan's not really getting it.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now I need to say very firmly that even though the early church was pretty united on seeing the angel of the Lord as the preincarnate Christ, I think John is definitely saying that the the the angel of the Lord is the preincarnate Christ.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the Reformers and the Puritans were very clear and united on saying that the angel of the Lord is the preincarnate Christ.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um that doesn't mean he's a creature at all.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like angel, angel does not mean creature, angel means messenger or sent one, and it does not mean at all that Christ came into being at some point in time.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: To say that would make you an Aryan, it would be to say that there's a time when the Sun was not.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm certainly not saying that.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I am saying that from all eternity there has been a God from God union.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: And what John is saying is that no one has ever experienced God truly except in the Son.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, when Jesus in John chapter 14, for instance, says, If you see me, you've seen the Father, he's not saying you can see the Father through all sorts of things.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: You can see the Father if you look at this inanimate object or that inanimate object, at me, Tom, Bill, Dick, Harry.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is saying he is the unique and eternal conduit of the name and nature of God.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's what he's saying in John chapter 14.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: And remember, we're heading towards Thomas and John chapter 20, and how it is that Thomas can say, My Lord and my God.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus says, Philip, come on, dude.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Have you been around me so long?
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you've not realized that to see me is to see the Father?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's not because Jesus is the Father, that would violate Trinitarianism.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus goes on to explain that there is a mutual indwelling.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: The Father is dwelling in Jesus, and Jesus is dwelling in the Father.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he repeats himself multiple times and goes on to say that that mutual indwelling will one day include his followers.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what he prays in John 17 in the intercessory prayer, that his followers may become one with him exactly as he is one with the Father, that they may be perfect in one.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so what Philip misunderstands, Thomas finally gets.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Again, not because Jesus is the Father, but because the Father is dwelling in Jesus, Jesus is bearing, manifesting the presence of the Father.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: So Philip should look at Jesus and say, I see Jesus, I also see the Father.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that is what Thomas recognizes in John 20, 28.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: My Lord and my God, I'm looking at Jesus and I'm also seeing the Father.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I am addressing Jesus, and in addressing Jesus, I am also addressing the Father.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: That makes the best sense of all of the Gospel of John.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: Far more than the notion that this conceptual and philosophical framework that didn't exist yet is accounting for what's going on there.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because it doesn't really account for it, because Jesus repeatedly distinguishes himself from the very God of Israel.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus doesn't say, Well, that part of the God that I'm not.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus says, You are the only true God, addressing the Father, distinguishing the Father from Himself as the only true God.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: But Jesus bears the Father so that Thomas can say, I see them both, my Lord and my God.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's there's various ways of of reading Thomas.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's it's it's not the that's not the silliest way to read uh Thomas's line there.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think the Jehovah's Witnesses basically say that Thomas is swearing at this point.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_02: My Lord, my God.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_02: When he sees the wounds of Christ.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um so much do those particular Aryans, the Jehovah's Witnesses, not want to see the Trinity.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean, even if he's right, he's saying, you know, the Son is the Lord and the Father is God.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well that that's a pretty New Testament designation.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_02: That that's true all throughout the New Testament.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: God, Theos seems to be the word for the Father, and Kurios, Lord, seems to be the word for the Son.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: But if you thought that Kurios was a less divine word than Theos, then you haven't read the Septuagint, you haven't read the Greek Old Testament, because six thousand eight hundred times um Adonai, Yahweh, right, is the divine name.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's Lord.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like Lord is far more the title for the God of Israel than Elohim is, than God is, than Thaos is, right?
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um so like like all this, all these gymnastics, in order to just like Thomas is seeing God from God, light from light, very God from very God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, who for us, men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, right?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's that that is what John is doing.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_02: He's seeing the sent one from the Father, the monogene Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, who is the only one who can bear the name and nature of God.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like this idea of that he is the authorized bearer of the name, is to assume that there are a whole bunch of other authorized bearers of the name.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_02: Now, there is one unique authorized bearer of the name, and eternally so, his name is Jesus Christ.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_02: In him, now we now carry his name out to the nations, but apart from him, there is no other mediator of the divine presence and name.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: And to be that person is to be the sent one from the Father, the great I am, which is who Jesus is.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_02: And this is just, you know, we don't need to go centuries later than John to understand these things.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_02: We need to go centuries earlier than John, and I think they'll all make sense.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now let's wrap this up because I've gone on far too long, but let's do tricks nine and ten.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: Trick number nine.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um if you're going to run the Dan McClellan playbook, you need to ignore inconvenient points.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because Dan Patterson actually raises a whole raft of verses, and Dan McClellan actually ignores the one that is inconvenient to his thesis.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's going on in John 20, 28.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: And why did Jesus' opponents try to kill him in John 5.18, 859, and 1033?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because they considered what he was saying to be blasphemous.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because they understood Jesus to be committing blasphemy, making himself equal with God.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: But that is not claiming to be God.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Blasphemy includes all kinds of speech that is considered to denigrate, to mock, to deride, to debase God.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: So there are all kinds of things that Jesus could have said to be accused of blasphemy, not only making himself God.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's going to ignore John 5, verse 18.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_02: John 5, verse 18, they pick up stones to stone him because he's just called himself the unique and eternal Son of the Father, and they say, you make yourself out to be Son of the Father, therefore making yourself equal to God.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: So what is their doctrine of God?
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: Their doctrine of God is that you can be distinct in person and yet have the same Usia, have the same nature as God.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_02: That is what the opponents of Jesus, that is their doctrine of God there in the first century.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: To be the son of the Father is to be equal to God is a first century doctrine of God, and it's not even just the Christians who have it.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's right there in John 5, verse 18.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: To be the son of the Father is to be equal to God.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_02: That is the most Trinitarian statement you can possibly have, and even the enemies of Jesus have a doctrine of God that is more capable of understanding Nicaea than certainly Dan McClellan's vision of God.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_02: And the final trick of Dan McClellan is to assume your conclusion.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: Just assume the conclusion from the outset, and let's just go to the 20-minute mark where we are discussing John 17 and the great high priestly prayer.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: And in his high priestly prayer in John 17, Jesus calls the Father to glorify him with the glory they shared before the world began prior to creation.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: But this overlooks something that's going on in chapter 17.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus did not always have that glory because verse 22 talks about how the Father gave him that glory.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Similarly, earlier in the chapter, the Father gave him the name, the divine name.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: These are things that Jesus, as the Logos, did not eternally possess.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: There is a point at which both the name and God's glory were given to Jesus.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_02: Just read it again.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_02: John 17, verse 24.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_02: Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory, the glory you've given to me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_02: This is the precreation, pretemporal life of God, in which the Father is sharing his love with his son, his glory with his son, his name with his son, his words with his son, his joy with his son.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: Trace out in John 17 all the Niagara falls of blessing that's just crashing down from the Father to the Son.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it is the glory, it is the name, it is the words, it is the joy, it is the love of the Father which is given to Christ before the world began.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, in the pre-creation, eternal and everlasting life of God, there is a life of eternal begetting.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_02: There is a taxis, there is an ordering from Father to Son by the Spirit, and from Son to Father by the Spirit.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: But the love and life and glory and words and name of God is given to Christ as an eternal reality.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that might not jive with your doctrine of God, but whatever it is, it's not a maths problem.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_02: It is the good news that God is love, and you are invited.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: I want those who you've given me to be with me where I am, says Jesus, and to see my glory, the glory you've given me.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: Because you love me before the foundation of the world.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: We are created out of love to share in this love, to stand with Christ in that eternal flow by the Spirit, to know his Father as our Father, to know his spirit as our spirit, to know his future as our future.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is good news.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a maths problem.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: John 12 says Isaiah saw Jesus' glory in his Old Testament vision of Yahweh.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and this is very clearly based on the early Christian idea that is even expressed in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, that in the Hebrew Bible, the theophanies, the visions of God, are not actually visions of God themselves, but visions of the pre-incarnate Jesus or the Logos, who is also identified with the messenger of Adonai, whose identity is conflated with God in several places in the Hebrew Bible.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you say conflated with God?
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you say conflated with God?
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_02: He simply is the God of Isaiah.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: I saw the Lord high and lifted up.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think anyone would blame Isaiah for putting the person he saw in the temple within his doctrine of God.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_02: Why does anyone have a problem with putting Jesus right at the heart of their doctrine of God?
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_02: We have all the ingredients for Trinitarian theology here.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_02: We have the God from God who is encountered in that temple, and he is Christ, the one filled with the Spirit.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_02: We have a Trinitarian theology right there.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_02: He has just admitted a Trinitarian theology, if only he has eyes to see it.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_02: But he is already assuming, his conclusion is that whatever mediator of the divine presence there is, it must be on the outside of his doctrine of God.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_02: He is assuming that.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: He's assuming his understanding from the outset.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_02: His conclusion is that whatever mediator there is, that mediator does not belong to the eternal life of God.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_02: That mediator must be in between the absolute God and the person experiencing God.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_02: But that is an assumption.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_02: He's beginning with his conclusion.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's dogma over data.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_02: He has dogma.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: Dogma over data right here.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_02: That is why he is not seeing the biblical data correctly, because he has such thick unitarian or perhaps tritheist lenses or perhaps atheist lenses.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: But he cannot understand this data because he has a prefabricated doctrine of God that won't allow the one in the temple who is named as Lord, he can't even allow him to be God.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if the God of Isaiah's temple vision is not God, then I don't know what doctrine of God Dan McClellan is wanting to defend.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: But if you do want to defend a biblical doctrine of God, then you are involved in Trinitarian theology of necessity.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_02: The pre-incarnate Christ is God from God.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_02: The pre-incarnate Christ is the sent one of the Lord who is the Lord.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's what makes sense of the Old Testament, it's what makes sense of the New Testament, and it's what makes sense of Nicene Trinitarianism.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why does that messenger of God get to do all the things that only God is supposed to be able to do?
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, according to Exodus 23, God explains, My name is in him.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: And in John chapter 17, you have given me your name.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_01: The author seems to be gesturing quite clearly in the direction of identifying Jesus as a mediatory figure who does what only God is supposed to be able to do and bears God's presence and power and authority.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_02: As he has done in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is like because Jesus is the authorized possessor of the divine name, that communicable vehicle of divine power and agency and presence.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: And by prophesying to be the arbiter of final judgment and the one to grant forgiveness of sins and eternal life, Jesus takes to himself divine roles.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, these are all things that the authorized possessor of the divine name can do within the Hebrew Bible, within Greco-Roman period, and even within rabbinic period Jewish literature.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_02: Dan is used to going to Exodus chapter 23 and seeing how the angel of the Lord, this messenger of the Lord, possesses the divine name and has the power to forgive sins.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, this person is the Logos.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's who Philo took in to be.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_02: Philo again and again returns to Exodus 23 and says, Oh, you know how I keep on talking about the Logos, who is the creator of all things, he is the high priest of all creation, he is the firstborn son, he is the sent one of the Lord, in whom the name and nature of God abides.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_02: Philo was saying it, Moses was saying it, Isaiah was saying it, John was saying it, and this is just what Trinitarian theology is.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_02: Once you recognize that this authorized possessor and carrier of the divine name is not external to what it is to be God.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_02: He is internal and eternal in the life of God.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_02: So those are the ten tricks of Dan McClellan.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_02: There is strawmanning, there is poisoning the well, there's disparaging the unity of scripture, there's chronological snobbery, there's the halo effect, there is the appearance of neutrality, there is ABC, always be confident, there's misquote your interlocutor, there is ignore inconvenient points, and there is assume your conclusions.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_02: Do all this, and you too can keep yourself safe from Trinitarian theology.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_02: But why take the risk?
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_02: Don't keep yourself safe from Trinitarian theology.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, come to Jesus.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_02: He is the Son of the Father, filled with the Spirit.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_02: He is God from God, light from light, very God from very God.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_02: And when you come in on him, you come in on everything.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_02: That'll do us for now.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_02: Have you done 321 yet?
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_02: Have you gone to 321course.com?
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps you could do it.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps you could send it on to a friend and really get to know the God who Jesus reveals, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you give this video a like and a share around the place and subscribe to us?
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we'd love to see you on the next one.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_02: Hopefully, we'll have Dr.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: Josh Siowadi on the channel very, very shortly.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see you soon.