Evangelical Calvinist, par excellence, Thomas F. Torrance; provides some very insightful words on how he understood John Knox’s doctrine of God and His triune nature. What Torrance says articulates some of the basic premises about God’s life and His relation to creation, that ‘EC’ pivots upon. Let me quote, at length, and then provide a little reflection behind the quote:

(a) It is as a Trinity that the majesty and sublimity of God are made known. As Holy Trinity God is revealed to be intrinsically personal. God is Person precisely as he is triune, so that intimate personal relationship is involved in acknowledgment of the one only God, cleaving to him, serving him, worshipping and trusting personally in him as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The majesty of the one only God and the transcendent mystery of the eternal God as such do not produce the personal communication between God and man — that belongs to the personal self-revelation of God as Holy Trinity. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and remains what he is in his eternal Self even when he gives himself to be known by us in such personal ways.

(b) It is the triune God who is known as Father, Maker, Pastor and Redeemer. It is the Trinity who creates, appoints, governs all things in heaven and earth, visible as well as invisible. God the Father Almighty can be known only through the Son, as the Incarnation of God and of his work for our redemption. Fatherhood is defined in terms of redeeming grace toward us and free adoption of us as his children. ‘We call him Father not so much because he has created us, but by reason of his free adoption by which he has chosen us in Jesus Christ.’

(c) It is as the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that God relates himself to all creation, visible and invisible. His relation to creation is supremely as personal will — but the purpose and glory of that relation is Jesus Christ. There are here distinct elements of cosmic redemption, in God’s concern for all creation and of all his handiwork, but what all that means will be revealed only at the last day. This strictly trinitarian theology means that Knox regarded God’s relations will all creation exclusively in terms of personal will, and exclusively in the light of Christ’s redemption and saving purpose. (Thomas F. Torrance, “Scottish Theology,” 7).

Just a few things. God is first and always already triune before he becomes Creator. He created because He is love in Himself, and thus this becomes the ground through which He always relates to His creation; in personal, loving ways — and thus “Law” must be framed through this, versus the classical way which has God relating by Law, then Grace/Love etc. Second, the method for knowing God (as Church father, Athanasius made clear in his argument contra Arius) is to ground this revelation in the eternal Son; it is through this self-Revelation of God that we by the Holy Spirit are made “alive” “reconciled” and thereby have the capacity to know who God is in Christ’s redeemed humanity — this is the point being made in point (b) above on adoption. Third, just to reiterate, Evangelical Calvinists, along with two historic ones (Torrance and Knox), believe that because God is triune (that’s who He is), that his relations to humanity will be shaped by what can be called God’s antecedent life of eternal love; thus an implication of this, is that God does not relate to creation through a matrix of impersonal decrees (that other and most Western theological frameworks think of God through).