The Mystery of the Trinity

Description

Starting with the doctrine of the Trinity, Vern Poythress addresses six challenges concerning the compatibility of God’s independence with his activities in the world. The eternal activities among the persons of the Trinity offer a foundation for God’s activities in the world. Alternative metaphysical frameworks for explaining God’s transcendence and immanence run the danger of overriding the truths of biblical revelation.

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Making Sense of the World

Description

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.

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Knowing and the Trinity

Description

Every human being has a distinct perspective and experiences truth from this viewpoint. If God exists in three persons, as the Bible teaches, is it possible to discern epistemological perspectives that originate from this mystery? Once we understand that God is Trinitarian, we can see numerous reflections of his Trinitarian character in general and in special revelation.

Vern Poythress is one of a growing number of theologians who have developed and used perspectival triads to further our knowledge of God. This book explores the relationship between numerous triads and God’s Trinitarian character, and shows that many triads reveal analogies to the Trinity. Understanding these analogies will help readers perceive the fundamental connections between our Trinitarian God, the Bible, and our created world. 

Author

Vern S. Poythress (MLitt, University of Cambridge; PhD, Harvard University; DTh, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa) is Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also the author of Understanding Dispensationalists;Science and Hermeneutics; Implications of Scientific Method for Biblical Interpretation; Symphonic Theology; The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology; and The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses.