Kazanie w kościele ewangelickim | Sermon in a Protestant church

One of the doctrines of the Protestant churches is the principle of Sola scriptura (Only Scripture), stating that only the Bible is the infallible and self-sufficient source of faith that was to ensure salvation, which is why the study and teaching of the Word of God was so important in Protestantism. Hence, this motif also became important in Protestant art, which, having abandoned the worship of images of God and the saints, tended to have an educational and illustrative significance for the sermons delivered in church. In sacral painting, therefore, not only biblical scenes were immortalised, but also religious and moral acts relating to the relationships and attitudes of the community members. A painting entitled 'Sermon in Church' is an interesting illustration of the life of a single community, with a man in the foreground wearing a courtly attire standing in the nave of the Gothic church with his back turned, women and children sitting to his left, and men to his right. A pastor addressing the congregation stands at the pulpit, under which two women kneel, gazing fearfully at a sculpture of a devil placed beneath the pulpit. To the left in the picture's background, a dressed up couple sits in wooden stalls near the main altar, and further, behind them a group of people is shown entering the left nave of the church. The painting, made on an oak plank, accompanied by four other depictions, adorned the wall of the pulpit corpus in the castle church in Szczecin, which was dismantled in 1864. In 1868, the complete set was donated to the collection of the Society for the History and Antiquity of Pomerania. They remained in the Szczecin museum collection until the Second World War, after which they were deemed to be missing. Three of them were discovered in the 1990s in the collection of the Mazovian Museum in Płock. In 2000, they were returned to the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin. Justyna Bądkowska