God and Creation in Systemic Perspective

This book offers a new theological account of the relationship between God and creation informed by contemporary understandings of matter. Moving beyond classical models grounded in the category of substance, it explores whether matter and its dynamic organization can provide a more fruitful framework for thinking about divine-world relations. Drawing on contemporary science and philosophy, the book engages accounts of the material world as a network of open, interconnected, and evolving systems. Particular attention is given to the phenomenon of emergence, through which new entities and properties arise that cannot be fully explained by their constituent elements, as seen in the emergence of life and mind. The book also examines the co-evolution of systems and their environments as a key feature of contemporary accounts of reality. Using the ontological categories of system and process in an analogical sense, this book develops a model of the inner life of the Trinity and God’s relationship with the world. In doing so, it examines how the incarnate Logos bears on God’s relation to an evolving world, and it engages recent proposals that reread patristic and medieval sources. It offers a constructive contribution to systematic theology: a systemic model of the Trinity and of creation that brings classical Christian doctrine into transdisciplinary dialogue with current scientific and philosophical thought.