Communion

Communion is the shared life that God gives to his people and that believers share with one another: a mutual belonging in which God dwells with them and they are his people, and the same English word also names the meal Jesus gave his disciples. Linguistically, "communion" translates the Greek koinonia, meaning sharing, partnership, or fellowship, and the Latin communio; the idea in Scripture is not primarily a feeling but a common life — a shared standing before God and a shared table.

The text presents this communion as God's initiative and God's presence. To Joshua, God says "As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not fail you nor forsake you" (Joshua 1:5), and grounds courage in the same fact: "Yahweh your God is with you wherever you go" (Joshua 1:9). The promise that opens the covenant family rests on God's own power — "Is anything too hard for Yahweh?" (Genesis 18:14) — and in John 14:23 Jesus ties the presence to love and obedience: "If a man loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." The corporate form of the promise is stated in 2 Corinthians 6:16, "I will dwell in them and walk in them. I will be their God and they will be my people," and its family form in 2 Corinthians 6:18, "I will be to you a Father. You will be to me sons and daughters." The Spirit's cry "Abba, Father!" in the heart (Galatians 4:6) is the inward side of that relation.

Communion with God and communion with one another are held together in the text rather than separated. In 1 John 1:7 the shared life is a walk: "if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son, cleanses us from all sin." Jesus prays for it as unity — "that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you" (John 17:21) — and it is built up concretely when the word of Christ dwells richly in a community that teaches and admonishes one another "with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs" (Colossians 3:16). The same passages place holiness inside communion rather than alongside it: the call "Come out from among them, and be separate" (2 Corinthians 6:17) belongs to the promise of God's dwelling, and covenant life is described as careful observance that does not turn "to the right hand or to the left" (Joshua 1:7).

The word is also the common name for the Lord's Supper, since the Greek koinonia stands behind 1 Corinthians 10:16, where the cup and the broken bread are a sharing in the blood and body of Christ. Traditions read the term with different emphases, and these differences are confessional, not merely semantic. In Catholic and Orthodox teaching communion is chiefly sacramental and ecclesial — participation in the body and blood of Christ within the visible church, with the communion of saints and, in Orthodox framing, a call toward ever deeper participation in the divine life; both traditions in practice restrict who may receive the Eucharist. Lutheran and Reformed teaching likewise treat the Supper as a means of grace but have historically disagreed about the mode of Christ's presence, with Reformed emphasis falling on feeding by faith and on covenant fellowship. Baptist and free-church traditions commonly call the Supper an ordinance and stress the conscious faith of the individual participant and a regenerate membership, which shapes their practice of who is welcomed. Pentecostal and charismatic readings often foreground the experiential and Spirit-given sense of shared life. Some bodies, notably the Religious Society of Friends and the Salvation Army, have historically practised inward communion without a formal sacramental rite. One way to read the biblical material across these divides is to see the meal as one expression of a communion that Scripture describes more broadly as God dwelling with his people and his people belonging to one another.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.