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After stripping harmful images from the altars and their hearts, Reformed Christians of the early modern period re-created their space according to Reformed principles. Dyrness explores how Reformed ideas became reflected in the visual cultures in post-Calvin Geneva, Ames's Holland, and Puritan England and New England.
While some sixteenth-century congregants destroyed images in the church, the Reformers encouraged internal cleansing of the corrupt human imagination, which produced false images. Dyrness sees a congealed tension between iconoclasm and re-creation in Calvin's theology. While Calvin departed from their sacramentalism, Calvin affirmed the Orthodox and Catholic apophatic traditions and believed that God was beyond human description. To him nature and creation were symbols of the providence and sovereignty of God. With the eyes of faith Reformed Christians could see, appreciate and enjoy God's continuous work in everyday life. They were to live in the tension between daily iconoclasm of visible and invisible idols, and their re-creation of the beauty of God in the world around them. The biblical words and Calvin's texts became the source of Puritan re-imagining of God in the new world order.
Dyrness highlights two Puritan theologians, who carried Calvin's tension into two poles of logic and emotiveness. One side of this 'dichotomy' pulls one's imagination towards the rational re-ordering of the world; the other to the purifying of the heart. William Ames extended Peter Ramus' logic into 'technometria', in which the scriptural teachings on God's working in Christian life can be rendered as a 'clear and unambiguous map of knowledge of living to God' (p. 152). By studying this diagram at home and church, the Puritans learned that 'All truth emanates from God and can be understood in a vast scheme that is reflected both in the world God has made and (potentially at least) in the world that humans reorder...