Calvin was formed by his training as a Renaissance humanist. His language was more rhetorical than dialectical. He made use of theatrical imagery to trace the entire course of salvation, for example. “In the vast theater of heaven and earth,” Ford Lewis Battles says of Calvin’s vision, “the divine playwright stages the ongoing drama of creation, alienation, return, and forgiveness for the teeming audience of humanity itself.”10 In the broadest sense, this theater is the entire created world, summoned to a common praise. But Calvin spoke more particularly of the church as a distinct company of
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