Trinity and Creation: Bavinck on the Vestigia Trinitatis

Abstract

Engaging recent scholarship on Bavinck’s revitalization of the vestigia trinitatis and its connection to the organic motif, this essay identifies and examines two aspects of Bavinck’s account that remain underdeveloped with scholarship on this topic. First, it explores the lingering importance triads within Bavinck’s account of the vestigia. Bavinck may have developed a primarily non-numerical account of the vestigia, but he still acknowledges the place of triadic analogies, especially in humanity. Second, it contextualizes Bavinck’s appropriation of the vestigia within his understanding of creation as relative, divine, self-communication in order to illuminate how creation can bear the imprint of the Trinity even as the Trinity remains unlike anything in creation. Much work has been done on Bavinck’s triniform account of creation and his organic cosmology, but these accounts can often miss or gloss over the doctrines that Bavinck utilizes to carefully guards against a direct correlation between God and creation.