I’m glad a Dutchman broke my brain that day. He took me into a windowed room I’d never entered. And now the rest of the world is bathed in biblical light as I strive to stay low, worship well, and love deeply.

Learning new things is like opening doors to windowed rooms. We can enter another space we haven’t seen before, but that other space also lets light into the hallway of the present. All we had thought and experienced before is hit with new color. In some cases, that color change is so drastic that we question whether we really saw things before as we should have. Everything ripens for the thrill of reinterpretation. As we learn, we not only go to new places; we revisit all the old ones and see them as we never had.

Something like this happened to me some years ago when I was listening to an old lecture from the Dutch theologian Cornelius Van Til. The audio quality was poor (circa 1970s), and I struggled to make out all the words. I had no idea what sort of door was about to open. And then the handle turned.

We certainly cannot penetrate intellectually the mystery of the Trinity, but neither can we penetrate anything else intellectually because all other things depend on the mystery of the Trinity, and therefore all other things have exactly as much mystery in them as does the Trinity.[1]

Hmm, Amen…Wait—what? We can’t penetrate the mystery of the Trinity—sure, I’ve got that. Who would dare to disagree? But everything has as much mystery in it as the Trinity does? Who would dare to agree?

Is a yellow tulip as puzzling as the divine persons? Is grass as incomprehensible as the Godhead? Does a dog’s bone have divine depth? Van Til’s words drove me deeper into thought. I had always learned to link the doctrine of God to the doctrine of creation (the famous Creator-creature distinction). But now I had to think about how the nature of God has an effect on the nature of the world all around me.

Here’s what I believe Van Til meant, and how it’s revolutionized my approach to…well, everything.

Differentiation and Divine Threads

The Trinity is the source of all things. That much seems simple enough. But then Van Til goes deeper. In his Introduction to Systematic Theology, he wrote these cryptic words: “for a consistent Christian theology the principle of individuation lies within the Godhead.”[2] I’ll assume that sentence produces the same response in many readers that it did in me: huh? Individuation is the ability to identify and distinguish individual things amidst the panoply of creation. It’s how we can identify the significance of one yellow tulip picked from our front yard, which has many other things on it (including some forgotten kids’ toys). This is related to Van Til’s discussions about “the one and the many,” or universals and particulars, which is a whole other rabbit hole to fall into.

If this all sounds horribly abstract, just hold on; I promise there’s a point. If we want to actually identify and differentiate between the things around us—to see their significance amidst the multitude of created things—we have to go all the way back to the Trinity. In Van Til’s words, “There is a deep and rich differentiation in the personal relationship between the three persons of the Trinity.”[3] Put differently, in the Trinity, there is differentiation among the divine persons in the one essence of God. We can distinguish between the Father, Son, and Spirit without losing the unity and deep relationship in the Godhead. And so, because creation is an expression and revelation of this God, all of the myriad things in our universe are significant and meaningful because of who God is: three perfectly differentiated persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) in one perfect essence, a God who works many things at many moments all according to one plan.

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