https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_C6jtD87K6k
I’ve been reading a lot of Mircea Eliade and just finished the myth of return of return. He seems to take issue with the concept of history that the Judeo-Christian world introduces as its opposition to a more cyclical view. Yet either God acts in time and then marks that time and creates a linear view of reality where there is a beginning and an end. What are your thoughts on this and how do we look at it symbolically? Well, Blake, the way we look at it symbolically is that it’s just all hogwash. It is absolute hogwash that Christianity presents a linear view of history. You know, there’s so many scholars say that and you just want to slap them around because what are you talking about? Seriously, what are you talking about? My goodness, it is clear when you read, it’s so clear in Scripture that when you read in Scripture, all that Christ is doing is a kind of recap and return and transformation of the story in Genesis. When you look at how the story ends in Revelation, that it’s a return into the garden and an adding of the crown of the city around the garden. And so it’s not a linear view of history by no means. It is a kind of giant, giant cycle where the end of the cycle comes into the beginning but transforms the beginning by giving it an end. And so it actually shows us the fullness of the cycle. So it’s not that it’s just one story with the beginning and an end. It’s that it’s what the Christian story is showing is the giant, giant, giant cycle, the ultimate eternal ultimate cycle, you know, the pattern of which all the small cycles are patterned on. And so it’s just not linear. I don’t know what to say. And I really, really am annoyed because I don’t see. I just don’t see. Read, read like when the church fathers or when Christ says to the good thief, he says, tomorrow you will be with me in paradise. He’s saying you will be with me in the garden. How can that be linear? He’s bringing them back. He’s bringing the thief back into the garden. He’s bringing the end into the beginning. And so, I don’t know, I just, I like Mircea Eliade. But I mean, I think he just gets it wrong. There’s just so many people who get it wrong. So many people. And it really is a weird, I think it’s like an enlightenment view of Christianity, which wants to see Christianity and its own idea of progress and all this kind of nonsense.