Friday, July 13, 2012

In May President and Sister Pimentel invited all the senior couples to an outing to Wittenberg, the city in which Martin Luther started the protestant reformation.

This next one is the church door on which Luther nailed his 95 theses, proposed reforms that he felt the Catholic Church needed to make. It's no longer the wooden door from 500 years ago. That one was burned in a war about 200 years later. This door is made of or clad in bronze, with the 95 theses inscribed upon it (in Latin).

Next are pictures of the inside and outside of this church.




Here are the statues of Luther and his close friend and reformer colleague Philipp Melanchthon in front of the old Wittenberg city hall.


Interesting little sidenote about Melanchthon: The word is Greek for black earth, or in German Schwarzerd, which was his real name in German. He changed it to Melanchthon after he graduated from college and became a famous philosopher, because it sounded more "philosophical".

The next pictures are of the parish church for which ML was the parish priest and in which he preached most of his sermons.



In the courtyard of Wittenberg university are plaques with the names of famous professors that taught there. I only took the closeup of the one I was familiar with because he was a famous physicist.

The next picture is of the monastery that was converted into a residence - after the monks all left the church and the monastery - and given to ML and his wife, a former nun, to live in.
Finally, the city of Wittenberg planted an oak tree in the place where supposedly ML burned a bunch of documents related to him being banished and excommunicated, such as the papal bull excommunicating him. Interestingly, this oak tree was planted in 1830, a fact that prompted president Pimentel to draw on the relationship between the Reformation and the Restoration: The latter not being possible without the former first having happened.


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