The biblical theory can best be briefly dealt with by quoting Leslie Stevenson of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland:

"When the Jews fail to obey God's laws, there comes the idea of God using the events of history, such as defeat by neighbouring nations, to chastise them for their sin (a theme which recurs throughout the histories and prophets in the Old Testament). And then there is the idea of God's merciful forgiveness, His blotting out of man's transgressions, and His regeneration of man and the whole of creation (Isaiah chapters 43-66)." [Seven Theories of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 1987) at pp. 48-9.]

Marx picked up on the Hegelian view and asserted that there were fundamental laws which drove the development of a culture or a country.3 These notions of historical development and of alienation were to play a crucial role in the thoughts of Marx. Marx had a deterministic view that all events (economic stages) come about as a result of the inevitable progress of history.4

Well, personally, I do not subscribe to any of these fancy theories. History is but a series of past events of which we have become conscious.5 Each event is a very thin and a very short fibre like that of the countless number which make up the great rope of humanity. The position of any particular fibre and its contribution to the whole is almost entirely a matter of chance. I doubt, to continue this metaphoric vein, that the rope of humanity has any particular purpose or that it has a predestined end.