Friendship has fallen on hard times. The Information Age is earmarked by loneliness, and the evangelical community has been touched by the same forces of alienation plaguing society at large. Friendship’s hardship extends to the realm of evangelical theology, which currently fails to devote much attention to the subject.
This situation is especially unfortunate because the Christian church and Christian theologians have historically taken friendship with great seriousness. As a gesture toward recovering what has been lost, my paper argues that friendship has historically played an honored role in Christian theology, and deserves to play that role once again.
In the process of establishing this thesis, I consider the historic role of friendship in Christian theology from two angles. One, I examine the evidence for the role of particular friendships in the formation of Christian doctrine. Two, I investigate the role played by the concept of friendship as it has been woven into the structure of Christian theology. I begin by considering the Christological and soteriological significance of Jesus’s words in John 15:12-17, as well as the function of Paul’s network of co-laborers in Acts and the Epistles, to demonstrate how the New Testament depicts the church as birthed out of friendship and into an atmosphere of friendship. I then move to the patristic period, noting how milestones in the expression of Christian orthodoxy, such as the Council of Nicaea, took place during a time when Eastern and Western theologians alike were intentionally “Christianizing” classical theories and practices of friendship. Turning to the Middle Ages, I take up the letters of Anselm of Canterbury as exemplifying the concrete bonds of friendship in the life of the theologian, and I look to Aelred of Riveaulx and Thomas Aquinas as key theologians of friendship itself. Entering the Reformation era and the growth of modernism, I draw from Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard to chart friendship’s long and uncertain exit from Christian theology. Jürgen Moltmann, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Katherine Sonderegger illustrate both the fragmentation and persistence of friendship in twentieth-century theology. Finally, standing at the intersection of modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism, we ourselves are beginning to experience a renewed awareness of our human and Christian need for friendship; this awareness is expressed in a smattering of books by authors such as Wesley Hill, Victor Lee Austin, and Rebecca McLaughlin.
This historical exercise leads to the following conclusions. One: for the first fifteen hundred years of church history, Christians largely presupposed the importance of friendship. Two: since the early church, the friendships of individual theologians have played a critical role—for good and for ill—in the development of doctrine. Three: in the modern era, theologians have appealed to the concept of friendship on an “as-needed basis”; this approach signifies both the fractured nature of our theology of friendship and friendship’s enduring significance.
Theology needs friendship. Theologians need friends. Friendship enjoys strong historical precedent within the Christian tradition, and the time is ripe for us as evangelical theologians to take friendship seriously again.