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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