Editorial: Koinonia

Abstract

Koinonia is an important New Testament word. It suggests that people participate in the life of God and one another in a way that brings about communion, fellowship and sharing. The Greek word koinonia in the New Testament – Andrew Davison tells us in his excellent book Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics1 – is intimately connected with the participation of the three persons of the Trinity in one another. For Davison ‘there is a “communion” between persons’,2 in which humans are privileged to share. This is echoed in 1 Jn 1.3 where the writer talks of fellowship with other people and with the Father and with Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul uses koinonia or communion in relation to the Eucharist (1 Cor. 10.16-17) where there is a communion or participation of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist (v. 16) and where there is also a communion or fellowship with one another as the Eucharist is shared (v. 17). Koinonia is good news for Anglicans, impelling us to proclaim the presence of Christ who comes to reconcile the world to God. This suggests that koinonia or communion is the very nature of God,3 where people participate in God and in one another. It is in the grace of this reconciling relationship that people live in unity and peace (2 Cor. 13.13). The fundamental sense of koinonia is the transformation brought about by sharing unity together or participating in the life of God and God’s Church as the body of Christ. The early Church portrayed this in the Acts of the Apostles where the first Christians ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship [koinonia], to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ (Acts 2.42). It was this fellowship and the eucharistic community, shared together, that sustained the spiritual life of these early Christians. Their sharing was with God and with one another in imitation of the fellowship Jesus shared with his disciples and many others. Koinonia not only has a depth of spiritual meaning but also an outward expression of fellowship, worship and unity in the gospel of Christ (Phil. 1.5). It was the strength of this fellowship that allowed the emerging Christian Church to overcome barriers and to remain together in unity despite the strife that sometimes afflicted its life. Barriers of culture, race and class were less important and the more fundamental concept of koinonia trumped ‘purely physical and eternal tests of conduct’ (such as circumcision or food laws), which became ‘obsolete in the course of time’.4 In more recent times koinonia has been central to the life of the Anglican Communion. The Lambeth Conference of 1930 followed the theme of ‘fellowship’