Joel Belz
Joel Belz is founder of WORLD magazine and God's World News children's magazines. He writes a bi-weekly column for WORLD, and is co-author of Whirled Views, a collection of columns, with Marvin Olasky.

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Going somewhere

God is taking history in a definite direction, not in little circles | by Joel Belz

"Everything that goes around," the old saying tells us, "comes around."

It's meant, I suppose, as a kind of folksy comfort. Don't worry, we're reassured. Things may seem out of joint. But they'll come back to normal. There's even a little biblical validation, when Ecclesiastes famously reminds us that "there is nothing new under the sun."

In more academic circles, it's sometimes referred to as a "cyclical view of history." It gains credence every time someone quotes another version of George Santayana's bromide that "those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it." But a professional historian I talked to a few days ago told me that good scholars—even those who do read history!—don't take the theory too seriously. It's one of those observations that makes sense, he said, only so long as you don't check it out too rigorously.

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