People have mixed feelings about the past. For many reasons, the past is painful, so we want to forget it entirely. The ability to forget can be a blessing and relief. We feel regret and sorrow that can be real and continuing pain. The regret can be so heavy that unless we can forget, we are burdened in the present and cannot live beyond the mistake, the evil, the loss—they are like sores or wounds that do not heal unless we cover them up and forget them. We may have good reasons to forget the past, but there are also good reasons to remember.

On an individual basis, I find the past easier to bear the longer I live. I see God’s providence inclusive of my regrettable mistakes, folly and failures. There is still room in the way I see God’s providence for continuing to regret and sorrow about episodes that I blame myself for. God’s work of good results by means of, or despite my failures mitigates the regrets and makes me grateful to God.

I expect that continuity of personal identity in the resurrection includes memory of all that we did and experienced in this passage through the old creation, the present evil age (Gal 1:4). I expect that my appreciation of God’s kindness to me for salvation will have as continuing background knowledge the evidence for why I do not deserve to enjoy him. He himself will be balm for my painful memories of wrongs done to me and wrongs I have done. The compensation of enjoying with God will not entirely eclipse the memory of pains, but they will no longer be painful in any sad way (Rev 21:4). That may be difficult to imagine now, but most aspects of the resurrection are difficult to imagine. We hope in what we do not yet see, but we have been promised that it will be good, and enough good to compensate us for all the pain we bear with now.

On a collective basis as a people, the past can be so hard to bear that we block it out entirely or deny it. Perhaps we avoid collective evil (such as American slavery, Germany’s attempt to annihilate the Jews, or incest in a family) because we cannot face the guilt and shame for our part in some evil. Perhaps we avoid memory because the severity of the wrong done to us is compounded by our solidarity with many others who were also devastated by the abuse, the genocide, the discrimination, or some other aspect of horrible evil. Both perpetrators and victims may escape through forgetfulness. 

A collective memory can be good to keep in mind, or at least to keep in mind how much a collected memory may affect our perceptions and functioning in the present. When in Germany recently among several brilliant theologians, the familiar elephant in the room for many theological topics was the Nazification of Germany and the holocaust. Some German theologians seemed to embrace the memory of this national horror so much that biblical teaching had to be invalidated by the so-calle