In the preface of his second edition of, Mysterium Paschale, Balthasar comments on the mystery of the Kenosis of the Son–desiring both to take serious the assertions made in Scripture (e.g., those OT passages which address seem to indicate immutability) and to avoid falling into Nestorian or other Christological heresies.
“It seems to me that the only way which might avoid the two opposed and incompatible extremes is that which relates the event of the Kenosis of the Son of God to what one can, by analogy, designate as the eternal ‘event’ of the divine processions. It is from that supra-temporal yet ever actual event that, as Christians, we must approach the mystery of the divine ‘essence’. That essence is forever ‘given’ in the self-gift of the Father, ‘rendered’ in the thanksgiving of the Son, and ‘represented’ in its character as absolute love by the Holy Spirit. According to the great Scholastics, the inner-divine processions are the condition of possibility for a creation. The divine ‘ideas’ for a possible world derive from the everlasting circulation of life, founded as it is on the total and unconditional gift of each hypostasis to the others. [...] We shall never know how to express the abyss-like depths of the Father’s self-giving, that Father, who, in an eternal ‘super-Kenosis’, makes himself ‘destitute’ of al that he is and can be so as to bring forth a consubstantial divinity, the Son. Everything that can be thought and imagined where God is concerned is, in advance, included and transcended in this self-destitution which constitutes the person of the Father, and, at the same time, those of the Son and the Spirit. God as the ‘gulf’ (Eckhart: Un-Grund) of absolute Love contains in advance, eternally, all the modalities of love, of compassion, and even of a ‘separation’ motivated by love and founded on the infinite distinction between the hypostases–modalities which may manifest themselves in the course of a history of salvation involving sinful humankind. God, then, has no need to ‘change’ when he makes a reality of the wonders of his charity, wonders which include the Incarnation and, more particularly, the Passion of Christ, and, before him, the dramatic history of God with Israel and, no doubt, with humanity as a whole. All the contingent ‘abasements’ of God in the economy of salvation are forever included and outstripped in the eternal event of Love” (pp. viii-ix).