Memory and The Anglican Future
Vol. 57 No. 43 | The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity | September 20, 2026
This reflection is based on the first of three Forums on the Anglican Future, concerning Memory. The next Forum is Sunday, October 25th, on Identity.
When we are talking about the Anglican future, why begin by thinking about the past? Why does memory matter? The late Canadian theologian Robert Crouse often drew attention to St. Augustine’s account of the soul in terms of three interrelated powers: memory, understanding, and will. The will is our power of choosing and loving; but we cannot choose well without understanding what we choose. And understanding itself depends upon memory. Without memory we lose the context in which things have meaning, the accumulated judgments by which we recognize what is true and good, and some sense of what our choices may entail. When people suffer from amnesia, or dementia, they don’t just lose their memories of the past: they lose their ability to make good judgments in the present.
Memory, in other words, is not the enemy of freedom. It is one of the conditions of rational freedom. This is not merely a philosophical insight. It is deeply biblical. Again and again Israel is called to remember—and when Israel forgets what God has done, Israel goes astray. The memory of God’s acts in the past is the basis for knowing and trusting him in the present and therefore for moving faithfully into the future. What is true in the Old Testament becomes still more concentrated in the New: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Christian faith begins with remembering what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Because we remember him, we can know him; because we know him, we can trust him; and because we trust, we can hope in him. Christian hope for the future is inseparable from Christian memory of the past.
Thus what is true of persons is also true of communities. Tradition is the Church’s corporate memory: the accumulated experience, reflection, argument, judgment, and wisdom of generations of Christians who sought to understand what the Scriptures teach and their implications for our lives. That does not make church tradition infallible. Tradition must be distinguished from traditionalism. “We have always done it this way” is not sufficient reason for continuing to do it. The Christian tradition is based on the Word of God and must itself be tested by the Word of God. But neither can we imagine that we approach Scripture without predecessors. We would not even know what Scriptures to approach, apart from church tradition! Thus to dismiss two thousand years of Christian reflection is to ignore the work of the Holy Spirit among generations who prayed over the Scriptures, argued about their meaning, corrected errors, made distinctions, and handed on what they learned. Tradition does not relieve us of the responsibility to think. It gives us more with which to think.
And that brings us to a peculiar problem of our own age. The Enlightenment sought to liberate reason from the constraints of tradition; late modernity has increasingly sought to liberate the will from the constraints of reason itself. Once both tradition and reason have been pushed aside, however, what remains is not greater rational freedom but the increasingly arbitrary will: choices made, without the larger perspective by which their meaning and consequences can be judged. The arbitrary will may be merely reactive or opportunistic, but it may also be transgressive and destructive—reveling in its defiance of any objective order of good. Ours is the age of amnesia. Yet people without historical memory do not become free of inherited assumptions. They simply become more captive to the assumptions of the present, because they have lost the perspective from which those assumptions might be questioned.
That is particularly dangerous for the Church. A Church without memory may retain its Scriptures, creeds, liturgies, buildings and institutions, while gradually forgetting what they mean and why they matter. And once their rationale has been forgotten, they begin to seem arbitrary—and can easily be discarded. That is why thinking about the Anglican Future begins with Anglican Memory. We do not look backward because we want to live in the past. We look backward because we want to move intelligently into the future. Deep memory gives us perspective on the present and enlarges our imagination of what the future might be.
St. John’s has a particular part to play in this work. In many respects, this parish has become a reservoir of Anglican memory: in its Prayer Book worship, its theological inheritance, its music and architecture, and its habits of parish life. But a reservoir is not meant merely to store water. It exists so that what it receives can give life. If we have been entrusted with a rich memory, therefore, the question is not simply how we preserve it. The question is what that memory enables us to see, to choose, and to do now. That is where memory becomes identity—and identity becomes mission.