Heid, Stefan: Altar and Church

An altar is a table or flat-topped block used as the focus for a religious ritual, especially for making sacrifices or offerings to a deity (Oxford Languages). Whether or not what Christians use during service today is allowed to be an altar is a point of contention between the denominations. However, since the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council, the altar has been at the centre of many redesigns of Catholic church spaces. For this they like to take the early Church as an example. In fact, the Council points to the "norm of the Fathers". But how can this be reconciled with the wid espread opinion that Christianity initially knew no cult and no sacrifices, but only loved feasts and meals of sinners, held in house churches? It was not until later, since the time of Emperor Constantine, that a real state cult with sacrifices, altars and magnificent sacred spaces developed, and the Church suffers from this historical burden to this day. But is this really true? Or are they not rather clichés that need to be critically questioned? This volume carves a few paths through the jungle and arrives at results that are as surprising as they are stimulating.