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 by their artifice’ with moral character (p. 164).

John Cotton pushed the second pole of tension towards emotiveness. Christian membership required the narrative of conversion, which manifested miraculous working of God in one's soul. Calling forth Christ's inner rule in believers' hearts, Cotton used abundant imagery from scripture because ‘God has amply provided images on which our soul can feed for its nourishment’(p. 180). His Bay Psalm Book (1640) contributed largely to the formation of Puritan spirituality in New England. His dramatic delivery of sermons resounded in a common eschatological tone, proclaiming New England as the God-guided Holy Commonwealth, where Christians with purified hearts participated in re-creating a utopian order.

Writing a history of mentalité requires detective skills and imagination in substantiating circumstantial evidence. Dyrness convincingly argues that the visual cultures of the seventeenth-century Puritan communities reflected the tensions of their theologians. He goes first to England, where John Donne expressed in a poem ‘the impulse to catalogue and lay out the plain and simple [biblical] truth for all to see and comprehend’, reminiscent of Ames's theological chart (p. 193). John Milton, like Cotton, wanted to ‘rewrite the narrative’ of the Puritans' own lives ‘in terms of the biblical narrative of sin and salvation’ (p. 191). Dyrness also finds echoes of the Belgic Confession's (1561) ‘emphasis on creation reflecting God's goodness and splendor’ in the naturalism of the Dutch paintings (p. 198). In the landscapes of Pieter de Molijn and others, Dyrness sees the artists' careful choice and arrangement of the motifs according to their biblical and Calvinist spirituality. These motifs alluded to the painters' ‘deeper narrative’ (p. 212) of human sin, the precariousness of the world, God's grace and providence, and their own salvation. Dyrness claims that Rembrandt van Rijn was inspired by the poems of his Reformed contemporaries. For example, his painting of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp corresponds to Caspar Barlaeus' poem: both works reflected the Calvinist knowledge of God and the knowledge of self in the smallest parts.

Again in New England the tension of Ames and Cotton provided the framework for Puritan visual arts. The portraits of Ames by Willem van der Vliet or of Increase Mather by Jan van der Spriet laid out symbols of Calvinist virtues and status, such as the presence of the Bible and righteous and prosperous living. Dyrness concludes: ‘For the Puritans images were banished from churches, but in place of such sacred imagery, the whole of life, in its patterns and structures, took on the character of an icon of God's presence. And in the midst of this theater of God's glory, it is the individual person as the special image of God that stands out as the dramatic focus in the narrative of salvation’ (p. 238). The Puritan vision culminated in Jonathan Edwards, who remarked that with the inner dismantling of the fallen human imagination, ‘the believer literally sees things in nature the unbeliever cannot see’ (p. 284).

As a master guide Dyrness weaves through the fascinating worlds of Reformed cultures, through theological treatises and poetry, sermons and journals, artwork and book illustrations, architecture and town design. He provides a useful array of secondary literature and multiple illustrations. He assesses the potential Reformed contribution to today's worship, in uprooting the human irrational imagination, deconstructing the meaningless symbols, re-creating ‘the beautiful that was lost and of anticipating its perfect’ (p. 310) and reshaping their surroundings in ‘God-honoring’ ways. While his points are well taken, I wonder if the changed status of the Euro-American Reformed Christians in the later modern period, from the persecuted to the prosperous, affected such critical power of imagination. What concrete Reformed biblical images could Dyrness suggest to preachers and worship leaders of the congregations living in our comfortable material cultures?

The Reformed sensitivity requires the historian to use corrective lenses in reviewing one's heritage so as not to make idols out of it. Dyrness seems to be aware that during the early modern period, riding on the waves of European colonial expansion, some Dutch and English Reformed Christians engaged with peoples and cultures in Eurasia, Africa, Asia and Latin America while others landed in New England (p. 289). What made the Puritan mentality thrive in some places and not in others? What were the implications of Calvin's appreciation of the gifts from non-Christians (p. 311), and the Reformed ways of re-ordering of God's creation in these ‘idolatrous’ lands? What distinctive visual cultures have the native Christians of the Reformed churches in South Africa and Indonesia, dating from the seventeenth-century, created? Given Dyrness's many publications in missiology, arts and emerging theologies of the two-third worlds, limitation of this work to one European/North American scope is regrettable. Jane Dempsey Douglass's call for ‘a comparative study of Calvinist visual art in the countries of the South . . . where about three-fourths of Reformed churches are located today’ (‘Foreword’ to Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Paul Corby Finney, Eerdmans, 1999, p. xiii) still stands.

Dyrness often compares the Reformed introspection with Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Loyola of course was the founder of the Society of Jesus, of which missionaries went out of Europe to the world as they made Ignatian exercises. There are such excellent works as Gauvin Alexander Bailey's Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773, which examines how the Jesuit missionaries and natives vernacularised the biblical message in different visual cultures. Another comparison of how Reformed and Ignatian theology and spirituality influenced particular visual cultures is waiting.