This monograph, a reworking of Gallaher's doctoral thesis, sets an ambitious goal – to explore the ‘problematic’ of ‘[h]ow can God as Trinity be free in creation and redemption if in His everlasting love for creation He has eternally bound himself to the world in Christ?’ (p. 227). His intuition is that an adequate theology needs to say two, seemingly contradictory, things. It must preserve the freedom of God, and the gratuity of grace, by maintaining that the economy of creation and redemption ‘could have been otherwise’ for God. Yet theology must also preserve a sense in which it could not have been otherwise. If God is not precisely the God who creates and redeems in Christ, then an unknown and arbitrary agent might lurk behind the economic Trinity. Gallaher proceeds by way of three interlocutors: Bulgakov, Barth and Balthasar. He then attempts a contribution of his own that builds upon them.
Gallaher begins by mapping the different modes in which one might speak of freedom and necessity, for both divine and creaturely agents. He then plunges into Bulgakov's thought. Central to these considerations is Gallaher's discernment of Bulgakov's penchant for ‘antinomy’ as a structuring principle. The central antimony under consideration is that between God as ‘Absolute’ (God in Godself), and God as ‘Absolute Relative’ (God for the world). The former is the locus for speaking of God's freedom, the latter the free necessity by which God creates and redeems. Gallaher's fear is that this antinomy is collapsed in the practice of Bulgakov's thought, the Absolute being swallowed by the Absolute Relative, resulting in a tendency towards monistic determinism (a tendency for which Bulgakov's sophiology accrues a fair degree of blame).
Next Gallaher explores Barth's doctrine of election, and sees in Barth's dialecticism a more successful repetition of Bulgakov's central antinomy. On the one hand (with Barth's holding, even if in an attenuated sense, to the idea of the logos asarkos), Barth's God remains free. His election for the world in Christ could have been otherwise. But, on the other, that election implies an eternally chosen ‘de facto necessity’. It even determines God's trinitarian life; there is afterwards no other God than the one met in Christ. But, if Bulgakov's vision falls off the stool in the direction of a deterministic collapse of God and the world, Barth's potentially falls off in the other direction. Despite the ‘de facto’ necessity election brings, there is still the whiff, to Gallaher, of a tacit voluntarism to Barth's God.
The reparative operation Gallaher proposes involves invoking Balthasar as a theologian who draws upon both Barth and Bulgakov. The dialecticism of Barth, and antinomy of Bulgakov, is supplemented in Balthasar by ‘analogy’ (ever a concept to conjure with). There is an analogy between the intra-trinitarian dialectic of freedom and necessity, and the dialectic of freedom and necessity operant between God and the world. An eternal intra-trinitarian drama grounds the economy of salvation and creation, but the two are not (pace Hegel) collapsed. Going beyond Balthasar, and drawing implicitly upon Barth as well, Gallaher pictures a double election: there is a primordial intra-hypostatic election that grounds the immanent Trinity's life, and a temporal economic election by God for creation in the incarnation by the Spirit. The latter, although it could have been otherwise, through participation (another word to conjure with) in the former, gains the gift of necessity. But there is still a sense for Gallaher in which that second election poses an element of risk and novelty for the first.
The audacity, and occasional opacity, of this work is evident in the above summary. Gallaher is self-evidently a theologian in the process of becoming formidable. Yet, there is a tendency in this unapologetically dense work for the argument to become subterranean beneath its details. The reader will, for instance, learn much about the internecine wars within Barth scholarship. Nor is much care given to orient a reader not already familiar with, say, German idealism, Eastern Orthodox theology (Gallaher's own tradition) and patristic thought. Thus, the usefulness of this potentially important work will be limited to those with the requisite knowledge, or the patience to obtain it. It is also self-consciously ‘systematic’ in the sense that there is only a minimal attempt to situate its thinkers historically and in relation to one another – rather the discussion is more interested in a purely formal shared problematic with which these three thinkers grappled. One cannot help but feel there is something lost in this, admittedly understandable, methodological approach.
