We now have both halves of the argument in place: a philosophical tool for turning empirical facts into necessary truths (study two), and the empirical facts themselves — a God of a particular kind, bound to a love that is dutiful and multi-formed (study three). This study is where they combine to actually generate three persons, and where the argument answers its remaining objections.
The problem: God cannot love himself the ordinary way
Agapē, being a duty owed to everyone, is owed by God to himself as well — God, too, must exemplify self-love. But self-love, on the account we've just seen, requires appreciation, benevolence, and a striving for union — and ordinary human self-love can only achieve that union because a person can be, in the philosopher Eleonore Stump's phrase, "divided against herself": double-minded, lacking full integration between what she wills and what she does. That internal fracture is precisely what creates the distance a person can then strive to overcome in loving themselves well.
God, being omniscient and perfectly free, cannot be divided against himself in that way. He cannot be double-minded, and he cannot will incompatible things. So the ordinary route to self-love — internal integration overcoming internal division — is simply not available to him. And yet a perfectly good being cannot fail to fulfill a duty owed to everyone, himself included. Something else must satisfy it.
The first generation: an "ek-static" self-love
Sijuwade's proposal is that God fulfills this duty by an analogical "dividing of himself" — generating a duplicate: a second divine person who shares every intrinsic property with him, distinguishable only by not being numerically the same individual. Call this second person d2. God and d2, each fully divine, can now do for one another what ordinary self-love does within a single divided person: appreciate, will the good for, and achieve a formal union of mind and will with an equal — except now it is genuinely between two, not a metaphor for internal integration. This is self-love stretched outward — ek-static self-love, love that steps outside the self because "the self" itself has, in an analogical sense, been shared.
Generating d2, on this argument, is not optional for God — it is the specific action his perfect goodness requires, given that the ordinary route to fulfilling the duty of self-love is closed to him. It is, in the language of the earlier study, an essential property, not a free choice among options.
The second generation: consummating a perichoretic love
Formal union — of mind and will — is not the whole of agapē, however. Love also strives for real union: an external, consummating expression of the union already present. In human romantic love, Sijuwade (following the philosopher Alexander Pruss) argues that this real union takes the form of a "one body" union, a mutual biological striving toward a shared, valuable goal: new life.
Between God and d2 — non-embodied, already sharing one nature — the equivalent real union cannot be sexual, but it can be structurally the same kind of thing: a perichoretic union (from a Greek term meaning mutual indwelling), consummated not through procreation but through generation — joint striving toward a shared goal significant enough to be worthy of their union. And the goal that fits is the generation of a third divine person, an equal, whom each can love and by whom each is loved in turn — exactly the "unselfish," outward-reaching feature that was present all along in the classical Love Argument, but now arrived at empirically rather than intuitively. Call this third person d3.
The result: three divine persons — God (the Father), d2 (the Son), and d3 (the Spirit) — none of them optional, all of them following from what perfect goodness requires of a being bound to fulfill the duty of agapē in full.
Why exactly three, and not four or more?
This is the natural next question, and Sijuwade (again following Swinburne) has a specific answer. If God and d2's generative love could always, in principle, extend to generate a fourth, fifth, or further person, there is no reason it should stop at three rather than four. But this is a case where there is no single "best" action available at all: given an open-ended series of possible goods, each incrementally better than the last (bringing about one more loving relationship, and then another), there is no highest rung on the ladder — and where there is no best action, a perfectly good being satisfies its goodness by performing any one of the available good actions, not by chasing an unreachable maximum.
The generation of a third person, though, is not one option among an open series — it is what is required to fulfill the duty of self-love (through d2) and then to consummate the perichoretic relationship that follows from it (through d3). Anything beyond that third person would not be generated by necessity — by what God's nature essentially requires — but only by a further, optional act of will. And a person generated merely by will, rather than by the necessity of God's own essence, would not exist as necessarily as God himself does, and so, on this argument, would not be divine in the same sense. The stopping point at three is therefore not arbitrary — it falls exactly where necessity runs out and free choice would have to begin.
Two remaining objections, briefly answered
Two further objections are worth naming, because both are answered by features already in place.
The Dispositional Objection says: perhaps being perfectly loving is simply a capacity God has, which he need not exercise — the way God could have chosen not to create a universe without thereby being any less perfect. But this objection only has force against a view where love is a disposition. Once love is fixed, empirically, as agapē — a duty-bound action, not a capacity sitting idle — the analogy collapses. God cannot be perfectly loving while declining to love, in the same way he could decline to create, because love just is the doing of it.
The Revelation Objection holds that the Trinity has always been treated, across the historic Christian tradition, as something known only because God discloses it — not something reason arrives at on its own. A purely a priori argument (Swinburne's original version) sits uneasily with that instinct. But the reformulated argument was never purely a priori to begin with — its central premise depends on the empirical, revealed fact of what love actually is. It therefore fits comfortably within, rather than against, the long-standing claim that the Trinity is known through revelation illumined by reason, not through reason operating alone.
Why it matters
The conclusion of this argument, if it holds, is not merely that the Trinity is possible or coherent — claims theologians have defended for centuries — but that a God who is genuinely, fully loving could not have existed any other way. The three persons are not an arbitrary shape God happens to have taken. They are what perfect love, examined carefully and grounded in what Scripture actually says love is, turns out to require. Whatever one makes of the technical philosophical apparatus, that is a claim worth sitting with: the Trinity, on this reading, is not a puzzle bolted onto the doctrine of God — it is what God's own love, taken seriously, looks like from the inside.