Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 87:2 (Fall 2025)
Article: The Trinity And God’s Relation To The World
Author: Scott Oliphint

WTJ 87:1 (Spring 2025) p. 199

The Trinity And God’s Relation To The World

K. Scott Oliphint

K. Scott Oliphint is Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology (Emeritus) at Westminster Theological Seminary. This article originally appeared in the Criswell Theological Review, n.s.21.1 (Fall 2023).

This article examines the theological problem of how God, as transcendent and immutable, can sustain a real relation to the created world. The discussion begins with Thomas Aquinas’s claim that while creatures are really related to God, God’s relation to creatures exists only “according to reason,” since no ontological parity exists between Creator and creation. Earl Muller critiques this asymmetry, arguing that it rests on an Aristotelian framework that must be transformed in light of Christian revelation. His proposed correction grounds divine-world relations in a revitalized trinitarian theology: the Father’s relation to the world occurs through the Son and in the Spirit. Because the divine persons are distinct yet consubstantial, this provides a real foundation for God’s relation to creation without compromising divine simplicity. The article then develops this proposal by introducing the Reformed concept of God’s covenantal condescension—the voluntary act by which the triune God freely relates to humanity through covenant. Drawing on Van Til, Owen, Turretin, and others, it shows how divine simplicity, immutability, and aseity remain intact even as God reveals himself in and through the divine activity of his covenant relationship with his people. Ultimately, the study concludes that God’s relation to the world is real, personal, and covenantal, rooted in the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and fully expressed in the incarnation and redemptive work of Christ.

Thomas Aquinas famously argues that the relationship of God to the world is asymmetric, as it surely is. He explains the asymmetry by insisting that there is a real relation of the creature to God, but no real relation of God to the world.

Now the creature, according to the name, refers to the creator. The creature depends on the creator, and not the other way around. Hence the relation by which the creature is related to the creator must be real; but in God there is a relationship according to reason only.1

WTJ 87:1 (Spring 2025) p. 200

According to Jeffrey Brower, Thomas’s view of relations has the “awkward consequence that things can be related even if their relations do not exist.”2 It is certainly possible that Brower over-reads Thomas at this point, but any statement that affirms that God ...