I’ve been enjoying a Teaching Company lecture series called “The Search for a Meaningful Past” that presents and compares different “philosophies, theories and interpretations of human history.” It’s been fascinating, but sooner or later when I’m listening I always end up realizing why intellectuals just can’t abide Christian orthodoxy — it spoils all the fun.

Here are all these brilliant individuals sifting through the ashes and trying to make connections. It’s an arduous task, particularly before the Information Age when accurate data was so hard to come by, and as with so many of these displays of Deep Thought, it’s staggering to contemplate the intellectual prowess on display behind the work of Hegel and Marx and the rest.

But the big unspoken truth is that the singular reason for these types of theories is to grab that elusive brass ring: an accurate prediction of where mankind is headed. Not that it’s not fun to just dig around in the bones, but sooner or later that curiosity has to succumb to the temptation to be both a scientist and a prophet.

It’s just our way, of course. We’re all afloat on this magnificent cruise boat, and we all want to be the one to say either “Land ho!” or “Iceberg dead ahead!” So there are theorists that are bullish on mankind’s future and ones that are bearish ( — optimists and pessimists, basically). There are those like Marx that thought that societies would naturally progress to a higher and higher level until they became “classless” (well, he got THAT part right, anyway) and all would go well. There are others that believed that societies are cyclical, repeating patterns of birth, growth and death without making significant progress to or from anything. More recently there are those that are saying that there’s nothing new for societies to do and we’re all just on a big film loop for the foreseeable future. (“The end of history” so-called. Talk about a pepper-upper!)

And then there’s the Christian epistomology, (though the illuminati would always prefer to disregard the viewpoint of that quarter of the earth’s population). We’re not likely to view the last few centuries as glowingly as a Marxist would, but we certainly don’t think we’re doomed to just travel in meaningless circles until the sun goes nova. Mostly, of course, we tend to view any serious examination of human history as being incomplete if it doesn’t at least attempt to take God into account. He’s far from a disinterested party. At the absolute least, He has taken a hand on occasions to establish the covenants documented in the Bible. And finally, He has come in the flesh and established His Church in these latter days.

All of which a secular theorist would debate or discount of course. So I can only imagine how much less these guys want to consider that the brass ring they’re searching for has been given to the humblest Christian with the humblest mental abilities (which might just be me, come to think of it). And that is, we know what the big finish is — it’s the Second Coming. We know we’re not to speculate too much about it (though we do it anyway). And we know that there are a lot of specifics we don’t know (the most maddening of which has to be when???). But any orthodox Christian (lower-case ‘o’ or upper-) believes that this is how the story ends and all that’s left are details.

Which can make us seem cocky, I would think, when we’re not just viewed as being idiotic or demented. But I think it also makes us the least favorite ones to invite to the talk-fest. We’re like people attending a murder mystery play who say we know for certain who did it but haven’t a clue as to why or how. I suppose the non-believing crowd wishes we’d either shut up about it or come back when we can fill in the juicy details.

So I sort of tune those parts of the lectures out. I suppose what I find much more telling is how secular thinkers are dealing with the fact that the Age of Enlightenment hasn’t succeeded in pointing the way out of human fallenness. It was all supposed to be very scientific, you see. And when we enlightened Westerners dismissed all the superstitious stuff, humanity was supposed to take flight. The scientific approach has brought Western civilization as far as a democratic republic (though we may not be able to hold onto it much longer). And it has pointed the way to elevated possibilities like communism (which I’ve always thought would work just dandy if only people were entirely devoid of self-interest, competitiveness, ambition, greed or individualism). But the best thinking by all the people with a little too much time on their hands hasn’t succeeded in getting beyond that, and morale just keeps getting lower and lower.

Perhaps Christian morale is a bit low as well, at least amongst the End Times theorists. Maybe we’re all ready for God to take a hand again, even if it’s just to give us a kick in the pants. But then, how many times do we have to find out that you want to watch what you wish for?

As the Chinese adage goes, “May you never live in ‘interesting’ times.” Interesting end times would definitely be worse. But probably both the historical theorists and the End Times speculators would be thrilled for a couple minutes or so.