REMEMBERING past events is at the heart of both Jewish and Christian faith. At the centre of Jewish liturgy is recitation of the Shema, which begins “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” and goes on to instruct Jews to write the love of God upon their hearts and to teach God’s commands to their children. An act of memory is also the central moment in Christian liturgy.

At the Last Supper, Jesus tells His disciples when they break bread and drink wine together to do so “in remembrance of me”, which Saint Paul, in the earliest record of the Lord’s Supper, glosses by adding: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

Whatever else is revealed by Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, it demonstrates what most of us knew already: that human memory is a not altogether reliable instrument. “After great distance of time,” wrote the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “our imagination of the Past is weak . . . so that Imagination and Memory, are but one thing.”

Facts are selected, rearranged and interpreted in the memories not only of politicians and historians, but of us all. Whatever care we take in noting what takes place and what is said, when we come to report, the past memory is liable to slip. Recovering an account of past events on which everyone can agree is a very tricky business indeed.

Yet the Hutton inquiry also shows that facts do retain a stubborn independence of interpretation and opinion. In an essay on “Truth and Politics” that might usefully be read alongside the Hutton report this weekend, Hannah Arendt tells a story about the French statesman, Clemenceau, who was asked by a German what future historians would conclude about which nation was guilty for starting the First World War. “I don’t know,” Clemenceau replied, “but I know for certain they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” Of course, facts are interpreted by opinion, but it takes a lie to change them altogether.

The problem of religious memory would seem at first to present the same problems of representing the past as those facing a public inquiry, a court of law or a conference of historians. Jews and Christians claim certain things about the past. Even if we accept that facts can never, and more debatably, ought never, to stand in splendid isolation from the history of interpretation in which they are embedded, it surely still matters if things recalled bear some relation to what actually happened.

Yet in one respect the kinds of religious memories borne in Jewish and Christian Scripture, and in Jewish and Christian liturgy, have a quality that is unusual and may be unique. Faith claims to bear witness to a living link between the past of things remembered, the present of things perceived and the future of things hoped for. Religious memory, memory of what God has done, is not in this sense simply a matter of accurately remembering the past; it is a matter of truthfully remembering for the future. The past matters not only as a report of what has been but as a promise of what is to be.

When Jews and Christians recall the past they are not simply trying to establish the facts: they are attempting to situate their personal and communal sense of truth and identity within the truth and identity of the story of God’s past action and future promise.

In Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, when the father, an unrepentant liar, asks the holy elder Zossima what he must do to gain salvation, the saint replies: “Above all never lie to yourself.” This imperative makes standards of religious memory more, not less, strict than other forms of inquiry into past events.

The Rev Dr Stephen Plant, a Methodist minister, is senior tutor at Wesley House, Cambridge.