Communion
When Paul calls bread “the communion of the body of Christ,” he uses koinōnia, which denotes a people made one by sharing a common meal.
The Greek word Paul uses for the Lord's Supper, koinōnia, comes from koinōnos, a partner or sharer. Its range covers fellowship, association, and joint participation. When Paul asks whether the bread is "the communion of the body of Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:16–17), he has in view a people who hold something in common because they have eaten from one loaf.
The zevaḥ shelamim frames shared life around a sacrificial meal: the offering is portioned between altar service, priestly share, and the worshipper’s household.
Although the Hebrew Bible has no direct translation for "communion," the idea is powerfully expressed through one of its central sacrificial rites. The zevaḥ shelamim, rendered "peace offering" in the King James Version and "communion offering" in some modern translations, takes its name from the root of shalom, a word that includes wholeness, health, and harmony. It was the one major sacrifice the worshipper ate. Part burned on the altar, part went to the priest, and the offerer's household ate the rest on the day it was offered (Leviticus 7:15). In its oldest biblical form, communion is a meal shared among God, those who serve at the altar, and a family.
Remembrance at the Table
Jesus instituted the sacrament at a Passover meal, and the accounts of that night preserve his command to eat and drink "in remembrance" of him. The Greek term, anamnēsis, implies more than recollection. In ancient liturgical usage, to remember a saving act was to make it present, so that those who partook of sacrament relived the event they commemorated.
Latter-day Saint scholars have noted how closely this reading fits weekly observance. The sacrament asks members to remember Christ as a standing obligation, each Sunday, and to act on that memory in the week that follows.
Restoration Distinctives
The Book of Mormon adds a detail absent from the New Testament accounts. When the risen Christ administered the sacrament among the Nephites, he told them to partake "in remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you" (3 Nephi 18:7). The body they had seen and touched that day was the very body that rose from the tomb.
The sacrament prayer recorded by Moroni frames communion as a covenant with obligations on both sides. Those who partake of the sacrament witness that they are willing to take upon them Christ's name, always remember him, and keep his commandments, "that they may always have his Spirit to be with them" (Moroni 4:3).
Early Latter-day Saints also administered the sacrament in the Kirtland and Nauvoo temples during dedicatory services. Revelation extended the word beyond the ordinance itself. Among the privileges of the Melchizedek priesthood is to have the heavens opened and "to enjoy the communion and presence of God the Father" (D&C 107:19). In Restoration usage, the sacrament and the highest form of access to God share a name.
Communion as Sociality
Joseph Smith taught that "that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory" (D&C 130:2). Latter-day Saint writers have drawn a strong conclusion from this. If celestial life consists of relationships, then building Zion is heaven in its early stages, and the friendships formed in a ward or a family are the substance of exaltation.
The city of Enoch supplies the model. Its people were "of one heart and one mind" (Moses 7:18), a unity that preserved the differences agency produces among persons. Latter-day Saint theology locates this unity at the sacrament table itself. The setting changes from congregation to congregation. In each case, the ordinance gathers people who would otherwise remain strangers.
Theosis as a Communal Process
Mormon transhumanists argue that theosis is a communal process. Lorenzo Snow's couplet about humans becoming as God is usually read as a description of individual progress. The scriptures, however, describe exaltation as membership in a society of glorified persons. If becoming like God depends on relationships, then technologies that change how minds connect and cooperate bear directly on salvation. Some in the movement describe the goal as superhuman communion: capacities for understanding, empathy, and shared purpose extended well beyond present human limits.
This view carries a political judgment. Intelligence, whether human or artificial, should be developed in a decentralized way. Distributed power compels cooperation, and cooperation keeps powerful agents accountable to one another. The shelamim offers an ancient image of this arrangement: one offering divided among several parties, with no single party taking the whole.
The Work That Devolves Upon Us
Each week the sacrament repeats a pattern that predates temple liturgy: sacred emblems blessed and passed from hand to hand. Mormon transhumanists read that pattern as a description of the work entrusted to disciples. The task at hand is to widen the circle of those who share the meal until it includes all who will come to the table.