09 — Reception and Assessment

The work’s actual footprint — self-published, never peer-reviewed, carried by a niche Orthodox internet subculture, influential on popular anti-Filioque polemic, and complicated by its author’s later alternative-history career — and the closing (a)/(b)/(c) discipline that lets an Orthodox reader take the Church’s confessed truth from GHD, hold Farrell’s grand thesis as a thesis, and register the genuinely disputed questions as disputed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; reception and assessment)

Overview

This section closes the collection by doing two things. First, it states the reception factually — no sneering, no whitewash: the absence of peer review, the self-publication, the 2008 secured electronic edition and the Orthodox online milieu (Energetic Procession) that prized it, the real influence on popular polemic, and the bearing of Farrell’s second career. Second, it applies the triage the whole collection has been building toward: (a) what the Church confesses and the reader may take with confidence; (b) what Farrell argues beyond that, to be held as his contested thesis; (c) what serious scholarship disputes. Keeping these three apart is the right way to read GHD — honoring its dogmatic truth, weighing its thesis, and confusing neither with the other.

Files in This Section

  • The Work’s Footprint — outside the academy; the Orthodox internet subculture; influence on popular polemic; the self-publication question; and the later-career question, all stated with sources.
  • What the Reader Can Take With Confidence — the (a)/(b)/(c) distinction drawn explicitly, with a sober final assessment.

See Also