‘A Bad Show on the Nature of God’

 

Misters Harper and McFarland strike again.  A poor woman confused about how one could see God since He is pure Spirit got a rambling, nonsense answer on Exploring the Word on American Family Radio (24 Aug. 2026, last segment of the program, starting about the 46:45 mark).  Mr Harper gave the worst answer of the two, saying the essence of God can be revealed.  That is a flat breach of basic Christian theology:  God’s essence cannot be known to any created being, only to the Three Persons of the Trinity.  Once again, if Protestants like these two would only do the smallest bit of study of biblical commentary by those within the authentic Apostolic lineage such as the Orthodox theologians Basil the Great or Gregory Palamas, they would know that God is both a hidden, unknown Essence and revealed, knowable Energies.  We can see God and be united with Him through His Energies.  What Mr Harper was saying is actually a restatement of an old heresy from the 4^th century, Eunomianism.  We quote briefly from Fr John Romanides:

‘Both Orthodox and Arians fully agreed with the inherited tradition that only God knows His own essence. This means that He who knows the divine nature is himself God by nature, Thus, in order to prove that the Logos is a creature, the Arians argued that the Logos does not know the essence of the Father. The Orthodox argued that the Logos does know the essence of the Father and, therefore, is uncreated. The Eunomians threw a monkey wrench into the agreed rules for proving points with their shocking claim that, not only does the Logos know the essence of God, but man also can know this essence. Therefore, the Logos does not have to be uncreated because He knows this essence.

‘Against the Arian and Orthodox position that creatures cannot know the divine uncreated essence, but may know the uncreated energy of God in its multiple manifestations, the Eunomians argued that the divine essence and uncreated energy are identical, so that to know the one is to know the other.

‘Strangely, Augustine adopted the Eunomian positions on these questions. Therefore, when the Franks appeared in the East with these positions they were accused of being Eunomians.’

I hope Misters Harper and McFarland will pray for me.  They are doing good work by encouraging people to read the Holy Scriptures.  Yet without the guidance of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, they are making errors in their interpretations of the Bible that is harmful to their listeners.  May God help them to stop relying on their own wisdom.

Sources:

https://afr.net/podcasts/exploring-the-word-with-bert-harper-and-alex-mcfarland/2026/august/the-word-and-work-of-jesus-matthew-724-813/

https://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.03.htm

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Death in the Farm Community’

 

We don’t mean those words of the title in an elegiac, metaphorical sense, though there is an element of that in what we will be discussing.  It is in reference rather to a hard, empirical truth, that deaths are rising in farm communities, and specifically a certain kind of death:  from cancer.

News stories about exploding cancer rates in agricultural areas are beginning to pile up.  Here is an excerpt from the latest, reporting on Missouri farming counties:

‘Nestled in Missouri’s Bootheel is the small town of Kennett, the Dunklin County seat. With just over 10,000 residents, it’s a close-knit community where good-natured teasing is a common show of affection.

‘Once a sprawling swampland, it has since been transformed into an expanse of flat, fertile fields where agriculture stands as the backbone of the region’s economy.

‘Kennett’s houses don’t get much taller than one story, and as visitors stroll down the main street, they’re welcomed by a mix of restaurants, boutiques and a cozy hair salon.

‘These buildings are dwarfed in size by a silent, boarded-up hospital, its vacancy a remembrance of what the community has lost.

‘It’s the kind of community where if something tragic happens, everyone finds out.

‘Bobbi Bibbs found this out the hard way. She discovered she had cancer in her colon in December 2023, which then metastasized to her liver, making it a stage four diagnosis.

‘Bibbs isn’t alone. Dunklin County is among the 10 counties with the highest rates of that type of cancer in the state.’

The reason for this is now coming to light, mainly, the heavy use of toxic agricultural chemicals.  The news story continues:

‘In Dunklin County, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of crops — and most of that land is blanketed by pesticides.

‘Estimates suggest that thousands of kilograms of pesticides are sprayed over Missouri cropland each year. In some places, wastewater sludge containing “forever chemicals” — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — is applied on farmland as fertilizer.

‘Multiple scientific studies have explored a connection between pesticide use and cancer, pointing to a silent public health crisis hitting rural communities particularly hard.

‘The University of Missouri, in partnership with Investigate Midwest, conducted a county-by-county analysis of cancer rates and pesticide use, using the most recently available data for pesticides that are repeatedly cited in research as likely to be associated with cancer risk.

‘The six counties with the highest use of these pesticides per square mile are all located in the Bootheel, including Dunklin. Four of those counties are in the top 15 for overall cancer rates in Missouri. All counties with the highest rates of cancer are rural.’

If we cast a wider net and look at all the States, the data appear to confirm that those with the heaviest use of agri-chemical pesticides and herbicides have the highest cancer rates.  Many of them are Southern States.

This is an existential threat to the Southern identity.  Agriculture is one of the most defining marks of Dixie’s culture.  Pecans, rice, corn, black-eyed peas, okra, mayhaws, peaches – the list could go on much further.  Without the fruits of the land, the South would be a much different place.  And if our farmers are too sick to bring forth those fruits, then a central part of Southern culture will die with them.

This is not all by accident.  The giant agribusiness cartels want centralized control of the food supply; monopolies in their hands secure them the largest possible profits.  Independent farmers, on the other hand, using heirloom seeds, non-toxic pest control, and fertilizer from livestock manure and other natural sources, are their death knell.  The goal of the cartels is to make the farmers dependent on them for all their inputs.  Patented, genetically modified crop seeds were a big step to securing monopoly control of agriculture.  Along with the patented plants came all the chemicals like glyphosate/Roundup that were to be used together with them, which had to be bought from the same cartels.

This industrial model of agriculture is largely what is practiced here at the South today, and it is this which has destroyed the traditional family farm, and ruined the health of farming communities and of the wider environment of which they are a part.

But this model is alien to our people.  Dixie’s approach to farming is quite the opposite of it:  It is based on the idea of the independence of the farming family and on increasing the health of people and land and animals.  John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, wrote some wonderful lines articulating the Southern vision of agriculture in his book Arator (first published in 1814).  Reading only a few passages from his book offers strong inspiration to reject the present model and reacquire the Southern agricultural ethos.  On improving the land, he writes,

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/death-in-the-farm-community.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Evangelical Protestants Should Not Be Directing US Foreign Policy’

 

Masterclasses are all the rage right now, so we’ll hop on that bandwagon for a moment and say that if anyone wants a masterclass on why Evangelical Protestants shouldn’t be in charge of United States foreign policy, he will have a difficult time finding a better one than the opening segment of American Family Radio’s Today’s Issues for Monday, 18 Aug. 2025.

We have a lot of respect for AFR’s parent organization, the American Family Association, for its work in promoting Christian culture by combating abortion, pornography, the LGBT cult, and so on.  But the political and religious programming on AFR can be a real trainwreck sometimes.  So it was on Today’s Issues.

The segment in question featured a discussion of the Ukraine-Russia war in the wake of the meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin, and the commentators, who are supposedly well-informed on current events, couldn’t stop mouthing the dishonest talking points that permeate the mainstream Western press:

1.  Putin invaded the Ukraine without provocation and without justification for the sake of acquiring resource-rich lands.

This kind of statement was excusable in the opening days of the war, when passions were running high and reporting was chaotic.  But it has now been going for more than three years since the war began.  That is plenty of time to do the necessary research into the background of the conflict.  The commentators on TI have not done that research.  Let’s help them.

Many folks in the West live in a make-believe world where nothing happened in the Ukraine prior to 2022.  Pres Putin one day just woke up (so this fanciful thinking goes) and decided to go to war with the Ukraine because he’s an evil dictator who wants to re-establish the Soviet Union.

There is actually a very long history surrounding Western aggression toward Russia on her western marches, and Russia’s efforts to fend it off.  More recently was the US-EU sponsored coup in the Ukraine in 2014 that turned her into a puppet state of the West to be used precisely for destabilization operations against Russia.  The RAND Corporation’s 2019 document ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ specifically mentions weaponizing the Ukraine against Russia.  Thousands of people in the eastern provinces of the Ukraine, which culturally are very close to Russia, had also been killed by the murderous Kiev regime from 2014 to 2022, when Russia had finally had enough of Western treachery and took matters into her own hands to protect herself and her friends within the Ukraine from that Western puppet government.

But Western aggression against Russia extends much further back in time.  Ben Dixon wrote a series of essays that go into great depth on Western-Russian relations in centuries past (one of them is here).  We will simply note a couple of examples in this regard.  The first is one of the earliest examples of the post-Orthodox West’s attempts to subjugate Russia, via the Roman Catholics during the life of the wonderful prince St Alexander Nevsky:

A very troublesome time had begun in Russian history: from the East came the Mongol Horde destroying everything in their path; from the West came the forces of the Teutonic Knights, which blasphemously and with the blessing of the Roman Pope, called itself “Cross-bearers” by wearing the Cross of the Lord. In this terrible hour the Providence of God raised up for the salvation of Russia holy Prince Alexander, a great warrior, man of prayer, ascetic and upholder of the Land of Russia. “Without the command of God there would not have been his prince.”

 

 . . . The Teutonic Knights remained a dangerous enemy. In a lightning-quick campaign in 1241 Saint Alexander recaptured the ancient Russian fortress of Kopore, expelling the knights. But in 1242, the Germans succeeded capturing Pskov. The enemy boasted of “subjecting all the Slavic nation.” Saint Alexander, setting forth in a winter campaign, liberated Pskov, that ancient home of the Holy Trinity, and in spring of the year 1242 fought a decisive battle against the Teutonic Order. On the ice of Lake Chud both armies clashed on April 5, 1242. Raising his hands towards the heavens, Saint Alexander prayed: “Judge me, O God, and judge my strife with a boastful nation and grant help to me, O God, as to Moses of old against Amalek, and to my great-grandfather Yaroslav the Wise against accursed Svyatopolk.”

 

By his prayer, by the help of God, and by military might the Crusaders were completely destroyed. There was a terrible slaughter, and there was such a crashing of striking spears and swords that it seemed as though the frozen lake were in motion and not solid ice, since it was covered with blood. When they turned to flee, the enemy was pursued and slashed by Alexander’s army “as if they sped through the air, and there was nowhere for the enemy to flee.” Later, they led a multitude of captives behind the holy prince, marching in disgrace.

 

Contemporaries clearly understood the universal historical significance of the Great Battle of the Ice, and the name of Saint Alexander was celebrated throughout Holy Russia, “through all the lands, from the Egyptian Sea to Mount Ararat, from both sides of the Varangian Sea to Great Rome.”

 

The western boundaries of the Russian land were safely secured . . . .

The other comes from the time of the Protestant Reformation:

In the course of its centuries-old history, Valaam Monastery, located near the border of Great Novgorod with Sweden, was repeatedly ravaged by the Swedes. The latter were attracted both by a desire for profit and by a desire to plant the Latin faith in the surrounding lands.

 

Under King Gustav Vasa (1523-1560), the Reformation took place in Sweden. During the reign of his son John III, a military detachment of Lutheran converts, who, according to St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov), " still breathed a fanatical predilection for their newborn faith," pursued the Orthodox King, crossed the ice from the mainland to the island and attacked the Monastery. February 20, 1578 " 18 old men and 16 novices were martyred for their steadfastness in the Orthodox Faith." Their names with the note "beaten by the Germans on Valaam elders and servants" were entered into the Synodikon, which later ended up in Vasiliev Monastery: Hieromonk Titus, Schema-monk Tikhon, Monk Gelasios, Monk Sergius, Monk Barlaam, Monk Savva, Monk Konon, Monk Sylvester, Monk Cyprian, Monk Pimen, Monk John, Monk Samon, Monk Jonah, Monk David, Monk Cornelius, Monk Niphon, Monk Athanasios, Monk Serapion, Monk Barlaam, the novices Athanasios, Anthony, Luke, Leóntios, Thomas, Dionysios, Philip, Ignatius, Basil, Pakhomios, Basil, Theophilos, John, Theodore, and John.

2.  The second dishonest talking point regards the so-called kidnapped Ukrainian children taken by the Russian army.  War propaganda featuring fake atrocities committed against children is a hallmark of modern Western countries.  England used it against the Germans in WWI; the US famously used it against Iraq in 1990 – the much-ballyhooed testimony that Saddam Hussein’s goons were taking babies from hospital incubators and murdering them, which was later proven to be a fabrication.

The Western countries are stooping to this strategy once again vis-à-vis Russia.  But, again, a little research dispels the lies at once.  Mrs Helen Andrews, who possesses and displays a ruthless precision in her research and writing, put this claim to rest more than a year ago:

 . . .

The rest may be here:

https://orthodoxreflections.com/evangelical-protestants-should-not-be-directing-us-foreign-policy/

Or here:

https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/08/27/evangelical-protestants-should-not-be-directing-us-foreign-policy/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!