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.

Gianluca Zuccaro is a Friar Minor, adjunct professor of Theology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and Deputy Director of the Research Centre at the Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome.

He holds a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, with a focus on computational physics, and a doctorate in Dogmatic Theology from the Antonianum.

His research explores the dialogue between theology and the sciences, with particular emphasis on the theology of creation, theological anthropology, and contemporary understandings of matter, an area in which his scientific training informs his theological work.

His work adopts a transdisciplinary approach to the relationship between God, humanity, and the world, engaging perspectives from physics, biology, and the philosophy of mind.