On the Altar - by Jonathan Sheehan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"On the Altar provides a rich and expansive history of the phenomenon of human sacrifice, exploring variant forms of sacrifice in a host of religions and secular movements."---Jesse Russell, The Bookman

"An exhilarating journey. Over the course of 450 pages, Sheehan traverses literal and metaphorical continents of space and time with dazzling erudition. He is consistently informative and thought-provoking, and writes engagingly and accessibly. . . . A major scholarly achievement."---Peter Marshall, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"Sheehan's immense scholarship shows that just about everyone in the ancient world offered sacrifices. . . . On the Altar is a secular book, but Sheehan fairly reports what Christians believe."-- "Marvin Olasky"

"On The Altar is a brilliant and fresh exposition of how sacrifice has influenced everything from theology to politics to the shape of modern thought. Grand transhistorical histories often fail, this inspiring book restores confidence in the worthiness of these projects."---Candida Moss, History Extra

"A magnificent work of scholarship. . . . The author's breadth of learning and command of sources is a wonder. . . . Mr. Sheehan accomplishes here what might otherwise take hundreds of scholars to produce in a standard reference work. This is a major scholarly achievement."---D.G. Hart, Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Jonathan Sheehan is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of European 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.