I have a concern with a particular word in Scripture that has its own history of translation issues. The Greek is koinonía. The root of the word is the adjective: koínos, meaning common. The noun is one of the great abilities of ancient Greek—the ability to create abstract concepts from adjectives (this is not common in ancient languages). It is this linguistic ability that caused philosophy in Western Civilization to first be practiced by the Greeks. Without abstract nouns there is nothing to discuss.
The word koinonía had a fairly clear religious, even sacramental, meaning by the time of the New Testament. It had a history of usage even in pagan religious settings. Its meaning was fairly clear: communion, participation or sharing. In each of these meanings the strongest sense of the word is meant. To have koinonía is to have communion, to actually participate in the life of another in the sense that your life and the life of the other share a common existence.
In the history of English translation the word receives a mixed treatment. In the King James Bible the word is generally translated either as communion, or, occasionally, by the weaker word fellowship. Interestingly, as time and Protestantism move along, translations have tended to move more often to the weaker rendering fellowship. Thus in the Revised Standard Version we read:
If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; 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 1:6-7)
What on earth does this mean?
In our modern two-storey world, fellowship is a very weak word. It refers to a relationship between two very discreet individualities. Rotary clubs meet for fellowship. It’s not unlike comradery with the exception that the term comrade sounds as if you actually shared a common experience.
The Greek is clear. If we say we have communion with Christ while we walk in darkness, we lie. We lie because to have communion with Christ is literally to have a share in His life, to dwell in Him and He in you. It is of the very heart of our salvation. By the same token, if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have communion with one another, because we are sharing in one and the same life. And it is this sharing in the life of Jesus that is itself the sharing in His blood that cleanses us from all sin.
In blogging this excerpt I realised that I do have something of my own to add, my own testimony as it were, that somewhat (though not intentionally) disagrees with Fr. Stephen's premise that fellowship means something necessarily different, or at least weaker than, communion.
Although an Orthodox Christian, after receiving holy communion I thank God using the prayer Almighty and ever-living God* from the Book of Common Prayer, in which this petition occurs, "And we most humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in." This part of the prayer, "that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in," I've also offered at other times, as when praying with my co-laborer in the Lord, because we share the same mind, the same life in Jesus Christ, rare among Christians today. For me, then, holy fellowship signifies the same depth of communion, participation and sharing that the article restricts to the term communion. Maybe for most people, that's correct, but not for all, not for me.
* This prayer is also part of the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon, an Orthodox Western rite liturgy composed by the Russian bishop Tikhon of Moscow.
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