Pantelis Kalaitzidis of the Volos Academy, Greece, is one of the most prominent of a loose-knit group of Orthodox academic theologians who have become dissatisfied with the theological status quo and are seeking renewal. These theologians, like Kalaitzidis, are rethinking iconic figures (e.g. Georges Florovsky), reviving neglected ones (e.g. Sergii Bulgakov), critiquing nationalism and even turning to new areas that Orthodoxy has ignored or reviled (e.g. feminism, homosexuality and post-colonial theory).

The present volume is a stellar example of this new post-secular and post-ethnic Orthodox theology. While its touchstones remain the Eastern patristic and liturgical heritage – strongly influenced by John Zizioulas – it applies this tradition to a relatively new area for Orthodoxy, ‘political theology’. Here Kalaitzidis’ work is akin to the important recent book, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2012), of the Greek-American Aristotle Papanikolaou, though the contexts are vastly different. In reaction to American Orthodox sectarianism, Papanikolaou argues for the church's support of a liberal democratic state with a broadly new left progressivist diversity agenda. Kalaitzidis, in contrast, is ‘anarcho-socialist’ and anti-nationalist, arguing that in Greece the church is tied far too closely to the state and to the oligarch families who run the country. For Kalaitzidis, Orthodox political theology combines both a stringent self-critique and an attempt to see how the church – retaining its prophetic otherness – might become a positive force for social transformation and greater social and economic justice.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part gives the book its title and it sets out the theological problem for Orthodoxy in regards to social and political engagement. The second section is a response from first principles to the problematic: ‘Eschatology and Politics’. In the first section, Kalaitzidis marks out the territory for an Orthodox political theology. Though drawing on Carl Schmidt's attention to structural analogies of theological and political concepts, he rejects his illiberal and nostalgic attachment to autocracy (pp. 24–5). He is interested, echoing Nikos Nissiotis, in developing an unashamedly left-wing political theology of social and political liberation (p. 65). What follows is a critical analysis of Orthodoxy's capitulation to nationalism, caesaro-papism and ethno-phyletism. Kalaitzidis argues for a new public role for the church – ‘eschatological’ in character – where it neither dominates civil society nor withdraws into quietism.

‘Eschatology and Politics’, the book's second part, lays out a theo-political vision of an ‘eschatological anarchism’ (p. 130). By ‘eschatological anarchism’, he refers to an ethics of kenotic self-surrender, a cruciform vision of authority and primacy and the negation of all attempts to establish a Christian society and state. Kalaitzidis wants politically to harness the already/not yet dialectic (seen in the eucharist) as it distances the church from the structures of the world and history at the same time as it does not disdain the world or flee from it and history. One critically affirms worldly structures and programmes where they meet up with the Gospel ethic but does not become bound by them, as there is no final and established meaning within history. Repentance for the past and faith in the openness of the future are needed. The politics of the church is to witness to the Kingdom to come through transfiguring and renewing the world by prophetically denouncing injustice and ministering to the oppressed, binding up wounds and proclaiming the Gospel (pp. 120–1).

Now this evangelical vision is beautiful, reminiscent of Pope Francis, and a breath of fresh air in the Orthodox context where theology so often simply sacralises the political order of the day. Yet, at least in this brief articulation of it, there is a vagueness, so that it is unclear what this amounts to practically and thus it lacks traction not as a theology but as a ‘liberation theology’. It so much emphasises that the church is a spiritual reality directed towards the Kingdom to come that it almost neglects the fact that the church is also a profoundly human institution with a material reality and a particular history. Pace Kalaitzidis, if the church is to be renewed then it must re-envision (not ‘reform’) its canon law, hierarchical liturgy (which glorifies the bishop as an emperor) and theology retaining continuity through a ‘living tradition’. Kalaitzidis, in fact, has made concrete suggestions elsewhere, not for ecclesial re-envisioning but a root and branch ‘reformation’ of Orthodoxy. However, I think that the vagueness in this short presentation is largely due to beginning with eschatology – swerving between the extremes of the already and the not yet. The temptation is to see the church as passing through the midst of history with its gaze fixed on the eschaton, surviving in this way the vicissitudes of history. History and culture for such a theology are not the essential garments of the body of the living Christ, the church, but at best afterthoughts to be abolished or ecstatically taken up into the life to come. The antinomies of history and the eschaton need to be kept in a creative tension through faith and tradition or the church either becomes static or erratic.

Nevertheless, Kalaitzidis’ project is a genuinely new and desperately needed rethinking of the Orthodox Church's positive engagement with the secular realm, human rights and liberal democracy. The question remains, however, with the recent calling of an Ecumenical Council by the Orthodox Primates for 2016, whether the gifts and witness of academic theologians like Kalaitzidis will continue to be marginalised in world Orthodoxy or drawn on as a resource. The renewal of an ancient church stands in the balance.