The table on which the Eucharist is celebrated, and the structural centre of a church. Christian altars carry a double meaning that the tradition has never fully resolved: table of a meal, and altar of a sacrifice. Which word a church uses is a fair guide to its theology, and the Orthodox preference for Holy Table is not accidental.
An altar is consecrated with chrism, traditionally contains relics, and is stripped bare on Good Friday. Its orientation and position have been rearranged repeatedly, pushed against the east wall, brought forward to face the people after the Second Vatican Council, and each rearrangement was an argument about where the priest stands in relation to the congregation.
Facts
Use
Who May Handle ItSourced to the subject's own accountClergy or ordained officiants only 2 ConsecrationConsecrated in a rite before use 1 Attributions
TraditionChristianity, with cognates across most traditions 1 Learn More
The Table That Is Also a Tomb
The altar is the table on which the Eucharist is celebrated and the structural centre of a church, and Christian tradition has held it to carry two meanings at once.
Table and altar
The Eucharist is both a meal and a sacrifice in Christian understanding, and the object at its centre is spoken of as both a table, around which the supper of the Lord is shared, and an altar, on which a sacrifice is offered, the emphasis differing between traditions that stress the one sense or the other. The Reformation argument over whether the rite is chiefly a supper or a sacrifice was fought partly over the word and the form of the object, some reformed churches deliberately using a plain communion table set in the body of the church rather than a fixed stone altar against the east wall.
Relic and consecration
The Catholic altar has traditionally been consecrated with chrism and has contained the relic of a saint, a practice that reaches back to the celebration of the Eucharist over the tombs of the martyrs in the early church, so the altar carries the memory of that origin and joins the sacrifice on it to the witness of the saints beneath it. A fixed altar of stone is consecrated and set apart permanently, becoming the fixed centre from which the whole building is oriented. The altar thus gathers into one object the meal, the sacrifice and the memory of the martyrs, which is why it stands at the heart of the church.
The Relic Sealed Inside It, and Who Alone May Consecrate One
For most of Christian history a fixed altar was required to contain a relic, sealed into a small cavity in the altar stone itself, a custom traced to the early practice of celebrating the Eucharist over the tombs of martyrs.
Construction and consecration
A stone altar has a flat mensa, the table surface, resting on a support of stone, brick or wood, and a bishop consecrates it by anointing it with chrism at the four corners and the center, a rite that only a bishop, not a parish priest, may perform. Modern liturgical reform relaxed the relic requirement and revived the freestanding table altar facing the congregation, a return to the simpler form used before the post Constantine shift toward the fixed stone altar built over a martyr's tomb or a portable relic.
Who may use it, and how the form has moved
Only an altar that has been properly consecrated or at least blessed may be used for Mass, and moving or altering a consecrated altar is not undertaken casually, since the consecration is understood to belong to that specific stone rather than to the building around it. Portable field altars, small enough to fit in a case, exist for military chaplains and missionaries, carrying a single small consecrated stone rather than a full altar slab, proof that the requirement travels with the smallest sufficient object rather than the largest.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The Christian altar's orientation and position were rearranged after the Second Vatican Council, brought forward to face the people.
Belongs to Tradition
The Christian altar is a table and a tomb at once, and canon law long required a relic within it.
Element Of
The Prayer Book says holy table and the catholic revival said altar, and Anglican practice has carried both words for the same furniture ever since.
The altar stands behind the icon screen and holds the gospel book, the tabernacle and the antimension without which no liturgy may be served.
The altar was kept where the Reformed churches removed it, and Lutheran order retains the word as well as the furniture.
The altar is consecrated and anointed, and Latin practice reads it as the table of the supper and the place of the sacrifice at once.
Rejected Here
Baptist, Denominations Baptist churches keep a communion table rather than an altar, because the supper is an ordinance remembered and not a sacrifice offered.
The Reformed churches took the altar down and set a table in the body of the church. An altar implies a sacrifice offered; the supper is a meal received, and the furniture was changed to say so.
Presbyterian order keeps a communion table and refuses the name and the idea of an altar, following the Westminster standards on the sufficiency of the one offering.
A meeting house has no altar and no table set apart. Friends hold that no place and no furniture is more sacred than any other.
Implement Of
The altar of burnt offering is the fixture the whole class of rites is performed on.
Sources
1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005on the altar and its consecrationView the Source 2. General Instruction of the Roman Missal, third typical edition
Congregation for Divine Worship, Congregation for Divine Worship, 2002Nos. 296-308the holders' own accountView the Source Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition
Holy See, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997on the Eucharist as meal and sacrificethe holders' own accountView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
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