Day three began with Morning Prayer in the Castle Church. This is the same church we closed yesterday off with evening prayer.
Today in the morning light the tall stained glass windows were brilliant.
We then broke into our elective sessions. Christina went to one on Taize singing, and Johnny, Alex, and I went to a session on the famous Lucas Cranach paintings that adorn the Town Church of Wittenberg. It is difficult to get a good picture of this church since it is so big, but is closely surrounded by other buildings.
This is not a good picture to view the art work on the altar piece by Cranach, but I include it to show the size of the work compared to the people behind it.
The top three pictures deal with the way God personally comes to His people in the sacraments. On the left is Baptism, the middle is Holy Communion, and the right side is Confession/Absolution. Below is Luther preaching to his congregation, and his words clearly point the people to Christ crucified for their sins. There are many small details in these paintings that we will take time to learn in a bible study some time this fall.
Before lunch we took some time to clime the tower of the Castle Church. The look-out platform is where you see the windows just above the gargoyles. It is about 65m above ground level. This is also the level where the bells are located. Pigeons keep the bells company. The words just below the viewing platform are from Luther's famous hymn: A Mighty Fortress is Our God.
This is the view from the tower. You can see here the two main downtown streets, and the Town Church (where the Cranach paintings are located) in between the two streets.
The next session dealt with church architecture and function. The large metal baptismal font in the Town Church was quite interesting. It is surrounded by the apostles, but below it, trying to crawl up the legs of the font are evil creatures. They cannot, however, get to the person because the Christian's baptism impedes the intentions of the evil creatures. Very cool.
Next we visited the house of Lucas Cranach. There is a statue of him drawing just outside his house. This was the print shop where the 95 Thesis were produced. Cranach also created many woodcuts and paintings of Luther and other reformational figures here.
Still, to this day, the Cranach house remains an art studio on one side and a print shop on the other. Here we are trying our hand at printing cards from woodcuts by hand.
We brought the day to a close with Evening Prayer in the Town Church. Wonderful singing in a historic and holy setting.
Tomorrow we go to Erfurt and visit the Wartburg Castle.
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