ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that changes in liturgical practices and conceptions of the worship space nurtured habits of perception that facilitated an emergent aesthetic—a Protestant way of aesthetically being in the world, even as it expanded the aesthetic possibilities of religious life. The images and performance of the liturgy have a rhetorical purpose to move worshipers to the love and service of God in the world. Worshipers were called to participate in this one historia; the mystical movement promoted in the liturgy was upward, toward a timeless union with God. The chapter focuses on language then not in isolation from other elements but as formative of a new way of imagining and relating to the world. Matthew Boulton has argued that John Calvin’s use of language—indeed, the whole structure of his teaching—is ordered toward a “rhetorical” purpose: to move the heart to pietus. Language is meant to make something happen.
