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podcast 331 – Dr. Joshua Sijuwade on the metaphysics of monarchical trinitarianism

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At one point, influenced by the great Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, Dr. Joshua Sijuwade held to a “social” Trinty. But now, following Beau Branson, he holds to a “monarchical trinitarian” view on which the one God just is the Father, and also there is a divine Son and a divine Spirit.

But he’s continued to think about the issues, now influenced by some work by Timothy Pawl and by metaphysician E.J. Lowe. In some ways, he’s trying to bring together a Swinburnean view of “the Trinity” with a Bransonian one, as we saw in episode 330.

In this episode Dr. Joshua Sijuwade and I discuss the ideas in his recent article “Monarchical Trinitarianism: A Metaphysical Proposal.” In this paper Dr. Sijuwade tries to develop the monarchical model using recent metaphysician E.J. Lowe’s 4-category ontology, so as to answer what he calls the multiple-natures problem and the multiple-modes problem. Specifically, he applies Lowe’s way of thinking about objects and their properties, as shown in this chart.

I press Dr. Sijuwade on what I think is a more fundamental problem for “monarchical trinitarianism” which is that it appears to assert three gods, as it features three things, the Persons, each of which has all that it takes to be a god. In his replies he explains why he is not concerned about that.

At the very end of this episode I make a couple of important announcements!

Links for this episode:

podcast 330 – Dr. Joshua Sijuwade on the monarchy of the Father

podcast 329 – Dr. Joshua Sijuwade on divine identity

Tim Pawl, “Conciliar Trinitarianism, Divine Identity Claims, and Subordination”

constitutive essence vs. consequential essence

This week’s thinking music is “Air” by Jesse Spillane.

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6 thoughts on “podcast 331 – Dr. Joshua Sijuwade on the metaphysics of monarchical trinitarianism”

      1. All the comments I have made have disappeared with all the other comments apparently. After the point at which is not possible to comment on a post all the comments disappear as far as I can see.

        In this case there is little incentive for me to visit this site as everything is too one-sided.

        I don’t know if this is a technical issue or your policy.

  1. dr dale, cannot play your podcast, can you link to a written response to dr sijuwade?

    very thanks

    1. Hi James, no, I don’t have any written response. Perhaps try listening on another device, or hitting the Download button and putting the file on a computer that can play mp3s?

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