Book Review: The History of Scottish Theology by David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott

About halfway between Lumsden and Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, on the site of the lost parish of Auchindoir, stands the stark, gray ruin of St. Mary’s Kirk. I am told that the main structure (which, aside from the roof, remains intact) dates from the early thirteenth century. The south portal is Romanesque and capped by the characteristic arch with patterned mouldings. A few stonework decorations in the building’s interior have endured the ravages of time, including some inscriptions bearing names of patrons from a bygone age. A stately belfry overlooks a few dozen ancient gravestones in the kirkyard. By far the most interesting feature of the ruin, though, is a small sacrament house set within the north wall. When I visited the site in 2005 as a student of theology in nearby Aberdeen, I was drawn to the aumbry, observing how it varied architecturally from the rest of the structure. I could just make out and partly decipher the engraving above the cupboard wherein the elements once were held: HIC-E-CORP D N I C V M; shorthand for Hic est corpus Domini Nostri Iesu Christi Virginis Mariae—lit., “Here is the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Virgin Mary.” What I had not considered at the time is the extent to which a ruin such as St Mary’s—particularly, the well-preserved sacrament house—stands as a monument to an earlier era in the complicated narrative of the history of theology in Scotland. In his fascinating chapter on “Liturgical Theology before 1600” in the first volume of The History of Scottish Theology, Stephen Mark Holmes traces the origin of the aumbry to a period in the first half of the sixteenth century during which developments in liturgy and church architecture flourished, especially in the north-east (I, 54–68). Canon Alexander Galloway (d. 1552), one among the “Aberdeen Liturgists” and, as Holmes dubs him, a “Theologian in Stone” (I, 58), decorated a number of churches in the area and further south, embellishing their interiors with carved images, crosses, Book Review