Some of the differences between Protestant and Catholic Christianity become apparent in the interiors of their churches. To Martin Luther, the founder of Protestant Christianity, elaborate church interiors, with their many sculptures and paintings, represented a spiritual danger, for he feared that the wealthy few who endowed such images would come to believe that they were buying their way into Heaven rather than relying on God’s grace. “It would be better,” he wrote, “if we gave less to the churches and altars, … and more to the needy.”36 John Calvin, the prominent French-born Protestant theologian, went even further, declaring that “God forbade … the making of any images representing him.”37

Behind such statements lay different understandings of the church building. While Roman Catholics generally saw a church as a temple or “house of God,” sacred because it is where God dwells on earth, Protestants viewed churches more as meetinghouses, gathering places for a congregation. They were not sacred in themselves as places, but only on account of the worship that occurred within them.38 Furthermore, to Protestants, images of the saints were an invitation to idolatry. Acting on such ideas, Protestants in various places stripped older churches of the offending images, decapitated statues, and sometimes ritually burned statues and paintings at the stake. The new churches they created were often quite different from their Catholic counterparts. Source 15.1, a painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Saenredam, portrays the interior of a Dutch Reformed (Protestant) church in the city of Haarlem.