The acerbic Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, regarded as one of the fathers of existentialism, challenges us with many pithy phrases. “Life,” he tells us, “is lived forward but understood backward.” He may well have picked this phrase up from the German writer Carl Daub, who said that “the act of looking backward is, just like that of looking into the future, an act of divination, and if the prophet is well called a historian of the future, the historian is just as well called, or even better so, a prophet of the past, of the historical”.

It is perhaps not accidental that the Times Register, in which the Faith page appears, is also the section of obituaries. Obituaries are written when a life is completed, and an assessment can be made, of attributes and achievements, of the meaning and purpose lived out in this particular history of this unique person. A good spiritual exercise, often used for evaluating candidates for ordination, is to be asked to write one’s own obituary, to judge what one would wish to have said about one’s life at the end. Honestly done, this can be a sobering exercise and point towards the choices that have to be made if that obituary is to be true in reality not just in aspiration.

Life can be interpreted only after it has been experienced, and our own history informs our understanding of the future. For Kierkegaard our human project was to become that man or woman whom we are after the image of Christ. Jesus was the one who is “the proper man”, the one who is, in St Paul’s words, “the image of the invisible God” who made us in love for Himself. It is He who is the key to what it is to be truly human, and His history therefore becomes our history too. As year after year the Church celebrates the life of Christ, Christians enter into the meaning of His birth, His life and teaching, His death and resurrection. Week by week as the word is preached, the Eucharist is celebrated, and Christ’s life is received in the sacrament, the meaning and pattern of our life is given.

Christian hymn writers have seen the providence of God at work in their lives as they look backwards. Joseph Addison praises the God who cared for him “before my infant heart conceived from whence those comforts flowed”, and who kept him safe “in the slippery paths of youth. . . Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe, and led me up to man.” John Keble, knowing that same providential grace, sees our waking each morning as a sacrament of God’s presence, “through sleep and darkness, safely brought, restored to life and power and thought”, with each day bringing new opportunities through the trivial round and the common task for the one thing needful, “a road to bring us daily nearer God”.

The histories of nations and communities are also to be lived forward and understood backward. Just as we need to tell the story of our own lives, which is part of our identity, so too do communities. If history is taught, as it sadly so often is, as so many disconnected modules, with little sense of shaping events and their consequences, it is not surprising that there is a loss of sense of identity. The late Professor Henry Chadwick powerfully said that a church that had lost its memory was as bad as a person who had lost their memory. It is no accident that the Bible, as well as the poetry of the Psalms and the wisdom of Proverbs, tells the story of the people of God; and goes on to tell the story of the one who gathered up that history, and whose Spirit brought the Church into being, impelling the Church into all the world. When Charles Williams, the friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, wrote a history of the church, he called it The Descent of the Dove, and he strove to discern beneath the chequered history of the Church, the providential working of the Holy Spirit of God. We need both the prophet, “the historian of the future”, and the historian, “the prophet of the past”.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe