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had inherited the Judaic conception of time and history through the Old Testa- ment.24 However, while the Hebrew Bible’s framework sees history as a process separate from the divine, the inclusion of God in the course of history was an innovation brought about by Christianity. The writing of history, generation after generation, was influenced by the way the biblical stories were told. The three historical religions had imprinted our consciousness with a perception of history as a succession of patriarchs.25 Such a historical approach evaluates people and epochs by their contribution to humanity’s success. Even the terms “Renaissance” and “The New Era”, which succeeded the so-called “Dark Ages”, express a belief in historical forces of re- newal and redemption. This belief is Judeo-Christian in its essence – the belief that we are moving towards a new era, an era of successes and accomplish- ments, as opposed to the failures of the past. A created world must make room for history because only under this as- sumption can one reject the theory of the eternal return of past events: the sequence of generations, without beginning or end, would transform time into a cyclical phenomenon without hope or meaning. Christianity is a historian’s religion – the Christian holy books are history books and Christian worship com- memorates episodes from the life of God on earth, alongside church liturgy and the Acts of Saints. There is another, even deeper sense in which Christianity is fundamentally historical. The fate of humanity, which unfolds between the Fall and Judgment Day, stands before the eyes of Christianity as a continuous adventure. In Christianity, nevertheless, theology is not derived from the future but from the promise, even though human existence is as a matter of fact an encounter with time and man’s actions within time. Western civilization, unlike many other cultures, has great expectations of time. People of action, in the West, have to constantly learn lessons from the past if they wish to succeed in the future.26 History has a style and an order, which grow more perfect over time. THE RIFT BETWEEN MYSTICAL TIME AND EARTHLY TIME It is a commonly accepted basic assumption today that the Bible perceives time as being linear, as opposed to other cultures which think of time as being cycli- cal.27 There are, however, those who oppose this generalizing notion and the 24 Russell 1945, 363–364. 25 It is telling that the chroniclers of the Middle Ages could not help but begin their accounts of the present generation by relating back to Adam, the first man (Sand 2004, 24). 26 Bloch 1964, 5–6. 27 Cultures which maintain circular time generally speaking see no point in planning for the future or anticipating it, for the future is nothing but a repetition of what has already happened in the Western Apocalyptic Time and Personal Authentic Time | 101www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 95–116