"Good history makes us think again about the definition of things we thought we understood pretty well, because it engages not just with what is familiar but with what is strange. It recognises that 'the past is a foreign country' as well as being our past."

The old chestnut about being condemned to repeat history we do not know applies to Church history as much as to any other kind. But just how are we to approach it? Much of what passed once for Church history was propagandist; and much of the best now written is brilliantly done but apparently detached from the Church's present needs.

In seeking to explore this need, Rowan Wiliams offers some reflection on how we think about the past in general and considers how Church history has been used by theologians not just to prove points, but to clarify what we are as human beings. Emerging from this is a sense of the importance of history as something that deepens our present thinking and obliges us to think with more varied and resourceful analogies about who we are and the world we are in.