Triune well-being: The kenotic-enrichment of the eternal trinity

That God is the perfection of all well-being, and the source and context for human well-being, tends merely to be assumed in theology. Whilst theologians have explored the ‘divine dance’ of Triune life, a synthesis of the ‘dance-steps’ that constitute God’s own well-being is largely absent. The question this book explores, therefore, is how God actualises God’s own well-being. Exploring this question, the dynamics of Divine well-being are examined through the Scriptural attestation of intra-trinitarian movement of gift and receipt. This gifting and receiving within the Godhead is identified as ‘Divine self-enrichment’— defined axiomatically as God enriching God in the perfection and fullness of God. The book argues, congruent with a revitalisation of the metaphysics of Christian classical theism, and an analysis of contemporary trinitarian theologies across ecumenical lines (Bulgakov, Pannenberg and Von Balthasar), that Divine ‘life’, the glory of well-being, is eternally constituted in the self-giving and other-centred relations of the divine persons of the Trinity. In other words, the actualisation of God’s ‘all-blessed’ life is contiguous with triune self-giving; a concept identified in this book as ‘kenotic-enrichment’ or ‘enriching-kenosis’. Such a trinitarian exploration is not merely theoretical but goes to the heart of a doctrine of God that impacts the possibility for human enrichment. In this sense, Triune Well-Being employs the riches of Trinitarian theology to situate the praxis of human well-being, as a repetition of, and participatory engagement in, the life of divine enrichment.