02 — The Work: Title, Composition, and Genre

God, History, and Dialectic is a single ~1,000-page work of “theological history,” self-published in 1997, circulated as a secured electronic edition in 2008, and reissued in four volumes in 2016. This section documents its thin and largely self-generated bibliographic record and describes the distinctive — and contestable — genre to which it belongs.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; bibliography and method)

Overview

Two things must be said about GHD as a book before its arguments can be weighed. First, its publication history is genuinely thin: it never passed through a trade or academic publisher, and its record — a 1997 self-published volume, a 2008 secured electronic edition, a 2016 print-on-demand four-volume set — must be reported with care, distinguishing the firm from the undocumented (see METHODOLOGY.md, §3.5). Second, it belongs to the genre of theological history — the claim that a civilization’s shape follows from its doctrine of God — a genre that is legitimate but prone to overreach, and whose method and four-part structure this section lays out.

Files in This Section

  • Composition and Publication History — the title and its claim; the 1997 self-published edition (~1,051 pp.); the 2008 secured electronic edition; the 2016 four-volume Lulu set with its volume titles; and an explicit account of what can and cannot be documented.
  • The Genre of Theological History — what kind of book GHD is: its three-step method (Trinitarian premise → the diagnostic category of “dialectic” → cultural outworking), its four-volume structure, and a frank note on where the genre is strong and where it overreaches.

See Also