John McGuckin's prolific scholarship on the history, theology, law, and liturgical life of Orthodox Christianity lies behind this succinct “new history” of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He sets out the historical methodology before beginning with “Proto-and Post-Apostolic Times” and ending in the last century's “Orthodox Diaspora.” McGuckin situates the Orthodox way of life within specific geopolitical and cultural contexts. These reveal the diversity of local adaptation by communities bound together in an understanding of tradition—the worship expression of both oral and written convictions of what is held in common as accepted belief and practice. He concludes with two chapters that examine recent “outstanding Orthodox figures” and the experience of “day-to-day life” any visitor might encounter upon entering an Orthodox temple. A postlude speculates on how Orthodox Christianity will fare in a “postmodern environment.” He provides with his own commentary on the Nicene Creed, the “fundamental creed of Christendom” (3), a “fourth-century liturgical song . . . collated from new Testament citations” (37), the “sharpest summative digest of the entire apostolic tradition—and this because every line is more or less entirely constructed out of the New Testament itself” (90).

McGuckin has authored a book on the Eastern Orthodox Church in its European expressions. One might have wished for one on the Arabic-speaking Christians that Syriac roots still comprise a significant part of the Eastern Orthodox communion of churches worldwide with deep historic connections to both the Greek and Russian Orthodox. This reviewer is more anxious about the author's decision to make clear why the Orthodox cannot accept identification as “‘one of’ the Christian churches since they are ‘the Church’” (3). Why then define “Orthodox” as “correct opinion” (32)?

Etymologically, McGuckin is correct. He understands “the” church to be “first and foremost a part of the resurrection glory given to Jesus” (15). “Church” remains “mysterion” that emanates from the resurrection itself and the testimony of those who only after that event began to grasp the transformation of the entire cosmos because of the Incarnation that is “no less than a second creation” (94). But can the word “opinion” today convey what had been understood from pre-Christian times? The Greek words once offered a via media between absolute knowledge (episteme) and woeful ignorance. Hence, “orthe” and “doxa” must be rendered as “correct opinion,” or even better, “right belief or teaching.” It would have been helpful for the non-Orthodox to recall that the Jewish diaspora translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek at Alexandria opted for “doxa” as the equivalent of the Hebrew “praise” or “glory.” All the writers of the Christian New Testament passed on that use and understanding. Hence, the common and ancient conviction remains that Orthodox has always meant simultaneously “right belief” and “right worship,” even if the eventual translation into the Slavonic Pravoslavie emphasizes right worship (187) and thus, by implication, “the” church.

McGuckin provides a masterful narration of the Eastern Orthodox in the Patristic centuries before turning to the “Byzantine” Imperial Church—a term the East Roman Orthodox would have rejected, just as they did Western jibes that they were “Greeks.” The role of monasticism and iconography, both of which grew in significance from the fifth century onward, provide the broader context for his analysis of the imperial church and its fractious relationship with non-Chalcedonian Orthodox and, increasingly, the Latin Chalcedonian West. One risks identification as a churl in asking more from such a condensed analysis that already provides a narrative structure. The book also returns repeatedly to the interior life of ascetical discipline, the praying-fasting-alms-giving manifestation of local “right belief and worship” whose ultimate purpose is for the truly human to achieve union with God in a cosmos that will ultimately reflect its original purpose and potential (301–302). Still, an honest assessment of the Eastern Orthodox today should acknowledge two related questions that have crippled the return to a bolder Orthodox proclamation of the Gospel. The lamed mission stumbles not primarily because of the nearly global allure of “secularist materialism” (299), significant though that challenge may be. The Eastern Orthodox remain unclear on how to answer the question of whether there is a “Petrine ministry” in the church, and, if so, what this implies for their understanding of the “primacy” of the long-absent bishop of Rome and that of his long-standing substitute, the patriarch of Constantinople. Internal division on this question has stifled international cooperation and the very principle of “collegial synodical governance” (206), darkening the credibility of the Eastern Orthodox to be the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” church. The second question cannot be asked without reference to the first: are the Eastern Orthodox, especially in their “traditional” lands, capable of acknowledging the evidence for the malign influence of “ecclesial imperialism” that has emanated from the close connections between throne and altar from the time of Constantine the Great to the present? McGuckin argues (122–138) for an understanding of the symphonia of the church and its “Christ-loving” emperors, suggesting that it is the peculiar “western” suspicion of that harmony that make the West's political and social theory so profoundly different. Perhaps it can even be blamed for providing the basis for the “secularism [that] has made the notion of this priestly-kingly synthesis something to be held in suspicion” (128). But this idealized portrait overlooks the use of military force on the part of emperors such as Justinian against Christian dissenters and, even more seriously, raises the question of whether the Eastern Orthodox can ever adjust to life in a pluralistic social-political world so long as the “Byzantine” model, in whatever reincarnation, remains a default instinct among them. McGuckin ends his “new history” on an optimistic note because of the Orthodox potential to offer in its worldly poverty its storehouse of experiences, one “spiritually and intellectually rich” (303). But that challenge applies with equal force not only in the “postmodern religious wilderness” of “the West” but equally in the lived experience of contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy itself.