While there is general agreement that Gregory of Nyssa's writings are not systematic in the modern sense, the mounting interest among constructive theologians who often appropriate arguments out of their original context has been met with resistance by historical theologians. The latter's concern is that the creative, speculative character of Gregory's thought is being lost and his work is being presented as more consistent and unified than it may be. Into this dispute comes Radde-Gallwitz's Gregory of Nyssa's Doctrinal Works: A Literary Study. While recognizing that individual writings have their place within Gregory's overall corpus, Radde-Gallwitz cautions against an overly systematic reading. His alternative approach is to read a set of texts composed during the period just after 378 to around 383, each within its own context, while at the same time noticing certain key repetitions that cut across different contexts. Nor should Gregory's view on one topic be deduced from a single text. He illustrates the point with an introductory analysis of Gregory's Epiphany homily, In diem luminum. Countering anti-Nicenes, who attribute different natures and different degrees of honor to the three hypostases of the Trinity, Gregory asks his congregants why unequal gratitude should be given to the three benefactors who are joined in the single act of liberation (4). Although this passage reflects his standard pro-Nicene position that oneness in action assumes oneness in nature, Gregory sees that this feast day is not a time from correcting errors of doctrine but for doxology. Therefore, he breaks off self-conscious of the insufficiency of his homiletical illustrations, not because the gaps in his argument could not be filled in with more detailed argument, but simply because each different occasion and audience requires an appropriate purpose (skopos).

Chapter 1 treats epistles 5 and 24 plus To Eustathius and Against the Macedonians, in which Gregory sought to defend himself before Nicene allies against Pneumatomachian charges of tritheism. In chapter 2 he argues that the core of Gregory's argument in the second book of Against Eunomius is not an attack upon Eunomius's metahyscial and epistemological errors, on which most commentators focus, but Gregory's redeployment of his argument for the gift of “life-giving power” by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together in baptism previously developed in epistle 5 and Against the Macedonians. In an excursus, Radde-Gallwitz tests older interpretations of the three hypostases ultimately concluding that Gregory's account is an underdeveloped definition of the person that boarders on a modalism. The third chapter offers analyzes the confusing To Ablabius through Gregory's linguistic argument in Against Eunomius 2 about the nature of theological discourse. Gregory, he concludes, is not making metaphysical claims about the Trinity but about how Christian can and cannot speak about the Trinity.

Chapters 4–6 shift to an analysis of Gregory's economic treatment of Christ. As with theological texts written in the aftermath of Basil's death, Gregory's Christological works are not infrequently responses to accusations, implied or explicit, of heterodoxy, specifically of dividing the preincarnate Christ from Jesus or teaching that the union of Word and humanity grew over time. By reading certain passages in isolation contemporary scholars have taken Gregory to subscribe to an “Antiochene” Christology. Radde-Gallwitz demonstrates that Gregory's Christology expressed in his refutation of Eunomius's treatment of John 20:17 Against Eunomius 3.10) displays the same method of exposition one finds in his festal homilies. Similarly, chapter 5 examines how Gregory builds upon the image of Christ the Good Shepherd bearing the sheep on his shoulder (Against Eunomius 3) later in Epistle 3 and Against Apollinarius to defend Diodore of Tarsus and their allies in the pro-Meletian circle against Apollinarius. The result was the emergence of Gregory's mature Christology that affirms the Word's perfecting assumption of a full human nature, soul and body, from Mary's womb (215–217). The final chapter, with its comparison of the Catechetical Oration and the homily On the Savior's Birthday (but also including De deitate filii and To Theophilus), illustrates how Gregory recycles and adapts earlier treatments of the economy and theology to speaks to his new set of opponents.

This volume is valuable for all whose work focuses on Gregory because it contextualizes some of his classic words, for example Against Eunomius and Catechetical Oration, by reading them alongside other lesser known texts of the period. At another level, this monograph brilliantly illustrates the deep logic of Gregory's theology that, despite his unsystematic ways, gives coherence to his overall thought. Indeed, Radde-Gallwitz's argument places Gregory within the speculative tradition of Origen. For example, when analyzing the image of the good shepherd to parse the incarnation, Gregory, far from providing a reductive explanation of Jesus's words, employs “a chain of biblical language” or “gloss upon gloss” (188). This reflects his conviction that the divine economy is not explained by going outside the figurative Biblical language to “a foundational, literal” meaning. Gregory's linguistic assumption flowing through theological and economic writings is that the salvific union of God and man can no more be comprehended than the divine essence can be captured in the word “unbegotten.” The theologian, no less than the preacher, is forced to use chains of figurative images because that is all she has. For Gregory, there is no final Hegelian abstraction or Husserlian eidetic reduction that cuts through layers of figurative sediment to reveal some pure underlying form. Radde-Gallwitz demonstrates how contemporary theologians and historians misread Gregory if they fail to realize the fundamentally apophatic character of his theology. Because language belongs to creaturely sphere alien to God's nature, Christians cannot speak definitively of God or God's actions. The best that the theologian can do is live in the simultaneous “yes” (cataphatic) and “no” (apophatic) of God-talk. Each image in Gregory's chain of metaphors expresses a truth about God—the “yes”—yet his need to employ subsequent images in the chain reveals the inadequacy—the “no”—of the prior image, its insufficiency to capture or sum up the superabundant reality of God's self-disclosure. Nyssen scholars owe Radde-Gallwitz a debt for this fine work and should look forward to the conversations that will grow out of it.