a partner or sharer: someone who holds a real, invested stake in something together with another.
At its core this word names a person who has a genuine stake in something shared with someone else. It is less a fixed idea than a slot: the word stays steady while what is shared fills in its meaning. Join two people in a fishing business and they are partners; join them in shedding innocent blood and they are accomplices; join them to an altar, to suffering, or to God's own life and they are sharers in that reality. The same steady sense of invested, shared stake runs through all of it.
That is why the same word can move from the marketplace to the highest reaches of the New Testament without changing its meaning. In everyday Greek documents it was ordinary business vocabulary, the word for the person named as your "partner" in a lease or a trade. Paul uses that very vocabulary of his fellow worker Titus and of Philemon, and the fishermen James and John are called Simon's partners in the same plain sense.
What is shared can be:
- a business or other joint undertaking, as with fishing partners or ministry partners
- guilt in someone else's wrongdoing, when the shared thing is evil
- a spiritual reality, such as an altar, Christ's sufferings, or the glory still to come
The Greek Old Testament had used this word sparingly, and never for a person's relationship with God. The New Testament breaks that restraint boldly: believers can be sharers in Christ's sufferings, in his coming glory, and, in Second Peter's most daring phrase, sharers of the divine nature itself. Even then the word keeps its down-to-earth roots. The name for the sharing itself is a related word (κοινωνία); a plainer word for a partaker is μέτοχος; and a stronger form that stresses sharing something in common with others is συγκοινωνός.
Nuances
Whether being a "sharer of the altar" means real communion with the spiritual power behind the sacrifice or only social fellowship among the worshipers.
- majorityReal participation in the cultic reality itself, since Paul's parallel about sharing in the blood of Christ at the Lord's table works only if a genuine communion with a spiritual power is in view in both cases.; G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT); A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC); D. E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (BECNT)
- minorityChiefly social fellowship among those who eat together, not a real communion with a supernatural being.; W. L. Willis, Idol Meat in Corinth (SBLDS 68)
Whether the phrase means believers become "sharers of the divine nature" (participants in something belonging to God) or "partners of the Deity" (persons in covenant partnership with God).
- majoritySharers in specific divine attributes, chiefly God's moral character now and freedom from decay at Christ's return, without crossing over into God's own essence.; R. J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (WBC 50); J. M. Starr, Sharers in Divine Nature: 2 Peter 1:4 in Its Hellenistic Context (ConBNT 33); N. Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition
- minorityCovenant partners of God, reading the phrase as a partnership with the Deity rather than a share in a divine quality.; A. Wolters, Partners of the Deity: A Covenantal Reading of 2 Peter 1:4, Calvin Theological Journal 25 (1990)