About the video response to Dan McClellan on Christology

Mar 29 • General

I just watched Tim, Than and Coley video responding to Dan McClellan about Christology and boy it was awesome, and it sparked a series of thoughts that I wanted to write down because it helped me clarify where I currently stand in this debate.

First, just to summarize what I understand to be Dan McClellan’s position. As far as I understand it, when he talks about high Christology, he does not think that high Christology necessarily means Jesus is included within the identity of Yahweh. Instead, he argues that what people call “high Christology” can be explained within the framework of Jewish agency traditions. In other words, Jesus can be extremely exalted, can carry divine authority, perform divine functions, and still remain an exalted agent of God, rather than God himself.

Now to be clear, the idea of divine agency in Judaism is real. Agents can represent God, act in God's name, carry God's authority, and sometimes even perform actions associated with God because they are delegated.

That part is not controversial.

But what struck me while watching the video is that the debate actually follows a kind of back-and-forth between two explanatory models.

One model, associated with scholars like Richard Bauckham, argues something like this: in Second Temple Judaism, there are certain prerogatives that uniquely belong to Yahweh—things like being the creator, receiving worship, exercising sovereign authority over creation, sharing divine glory, and so on. When those Yahweh-specific prerogatives are attributed to Jesus, the simplest explanation is that Jesus is being included within the divine identity.

The exalted-agent model then responds: not so fast. In Jewish literature, agents can be extremely exalted. Angels, heavenly figures, and mediators can carry divine authority and perform divine actions without themselves being God. So attributing divine functions to Jesus does not necessarily mean he is included in the identity of Yahweh.

And at that point, the conversation should move to the next step.

Because presenting an alternative explanation does not actually debunk the original argument. It simply creates a rival hypothesis.

So if the divine-identity model says, “these Yahweh prerogatives imply Jesus shares in the divine identity,” and the exalted-agent model says, “these prerogatives could also be explained through agency,” what we now have is not a refutation but two competing explanations.

The real question then becomes: which explanation better accounts for the data?

And this is where I start to feel uneasy about the exalted-agent explanation.

One issue that comes to mind is what I would call the cluster problem.

Yes, Jewish literature contains exalted figures. Angels, Wisdom traditions, the Son of Man, and later figures like Enoch or Metatron. But those figures typically carry some divine prerogatives, not the entire cluster.

So the question becomes: does the exalted-agent framework really explain a case where a figure seems to carry multiple or even all of Yahweh’s prerogatives at once?

Because partial delegation and total delegation are not the same thing.

A simple analogy might help illustrate what I mean.

Imagine you see someone who has:

the president’s car
the president’s signature authority
the president’s residence
the president’s security detail
the president’s family living with them
the president’s ability to issue orders

At some point the most natural explanation becomes: that person is the president.

Of course you could say, “maybe all of those things were delegated to this person.” But the more prerogatives accumulate, the less convincing that explanation becomes.

And this is the kind of question I have when looking at Jesus in the Gospels.

If we compare Jesus to other exalted agents in Jewish tradition, the features don’t seem to map neatly.

Take the Ark of the Covenant, for example. The ark represents God’s presence in Israel. It is deeply sacred. Entering the Holy of Holies improperly could result in death because of the divine presence associated with it.

But the ark itself doesn’t perform miracles.

Take Moses. Moses performs miracles on behalf of God, but the text is very clear that he does so by God’s authority. And he doesn't mediate God's presence the way the ark does.

Prophets and judges carry divine authority, but do they forgive sins in their own name?

Do they claim preexistent glory with God before creation?

Do they receive the kind of worship or divine prerogatives that we see attributed to Jesus?

Again, I want to be careful here. I’m not claiming expertise. I’m someone diving into this conversation using the insights of scholars on both sides.

But at least from where I’m standing right now, I’m not sure the patterns of exalted agency in Second Temple Judaism fully match what we see with Jesus. But of course i need to look more into it.

Another thing that struck me while watching the video was a quotation about higher-order evidence that really made me think.

Tim quoted an epistemological point from dougherty roughly along these lines:

"When one reconsiders a body of first-order evidence and one’s evaluation changes, the later inclination may itself be evidence. More precisely, it may function as higher-order evidence about how the same first-order evidence supports the relevant proposition. The new inclination itself is the token of this new evidence, and it would be irrational not to update on such testimony just as it would be irrational not to update on the testimony of peers."

And the key takeaway was this line:

“We are not cognitive prisoners of the past.”

That idea really resonated with me. At first i did not get a thing that was said i had to repeat that part and some dark zones appeared, then Tim reformulated it and i think i got it so, Tim an illustration came to my mind tell me if that is what you meant, because that is how i understood it.

Take something simple like malaria.

Imagine someone centuries ago describing fever, headaches, and illness after mosquito bites. They don’t know about parasites or mosquito species. But we don’t say they were talking about something unrelated to malaria. We can look at the conceptual genealogy of malaria, evaluate the report, see how the language around that evolved and even if earlier data had no concept of virus transmitted by a specific mosquito, we can take that later reflection to illuminate the earlier data and what they mean and conclude that though they did not use that conceptual grammar and did not conceive of it the same, people of the past are indeed talking about the same virus later scientist developped a more mature grammar and concept for.

We say they were observing malaria without understanding the mechanism. This is just an example of how later reflection are not automatically second-rate and how though later they better explain the earlier evidence.

Later scientific understanding becomes higher-order evidence that explains what the earlier observations were actually about.

It means later reflection is not automatically epistemically inferior simply because it is later. In some cases, later articulation may represent a more mature account of earlier evidence.

This reminded me of something I recently read in the standford encyclopedia of philosophy in the entry on epistemology about hermeneutical injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice happens when people are actually perceiving real phenomena but lack the conceptual framework to articulate them.

Someone before Freud might notice patterns of behavior that correspond to what we now call repression. The phenomenon exists, but the concept does not.

Or take sexual harassment. People recognized the behavior long before the term was coined.

The phenomenon was there. The conceptual vocabulary wasn’t. There again i think some recognision of the link between later reflection and earlier evidence is explore but in the other direction in that entry they were defending that the

stigma can happen on the side of early data too that are not recognised as such just because they lack the more "modern" conceptual framework and language. It made me think it goes both ways.

And this is why I think this matters for the Christology debate.

Often when scholars say John has a higher Christology than earlier texts, the assumption is that this must represent a theological innovation.

But that assumption itself has to be argued for.

Because the alternative possibility also exists: that later articulation simply represents the conceptual maturation of something already present in earlier material.

And interestingly, even the idea that high Christology is late is not entirely straightforward.

Paul’s letters are extremely early, and yet we already see strong Christological claims there—like the reformulation of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6, where Jesus is included within Yahweh’s identity language. But i need to learn more about that to make sure it is not overstated.

So when we approach the Gospels, we are already approaching them with very early high Christology in the background.

All of this is why I remain unconvinced that the exalted-agent framework fully explains the data.

Maybe it does. I’m still exploring the debate.

But at least right now, I’m not sure that the features attributed to Jesus in the New Testament map neatly onto the patterns of exalted agency we see elsewhere in Second Temple Judaism.

And if that’s the case, then the real question remains open.

Is Jesus simply another exalted agent?

Or are we looking at a figure whose cluster of divine prerogatives pushes beyond the usual category of agency altogether?

That’s where I think the real conversation needs to happen.

It was also very fun to see Dan lacking self-awareness and crashing out when he got a taste of his own medecine... i mean he is an expert at hand-waving arguments for assuming univocality for presenting them with the same structure he do when he argue for the exalted Agent theory using the Old Testament and second temple Judaism writings as background. I guess when he does it to argue his position its unbiased scholarship, but when others do it to argue something else its dogmatic fundementalism using univocality...

Any way let me know your thoughts! And of course correct me where i am wrong

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