κοινωνία

There is a verse in Acts that summarizes the worship life of the early Christian church in four marks.

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42, ESV)

The four marks are listed in compressed Greek: tē didachē tōn apostolōn — the apostolic teaching. Tē koinōnia — the fellowship. Tē klasei tou artou — the breaking of bread. Tais proseuchais — the prayers. Four things, listed in parallel. This is what the church Christ left behind devoted itself to from its very first weeks. This is what the church has continued to devote itself to for two thousand years.

Notice the second mark. Tē koinōnia — the fellowship. The Greek word is koinōnia. In English Bibles it is sometimes translated “fellowship,” sometimes “communion,” sometimes “participation,” sometimes “sharing,” sometimes “partnership.” The translators reach for different English words because no single English word captures the full range of what the Greek means. Koinōnia in the New Testament is not exactly any of these English options. It is the word for what the church is, what the Supper creates, what the Spirit produces, what the Christian shares with the triune God and with the other members of Christ’s body.

This is the chapter on koinōnia, and it closes Part IV. The previous ten chapters have covered the means of grace — the kerygma proclaimed, the homologia confessed, the martyria witnessed, the mystērion revealed, the baptism received, the paliggenesia accomplished, the anamnēsis observed, the sōma and the haima given at the table through the artos. The koinōnia is what all these create. The Word and the Sacraments create a people, and the people share — with Christ, with each other, across time and space, until Christ returns to gather them fully.

The Word

κοινωνία (koinōnia), pronounced koy-no-NEE-ah. A feminine noun, first declension. The root is the adjective koinos (κοινός, “common, shared, held in common”). The family includes the verb koinōneō (κοινωνέω, “to share in, to participate, to contribute”), the noun koinōnos (κοινωνός, “partner, fellow sharer, partaker”), the adjective koinōnikos (κοινωνικός, “ready to share, generous”), and the compound synkoinōneō (συγκοινωνέω, “to share with, to participate together”).

The basic semantic field is sharing-in-common. Two or more parties hold something jointly — they have koinōnia in it; they are koinōnoi with respect to it; they koinōneō it. The English word “communion” descends through the Latin communio from the Greek koinōnia; the English “common” descends through Latin communis from the Greek koinos. The semantic field has been preserved across languages even where the specific English options each capture only part of the original. Communion and common and community and commune and commonwealth are all linguistic descendants of the basic Greek root, and each carries some part of what the original meant.

In ordinary Greek usage, koinōnia covered:

• Business partnership. Two merchants sharing in a commercial venture were koinōnoi; their venture was a koinōnia. The commercial sense is well-attested.
• Marriage as life shared together. Greek and Roman authors regularly used koinōnia of the marital union.
• Friendship and personal companionship. The shared experience of living-with as the substance of friendship.
• Civic associations — citizenship as shared participation in a city’s life.
• Religious associations — shared in the gods, in the cult, in the sacred mysteries of the various ancient cults.

The New Testament picks up this entire range and applies it to specifically Christian realities. Koinōnia in the New Testament covers what Christians share — with Christ, with the Spirit, with the Father, with one another, with the saints across history, with the apostolic deposit of the gospel, with the suffering of Christ, with the body and blood given at the Supper. The word is one. The applications are many. All of them describe Christianity as a sharing-in, not merely an associating-with.

Range of Meaning

In its New Testament usage, koinōnia and its verbal and adjectival forms cover:

• Fellowship and association between persons. The general relational sense.
• Participation in something. The active sharing-in dimension.
• Partnership, particularly in the gospel. Paul’s letters use koinōnia for the believer’s partnership in the ministry of the gospel.
• Contribution. By extension from partnership: the Christian’s material sharing with others in need (Rom 15:26 — koinōnian tina, “some contribution”; 2 Cor 8:4).
• The substance or experience shared. Koinōnia can name the shared reality itself — fellowship in the Spirit, communion in the body and blood, partnership in suffering.
• The Christian church’s specific fellowship. Sometimes used as a near-synonym for “the church” — particularly in the early Christian period after the New Testament.

The senses overlap in the New Testament’s actual usage. A passage may carry several at once. When Paul writes that he longs to share Christ’s sufferings (koinōnian pathēmatōn autou, Phil 3:10), the koinōnia is participation (sharing-in the experience), partnership (joining Christ in the work), and shared substance (the same sufferings) all at once.

Where You’ll Meet It

“God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:9, ESV)

Paul’s compressed statement of the believer’s calling. The Christian is called eis koinōnian tou huiou autou — “into the fellowship of his Son.” The structure of saving faith and Christian life is right there: the Father calls; the calling is into fellowship; the fellowship is with the Son. Christianity is not first a doctrine to be believed, an ethic to be practiced, or a community to be joined — it is a koinōnia into which the Father calls those He has chosen, through the Son, by the Spirit. Doctrine, ethics, and community all flow from this primary reality.

“The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (1 Corinthians 10:16–17, ESV)

The keystone Supper text for the doctrine of koinōnia. Treated at various points in the earlier Supper chapters; here, the full force of the koinōnia word can be seen. The cup is a koinōnia of the blood. The bread is a koinōnia of the body. The verb in Greek is not “represents” or “signifies” or “reminds us of” — it is the noun koinōnia, the participation, the actual sharing-in. And then verse 17 draws the consequence: because there is one bread (one substance, one Christ, one body) we who are many are one body — because we all partake (metechomen) of the one bread. The horizontal koinōnia of the church follows from the vertical koinōnia with Christ. The same bread, the same Christ, the same body — vertical and horizontal converge in one act of sharing.

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (2 Corinthians 13:14, ESV)

The Trinitarian benediction. The three persons of the Godhead are each named with a characteristic gift — grace from the Son, love from the Father, fellowship from the Spirit. The Spirit’s specific gift to the church, in this concentrated formula, is the koinōnia. The Spirit creates the participation; the Spirit maintains the participation; the Spirit applies what Christ has won through the participation. This connects directly to Chapter 36 (the next chapter, opening Part V) on pneuma — the Spirit whose specific work is the creating and sustaining of the church’s koinōnia.

“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.” (Philippians 1:3–5, ESV)

The Philippian koinōnia. The word here is the partnership-sense — koinōnia eis to euangelion, “partnership in the gospel.” The Philippians have shared with Paul in the work of the gospel: their prayers, their financial support, their personal presence through Epaphroditus. The koinōnia names what they do together with Paul, on behalf of the gospel that they all share. This is one of the New Testament’s strongest texts for the ecclesial dimension of koinōnia — Christians actively joined in the work of the gospel, sharing in what Christ has commissioned.

“That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death…” (Philippians 3:10, ESV)

The costly koinōnia. The phrase is koinōnian pathēmatōn autou — sharing in His sufferings. Paul’s discipleship aims at fellowship with Christ in His death as well as in His resurrection. The Christian life involves participation in both dimensions of Christ’s work — the glory of the resurrection and the cost of the cross. Both are real. Both are dimensions of the same koinōnia.

“That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” (1 John 1:3, ESV)

John’s compressed Trinitarian and ecclesial koinōnia. The apostolic proclamation creates koinōnia between the apostles and the hearer (“fellowship with us”); the apostolic koinōnia is itself koinōnia with the Father and the Son. The chain is: the apostles share-in the Father and Son; they proclaim what they have seen and heard; the hearer comes into the same koinōnia through the apostolic word; the church across time shares in the same Christ.

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7, ESV)

The horizontal dimension of koinōnia, grounded in walking in the light (the Father), connected to the cleansing blood of the Son. Vertical and horizontal koinōnia are inseparable in John’s grammar. The believers who walk in the light have koinōnia with one another — and the blood of Jesus cleanses them. The fellowship and the cleansing are aspects of the same Christian life.