Koinonia

"Christian communion" redirects here. For other uses, see Koinonia (disambiguation) and Communion (disambiguation).

Koinonia (/ˌkɔɪnoʊˈniːə/),^[1] communion, or fellowship in Christianity is the bond uniting Christians as individuals and groups with each other and with Jesus Christ. It refers to group cohesiveness among Christians.

Pre-Christian antecedents

Koinonia is a transliterated form of the Greek word κοινωνία, which refers to concepts such as fellowship, joint participation, partnership, the share which one has in anything, a gift jointly contributed, a collection, a contribution. In the Politics of Aristotle it is used to mean a community of any size from a single family to a polis. As a polis, it is the Greek for republic or commonwealth. In later Christianity it identifies the idealized state of fellowship and unity that should exist within the Christian church, the Body of Christ. This usage may have been borrowed from the early Epicureans—as it is used by Epicurus' Principal Doctrines 37–38.^[2]

The term communion, derived from Latin communio ('sharing in common'),^[3] is related. The term "Holy Communion" normally refers to the Christian rite also called the Eucharist.

New Testament

The essential meaning of the koinonia embraces concepts conveyed in the English terms community, communion, joint participation, sharing and intimacy. Koinonia can therefore refer in some contexts to a jointly contributed gift.^[4] The word appears 19 times in most editions of the Greek New Testament. In the New American Standard Bible, it is translated "fellowship" twelve times, "sharing" three times, and "participation" and "contribution" twice each.^[5]

Koinonia appears once in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, in Leviticus 6:2 ^[6]

It is found in 43 verses of the New Testament as a noun (koinōnia 17x, koinōnos 10x, sugkoinōnos 4x), in its adjectival (koinōnikos 1x), or verbal forms (koinōneō 8x, sugkoinōneō 3x) . The word is applied, according to the context, to sharing or fellowship, or people in such relation, with:

• a divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), God (1 John 1:6), the Father and His Son (1 John 1:3), Jesus, Son of God (1 Corinthians 1:9), his sufferings (Philippians 3:10; 1 Peter 4:13), his future glory (1 Peter 5:1), the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14; Philippians 2:1)
• the blood and the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16), pagan sacrifices and gods (1 Corinthians 10:18–20)
• fellow Christians, their sufferings and the faith (Acts 2:42; Galatians 2:9; 1 John 1:3, 1:7; Hebrews 10:33; Revelation 1:9; Philemon 1:6, 1:17)
• a source of spiritual favours (Romans 11:17), the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:23), light and darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14)
• others' sufferings and consolation (2 Corinthians 1:7; Philippians 4:14), their evangelizing work (Philippians 1:5), their graces or privileges (Romans 15:27; Philippians 1:7), their material needs, to remedy which assistance is given (Romans 12:13, 15:26–27; 2 Corinthians 8:4, 9:13; Galatians 6:6; Philippians 4:15; 1 Timothy 6:18; Hebrews 13:16)
• the evil deeds of others (Matthew 23:30; Ephesians 5:11; 1 Timothy 5:22; 2 John 1:11; Revelation 18:4)
• the bodily human nature all have in common (Hebrews 2:14)
• a work partnership, secular or religious (Luke 5:10; 2 Corinthians 8:23)

Of these usages, Bromiley's International Standard Bible Encyclopedia selects as especially significant the following meanings:

I. Common life in general (only in Acts 2:42)

II. Communion between particular groups, the most remarkable instance of which was that between Jews and Gentiles

III. Communion in the Body and Blood of Christ

IV. Sharing in divine revelation and with God himself (1 John 1:1–7).^[7]

Aspects

Sacramental meaning

Main article: Eucharist

The Eucharist is the sacrament of communion with one another in the one body of Christ. This was the full meaning of eucharistic koinonia in the early Catholic Church.^[8] St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "the Eucharist is the sacrament of the unity of the Church, which results from the fact that many are one in Christ."^[9]

Between churches

Main article: Full communion

The Eucharist has been a key theme in the depictions of the Last Supper in Christian art,^[10] as in this 16th-century Juan de Juanes painting.

By metonymy, the term is used of a group of Christian churches that have this close relationship of communion with each other. An example is the Anglican Communion.

If the relationship between the churches is complete, involving fullness of "those bonds of communion – faith, sacraments and pastoral governance – that permit the Faithful to receive the life of grace within the Church",^[11] it is called full communion. However, the term "full communion" is frequently used in a broader sense, to refer instead to a relationship between Christian churches that are not united, but have only entered into an arrangement whereby members of each church have certain rights within the other.

If a church recognizes that another church, with which it lacks bonds of pastoral governance, shares with it some of the beliefs and essential practices of Christianity, it may speak of "partial communion" between it and the other church.

Between the living and the dead

Main article: Communion of saints

The communion of saints is the relationship that, according to the belief of Christians, exists between them as people made holy by their link with Christ. That this relationship extends not only to those still in earthly life, but also to those who have gone past death to be "away from the body and at home with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8) is a belief among some Christians.^[12] Their communion is believed to be "a vital fellowship between all the redeemed, on earth and in the next life, that is based on the common possession of the divine life of grace that comes to us through the risen Christ".^[13]

Since the word rendered in English as "saints" can mean not only "holy people" but also "holy things", "communion of saints" also applies to the sharing by members of the church in the holy things of faith, sacraments (especially the Eucharist), and the other spiritual graces and gifts that they have in common.

The term "communion" is applied to sharing in the Eucharist by partaking of the consecrated bread and wine, an action seen as entering into a particularly close relationship with Christ. Sometimes the term is applied not only to this partaking but to the whole of the rite or to the consecrated elements.

Between individual Christians

A Christian fellowship is a community, social club, benefit society, and/or a fraternal organization whether formal or informal of Christians that worship, pray, cooperate, volunteer, socialize, and associate with each other on the foundation of their shared Christian faith. Members of Christian fellowships may or may not be part of the same church congregations or denominations, although many are associated with a given local church congregation (in turn possibly associated with a given denomination) or an interdenominational group of several local area congregations, some are established as parachurch voluntary associations or student societies, and others form out of casual non-denominational friend groups/social groups among individual Christians in some way affiliated with universities, colleges, schools, other educational institutions, community centers, places of employment, or at any other place, entity, or among neighbors and acquaintances, made up of people who worship, congregate, and socialize together based on shared religious beliefs.^[14][15][16]

See also

• Religious identity, the sense of membership in a religious group and its importance to one's self-concept

References

1. "Koinonia also spelt Kenonia". New Testament Greek Lexicon – New American Standard. Bible Study Tools.
2. Norman DeWitt argues in his book St Paul and Epicurus that many early Christian ideas were borrowed from the Epicureans.
3. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Archived 2005-09-02 at the Wayback Machine
4. Thayer 1885, p. 352.
5. NAS Exhaustive Concordance
6. "Koinōnía in the LXX". Blue Letter Bible. 17 December 2021.
7. Bromiley, Geoffrey W. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: A-D (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995 ISBN 0-8028-3781-6).
8. Hertling, L. Communion, Church and Papacy in Early Christianity. Chicago: Loyola University, 1972.
9. ST III, 82. 2 ad 3; cf. 82. 9 ad 2.
10. Gospel Figures in Art by Stefano Zuffi 2003 ISBN 978-0-89236-727-6 p. 252
11. Skylstad, William S. (Apr 5, 2006). "Notification from Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts on the actus formalis defectionis" (PDF). Canon Law Society of America. Archived from the original on 2009-03-19. Retrieved 2016-04-15.
12. John Henry Hobart, A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Protestant Episcopal Church (Swords, Stanford & Company, 1840), p. 258
13. Kenneth Baker, Fundamentals of Catholicism (Ignatius Press 1983 ISBN 978-0-89870027-5), p. 149
14. Norman DeWitt argues in his book St Paul and Epicurus that many early Christian ideas were borrowed from the Epicureans.
15. "Understanding Biblical Christian Fellowship". Grace Theological Seminary. 2021-03-17. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
16. "What Counts as Christian "Fellowship"?". Radical. Retrieved 2022-07-01.

Bibliography

• NAS Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible with Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries. Lockman Foundation. 1998 [1981].
• Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (1979). The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
• Lynch, Robert Porter; Prozonic, Ninon (2006). "How the Greeks created the First Golden Age of Innovation" (Microsoft Word). p. 14. Retrieved 2007-04-08.
• Richards, Lawrence O. (1985). Expository Dictionary of Bible Words. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Corporation.
• Thayer, Joseph H. (1885). Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House.

Further reading

• Lewis-Elgidely, Verna. Koinonia in the Three Great Abrahamic Faiths: Acclaiming the Mystery and Diversity of Faiths. Cloverdale Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-929569-37-3
• Hauk, Gary H. Life Ventures. LifeWay Church Resources, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4300-0975-7

External links

• Lexicon entry for koinonia, common domain
• Fellowship as defined in the New Testament
• Broken but Never Divided: An Orthodox Perspective
• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on some aspects of the Church understood as communion