On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular

How Christianity both abolished and absorbed sacrifice

From the beginning, sacrifice lived a double life in Christianity, both abandoned and essential. Christ’s death on the cross was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, eclipsing the temple sacrifices of Judaism and paganism. And yet at the center of the lived faith was the repetition of sacrifice: the offering of Christ’s body, the sacrifices of ancient patriarchs, and the sacrifices of martyrs woven through liturgy, theology, and popular devotion.

But this double life collapsed in the Reformation. Quarreling heirs to Christian truth discovered that the sacrifices they once called Christian might be nothing of the sort. To build their new faiths--to discover the truth of Christian sacrifice--they turned to the past, learning from Christianity as it was how Christianity ought to be.

In On the Altar, Jonathan Sheehan offers a new account of sacrifice both sacred and secular. His story is in part a history of the Christian imagination across the centuries of the Reformation, when new martyrs and holy warriors fought for the truth of their sacrifices, when the empire of New World sacrifice was recruited to settle Christian conflicts, and when the sacrifices of the ancient Hebrews were weaponized for orthodoxy. But it is a history of the secular imagination as well, as the vast archive of Christian sacrifice was dispersed and applied to things that humans make, their religions, politics, and societies. With On the Altar, Sheehan reveals a new history of both Christianity and the secular world in which we still live.

Jonathan Sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture and the coauthor of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century.