Northrup Frye says in his 14th of 25 lectures and The Bible and English Literature (emphasis added):
But scientists, of course, like anybody else, find that they can’t get along without creation myths; and eventually we have a Big Bang creation myth, which says that the world exploded, oh, say fifteen billion years ago or thereabouts, and has been scattering in all directions ever since. Well, that’s fine: what happened before that? And you immediately are up against the fact that as long as you are thinking of the order of nature, the conceptions of beginning and end do not apply. But we begin and we end, and because of what Thomas Pynchon calls creative paranoia in the human consciousness, we insist that because we begin and we end, beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the scheme of things. …
I’m not sure whether Pynchon and Frye and I would see eye to eye on all of this, but the point raised here (and highlighted on boldface) seems a good one to me. And while I don’t think Frye would agree, I’m not sure that the Bible story is actually telling us about an absolute beginning (Genesis) or an absolute end (Revelation). Rather, I think we may mistake it as such based on the very sort of bias that Pynchon calls “creative paranoia”.
Interestingly (and as Frye points out in earlier lectures), it is difficult for us to imagine either the beginning or the end of time, and yet even so (in my opinion), so many of us seem so adamant about holding to a model of the world in which time has both a beginning and an end. But I do think I see in the Bible (and extrabiblical Hebrew culture) texts various hints that a physical world existed before the curtain rises on Genesis 1. And I hope to have the time to write about that in this year.
Similarly, I suspect that life goes on on Planet Earth after Revelation 22, and that it is simply not the sort of end that many presume it to be. O for the time to write it all out, making my case!
