Day 82 - The Bible

We owe much to the sixteenth century Reformation which, in theory, established our reliance upon faith and scripture.

You can probably sense a ‘however’ coming here. Permit me to explain. I have been for a long time interested in how faith and religion develop, and especially how recognisable Christianity evolved from what people did by way of religion before there were features that we would understand. This is part of the anthropology of religion.

Not too far away from my home is the recently discovered chapel dedicated to St Morrell. It fell into disuse after the Reformation but was a site of pilgrimage for hundreds of years before that. The archaeology reveals that the hill on which the chapel stood had been ritually significant for two thousand years or more. The cemetery contains lots of skeletons, isotope dated to centuries before the Reformation and providing evidence that people had come from as much as two hundred miles away.

The chapel-site seems to have been dedicated to Saint Morrell and was a site where people expected to be healed, and that had been the case long before a regular chapel was built.

The burials, which are carefully done, show many sorts of practices that are unusual. These include a couple holding hands, which seems quite romantic, but also the placing of heavy rocks on the chest of the deceased. This latter is called ‘deviant’ and is thought to be to prevent the dead from rising.

What, you may ask, is the point of this very brief voyage into archaeology. There are two points that I recommend that you consider.

The obvious one is that the Reformation brought about the theological shift that resulted in our making The Bible a pillar of our formation of churches. That is to the good – at least it is when The Bible is studied and discussed.

The other point is that people had faith in the power of God even before the Reformation.

Pilgrimage was criticised by the Reformers because it was part of the theology that had saints interceding, relics being holy and superstition polluting faith. No doubt these are reasonable criticisms.

Now for the ‘however’. Getting rid of superstitious practices is great provided that the faith component isn’t excised at the same time. After the Reformation, religious practices like pilgrimage were actively displaced by local, inward, scripture-based forms of devotion. Instead of pilgrimage, the parish became the centre of religious life.

The letter to the Colossians, likely the work of Paul and Timothy, says this “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” [2:8].

For sure, the shrine named for Saint Morrell had become ‘taken captive’ by sorts of superstitious nonsense, but there was still some faith. Since the Reformation, we have become a bit complacent about ‘seeing to it that no one takes you captive’. This can be done only by actually reading The Bible accompanied by The Holy Spirit.

Maybe in a couple of hundred years, scholars will be excavating our chapels and pointing out the none-Biblical practices that some hold to be important. Maybe, we would do well to depend only upon Christ.

John Cartwright