Making Sense of the World: How the Trinity Helps to Explain Reality

Herman Bavinck taught that the “Trinity is wholly unlike anything else, but everything in the world is like the Trinity.” In this book, Vern Poythress uses a theological exploration of beauty to show how everything in the world reflects our Trinitarian God—from oak trees to image-bearers. Because our world is a Trinitarian world, to understand it properly requires using multiple perspectives, as Poythress demonstrates by analyzing a grape! “Once we acknowledge that there are multiple possible perspectives on anything in the world,” Poythress says, “it suggests that there is no one metaphysical analysis that alone represents the ultimate structure of the world. Rather, structures are intrinsically multiple. God has built in the multiplicity. The unity in one perspective is no more ultimate than the diversity expressed in several perspectives. Unity and diversity go together. Each points to the other, and neither is independent of the other. That is true in God. Subordinately, it is true in analyzing the world that God made. God’s world bears the imprint of the unity-in-diversity and the diversity-in-unity that characterize his nature.” Throughout this book, Poythress demonstrates how we can use various threefold perspectives as complementary ways of looking at creation, without reducing it to any one perspective. To understand our Trinitarian world in a non-reductionistic manner, we must employ a multiperspectival approach—specifically a triperspectival one: that’s the key contribution of this book.

Publisher: P & R
Type: Hardback
ISBN: 9798887790220

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Vern S. Poythress (MLitt, University of Cambridge; PhD, Harvard University; DTh, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa) is distinguished professor of New Testament, biblical interpretation, and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has authored books on a wide range of topics; his works include Symphonic Theology, Theophany, and The Mystery of the Trinity.

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“Herman Bavinck considered that while the Trinity is unlike anything in the world, everything in the world is like the Trinity. Poythress’s intriguing account of Trinitarian reflections in the world is worth extensive consideration. He is careful to operate within the constraints of biblical revelation and the historical parameters of church teaching, pointing the way to a vivid realization that the glory of the triune God can be perceived all around us in the things that he has made.” Robert Letham, Senior Research Fellow, Union School of Theology