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How perverse, when these flagitious corruptions are manifest, not only to defend them, but cloak their deformity, by impudently pretending that they belong to the genuine worship of God!
—John Calvin, The Necessity of Reforming the Church
John Calvin's 1543 manifesto, The Necessity of Reforming the Church, included a sweeping attack on the use of images in worship. There Calvin argued that gross superstition—"the idolmania with which the minds of men are now fascinated"—could be rooted out only "by removing bodily the source of the infatuation," that is, by prohibiting all images from the church. Calvin explicitly denied that a distinction can be made between the proper use of images in worship and the superstitious or brazenly idolatrous substitution of the mere image for the transcendent God.
The Reformed rejection of images continues to be influential even after the passage of nearly 500 years. In 1965, Eerdmans published a beautiful, stout, heavily illustrated book called Christ and Architecture: Building Presbyterian/Reformed Churches. The authors were Donald J. Bruggink, a minister of the Reformed Church in America and a professor of theology, and Carl H. Droppers, an architect and professor of architecture.
Here I am picking out just one theme from this splendid book. If you turn to page 565 of Christ and Architecture, you'll find a photo of a church interior. The caption on the facing page reads as follows:
Note the honest use of concrete block as the interior surfacing, the honest use of precast beams and precast slabs of the roof. There is no attempt here to cover this basic material with older, more acceptable, materials. The materials are honest. At the same time note the use of concrete for pulpit, font and organ support. There is no pretense; these materials are doing the job well without camouflage of any sort.
It is easy to poke fun at such rhetoric—the honest use of concrete block in this church will remind many readers of public restrooms they have known—but in part that is because we are rarely forced to spell out the assumptions that underlie our own attitudes toward worship. Most believers have strong but largely unexamined convictions about what is and is not right and fitting for worship: in music, in the use of images, in the design of the worship space. And the less such convictions are examined, the more dogmatic they tend to be.
Three recently published books—each of which merits a full review—remind us of the extent to which notions of what is right and fitting are entangled in the particulars of time and place. Catharine Randall's Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe is a brilliantly suggestive study of Calvinist architecture in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France. Protestants were persecuted during this period, even after the Edict of Nantes in 1598, but nevertheless, Randall writes,
Calvinist architects designed and constructed the vast majority of architectural structures built from the mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries in France. While institutionally marginalized in many respects, Calvinists paradoxically populated an elite corps of artists, artisans, and architects responsible for monumentalizing Catholic demonstrations of power. So pervasive was their presence that it is difficult today to find architectural manuals penned by Catholic contemporaries or to view buildings erected by major Catholic architects.
Some of these French Calvinists openly avowed their faith; others practiced what Calvin termed Nicodemism, or dissimulation. But all of those whom Randall treats were "subversive" in the subtle details of their architecture. What will be most valuable for all but a handful of specialist readers is the way in which Randall sets the designs of these architects in the larger context of a Calvinist understanding of space. "The spatial terms used in the Institution," Randall writes, "sketch the visionary architecture of a redeemed world." She notes how Calvin's sense of "redeemed space" was played out in Geneva in a "strategy … to redetermine space by occupying it":
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