Triune Well-Being: The Kenotic-Enrichment of the Eternal Trinity

That God is the perfection of all-blessed abundance, and the source and context for creation’s well-being, tends merely to be assumed in theology. Yet, how does God enact all-blessedness and actualize God’s own abundantly enriched life? And how might such a reality be relevant to human well-being? Addressing these questions in Triune Well-Being: The Kenotic-Enrichment of the Eternal Trinity, Jacqueline Service traces the dynamics of Divine well-being through Scripture, Christian metaphysics, and a synthesis of Orthodox (Bulgakov), Catholic (Von Balthasar), and Protestant (Pannenberg) Trinitarian theologies to argue that God’s ＂all-blessed＂ life, the glory of well-being, is symbiotic with triune self-giving (kenosis); a concept identified as ＂kenotic-enrichment＂ or ＂enriching-kenosis.＂ Such a trinitarian exploration not only offers a fresh perspective on the contested topic of kenosis but goes to the heart of a doctrine of God that implicates the possibility of the well-being of all life.

Jacqueline Service is lecturer of systematic theology at St Mark’s National Theological Centre and Associate Head of School in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University.