Friendship

The active promotion of the concept of friendship might lead us to the conclusion that it is widely experienced. We have friendly churches, user-friendly machines and friendship evangelism. Yet behind the rhetoric is a deep craving for what is seldom experienced—intimate, lifelong relationships in which persons are enjoyed simply for who they are and not what they can do for us. Ironically, people who boast of “my friends” may be among the most lonely as they are encircled by acquaintances, business colleagues or others linked by obligations and benefits through an unwritten contract of the mutual meeting of needs. Friendship, in contrast, is not for anything except the friend, and therefore as a nonutilitarian relationship, friendship takes us to the center of Christian living. The history of a person’s spiritual pilgrimage can usually be traced from the history of that person’s friendships.

The Value of Friendship

In practical terms friendship is crucial to emotional and personal development. We learn to become fully human persons in part through our relational history. Some people get stuck in their development in a self-absorption stage and never move forward into give-and-take relationships that inevitably require some level of death to the self. Such people are not only friendless; in addition they usually have a diminished capacity to give and receive love of all kinds, including marital love. The marriage relationship itself should not be required to meet all the friendship needs of each spouse and may be threatened by such unrealistic expectations. Nevertheless, it is commonly agreed that the basic recipe for a good marriage is friendship plus sex (McGinnis, p. 9). A truly biblical marriage is formed not only through friendship and sexual consummation but by the forging of a covenant. As we shall see, covenants are not exclusive to marriage and may strengthen the bond of same-sex or even other-sex friendships without the romantic or erotic dimension being present. If, as has been suggested, romantic/married love is two souls and one flesh, friendship is two bodies and one soul.

Friendship is good not only for our personal development but also for our moral development. One reason is that friendship offers a second self with whom we share feelings, thoughts, moral judgments and criticism. Paul Wadell notes, “One reason we have friends is that there is a good we share with them, but the reason friendships grow and become such a delight is that we cannot be good without them, indeed, we cannot be good at all” (p. 6). Commenting on this, Stanley Hauerwas reflects that the preferential nature of friendship—through which we choose to relate intimately with a few people—has always seemed to contradict and oppose the Christian obligation to love everyone (cited in Wadell, p. x). But because friendship invites us to rejoice in the particularity, the specialness, of the other, we learn how to grow in love. So particular friendships fit us better to love everyone. And mature friendships will admit, even seek, another friend.

Scripture occasionally uses friendship to describe the relationship of God with his people. Further, there is something like friendship in the Godhead since God is more “one” because of being three and not one in spite of being three. So true spirituality is essentially relational. Aelred of Rievaulx boldly paraphrased 1 John 4:16 as “God is friendship” (p. 65). Because “God is love” (1 John 4:8), to walk as children of God involves cultivating the relational life, including friendship. Far from being a diversion to the spiritual life, friendship is a path to God. But this view of friendship is something distinctive to the Christian faith.

The History of Friendship

In the Greek classics Aristotle and Cicero maintained that the good life cannot exist without friends living together and sharing in discussion and thought. In contrast, the Stoic Seneca believed the wise person can live perfectly well without friends. Where friendship existed in the Greek world, it was more of a sociopolitical relationship than the private and personal association sought today. Friends practiced together in the military academy, discussed politics and joined together to promote a common public life (Allen, p. 36). In contrast, friendship today allows people to detach from the constraints of political, business and public life simply to enjoy a relationship. Friendship is more like play, which is not useful though it is positively reinforcing. While the classical world ended with the isolation of friendship from community, the eleventh-century rediscovery of friendship can be linked to renewed interest in the classical texts.

The twelfth-century Cistercian Christian Aelred of Rievaulx has left us a very substantial reflection on spiritual friendship in which he drew heavily on Cicero. Such monastic discussions of the place of friendship in the spiritual life are illustrative since they reflect the tension of living in and for the community first. These discussions raise the question of whether special friendships in a monastic community destroy community. This discussion continues today in Christian communities where it is feared that exclusive relationships will work against koinōnia, that is, “fellowship.” Brian McGuire catalogs the options evident in the history of spirituality, especially in the monastic tradition: (1) the way of solitude—God and the individual (desert fathers); (2) the way of asceticism—God and individuals banded together; (3) the way of harmony—God meets individuals through communal acts of discipline (Benedict); (4) the way of friendship—God meets the community through special friendship relationships that do not threaten the harmony of community life; and (5) the way of brotherhood—friendships do not have to be limited to the cloister (pp. 36-37).

A high point in the monastic tradition of friendship is the works of Aelred: Mirror of Charity (1140) and Spiritual Friendship (1160). Aelred’s youth included habitual sexual sin with other men, either masturbation or homosexual acts. His victory over this led him both to condemn homosexual genital activity as an especially direct road to hell and, at the same time, to continue to believe in tenderness, affection, touching, being open and talking intimately about one’s life. “Aelred’s transference of sexual energy to spiritual fire came in the aftermath of the conversion to the monastic life at the age of twenty-four” (McGuire, p. 304). Unlike the more extreme desert fathers, Aelred dealt with the fear of sex in an all-male world by discarding passionlessness and insisting that warm love between friends of the same sex could be pure. This, however, did not come quickly or easily: “Jesus had become his love. As he made clear in Mirror of Charity, we must seek to concentrate on the flesh of Jesus the drives that otherwise would be directed towards the flesh of other men. One great passion took over and consumed all others, but instead of destroying his involvement in other men, the love of Jesus made human loves stable, permanent and part of the unity of the community” (McGuire, p. 329). Aelred underwent a lifelong process of conversion to this.

Aelred’s Neo-Platonism envisioned a continuous movement from physical loves to pure love of God, from lower friendships to pure spiritual friendships that take us to the heart of God. So he categorized friendships as functional, receptive (director to disciple), reciprocal (pilgrims together) and finally the knitting of souls. Aelred’s teaching is experiential: “He sought and found God in the impulses of his own heart and in the experience of men whom he knew through his reading and daily contacts” (McGuire, p. 322). Until recently Aelred’s books were banned in some monasteries out of fear that special friendships would endanger the community. The problem is still with us.

The Western world today is organized in such a way that long and deep friendships are exceedingly difficult in spite of courses on winning friends and influencing people. Many of the “new values” of postmodern society militate against friendship, not to mention spiritual friendship. These so-called values include (1) self-actualization, meaning that the self should actualize its potential and transcend its limitations, which includes the duty to get out of an unfulfilling marriage; (2) freedom to choose, meaning that we must have control over our own bodies, even our own future; (3) openness, meaning that we must stay available to alternative experiences for psychic mobility and not get trapped in a relationship, a factor that partly explains commitment anxiety and fear of covenant relationships; (4) regular sexual satisfaction as a human right, meaning that all sexual choices are legitimate, that no judgment should be placed on whether a relationship is homosexual or heterosexual and that monogamy is a rude intrusion in the sexual paradise of this instant-gratification culture; (5) intimacy, meaning that part of the relief sought from anonymity and the lonely crowd will be found in satisfying the hunger for heightened and new stimuli in relationships, which usually involve sexual activity, to give us the best experience we can get; (6) rentalism (Alvin Toffler’s word), meaning that we should be committed to transiency as a way of life so that the person gets lost in moving from one ad hoc experience to another, which involves treating people as commodities and allowing throwaway, commercial relationships to be used as sales prospects for insurance or for the gospel; (7) professionalism, meaning that all relationships from pastoring to friendships can be reduced to a technology promoted by experts; (8) revaluing of divorce, meaning that divorce is part of the growth sequence, a gateway to new values and role experimentation. These new values of the postmodern society are held against the backdrop of the “old values,” which are perceived as antivalues: lifelong fidelity and commitment, institutions and roles, responsibility for others, loyalty, closure and motherhood. While there is a hint of return to some of these old values in the postmodern consciousness, we must conclude that true friendship is largely countercultural. What many pursue, without knowing the difference, is pseudofriendship.

Signs of pseudofriendship are (1) functional relationships (we relate to people on the basis of what they do, what they can do for us, what they have done, rather than for who they are), (2) promiscuous relationships (we share ourselves inappropriately, not merely in the sexual sense, but by chattering away our lives indiscriminately and sharing intimately with strangers without the discipline of building trust and loyalty brick by brick), (3) contractual relationships (we agree to an exchange of goods and services in a conditional contract that can be broken by either partner—even in the family of God, with church membership often being based on an unspoken contract of the mutual meeting of needs) and (4) addictive relationships (we demand that others, even spouses, clients and parishioners, meet our neurotic needs). With considerable insight R. D. Laing comments on Western society in this way: “Can human beings be persons today? Can a man be his actual self with another man or woman? . . . We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. . . . No wonder modern man is addicted to other persons and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely” (pp. 20, 50, 62). Tragically, even in the family of God there is a profound loneliness. People lack soul friends with whom they can share the pilgrimage of faith, and many with a deep need to be liked find themselves to be the object of a love-an-unlovely-person project. It is profoundly unsatisfying.

Biblical Friendship

The Bible addresses the subject of friendship from several angles: example, personal reflection and explicit theological reflection. After considering these, we will explore the direct teaching of Scripture on how to be friendly.

Biblical examples of friendship. An inspired example of soul friendship is found in Jonathan’s friendship with David (1 Samuel 18:1-4; 1 Samuel 19:1-7; 1 Samuel 20; 1 Samuel 23:16-18; 2 Samuel 1:17-27; 2 Samuel 9:1-12). Characteristic of their model friendship is the disinterestedness of Jonathan’s friendship with David: that relationship would make David and not Jonathan the successor to the throne. Such friendship was risky and costly because the two found themselves in a triangle of jealousy and love with Saul (Jonathan’s father). The friendship was pure; at no time is there any hint of a homosexual element in it. Only once are we told about David’s feelings toward Jonathan—in the lament over his death: “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. As a mother loves her only son, so I was loving you” (2 Samuel 1:26 Vulgate). This same-sex friendship was secured by a covenant (1 Samuel 18:3), a covenant which David honored long after his friend’s death (2 Samuel 9:1-13). God stood as a witness between the two (1 Samuel 20:42). Most significant was the spirituality of the friendship: Jonathan sought to give David strength in the Lord, not in their relationship (1 Samuel 23:16-18). In the New Testament Paul’s circle of friends provides another inspired example. Note his friendship with Barnabas and the list of friends in Romans 16.

Biblical reflection on friendship. An inspired reflection on friendship is found in Eccles. 4:7-12, which includes beginning in Eccles. 4:9 a discussion of the rewards of friendship (“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their work”). Such rewards are practical support when one falls down (Eccles. 4:10), warmth (Eccles. 4:11), protection (Eccles. 4:12) and the hint of a spiritual presence (Eccles. 4:12; “a cord of three strands is not easily broken”).

The psalms offer the witness that even our friends will betray us (Psalm 55:13-15) and that the search for a true friend will lead us to the existential conclusion that only God is our help. Nevertheless, the value and pleasure of the bond experienced between like-minded persons is exalted: “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity” (Psalm 133:1 RSV).

Biblical theology of friendship. The Bible puts human friendship into the context of the mystery of the relational life within God (John 17:21, 23, 26) and the gospel through which God makes friends out of his enemies. Friendship between God and humankind is the ultimate goal of God’s grace and the spiritual journey, as modeled by Moses with whom God spoke on Sinai “face to face, as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33:11). Abraham was the friend of God (Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23), and Job hungered for God’s friendship more than he desired relief from his suffering: “Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God’s intimate friendship blessed my house” (Job 29:4). Satan’s question addressed the heart of Job’s friendship with God: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (Job 1:9). Friendship, even friendship with God, is not for anything. It has no utilitarian value. That is, our relationship to God should not be a commercial relationship in which we exchange piety for spiritual, even eternal, benefits.

In the Gospel of John Jesus said, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends” (John 15:15 RSV). But ordinary friendship is not an adequate metaphor for friendship with Jesus, for it involves obedience to his commands (John 15:14). Friendship with Jesus is inseparable from the truth about Jesus, for Jesus himself is truth. So it is more than mere sentimentality: to disobey his commands is to deny his friendship. Lewis Smedes underscores the truth that while most friendships either find or make equals, this friendship is different:

We are not fellow travelers; he is leader and we are followers. We do not walk side by side; he is always before us. We are not equals; he is vastly superior. He is the sort of friend we could not long endure in ordinary life with ordinary people; few people can remain friends for long with someone who accepts them by grace, “in spite of what they are” . . . yet, in those invisible bonds of moral consistency, kept commitment, gracious forgiveness, untiring listening, and ultimate sacrifice, he is the best friend one can ever have. (Shuster and Muller, pp. 240-41)

While Jesus called for nonpreferential love for all (Matthew 5:46; “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?”), he obviously had preferential relationships himself: Lazarus, Mary and Martha (John 11:34-35), and the disciple whom he loved (John 13:23). Jesus demanded uncompromising loyalty to himself even if it meant severing deep human relationships (Luke 14:26), yet he accepted such special relationships and described his relationship with his followers as friendship. Jesus turns normal definitions inside out by calling us to make a brother out of our friend, a friend out of our neighbor and a neighbor out of our enemy.

The theological background for Jesus’ view of friendship is the relational nature of the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and the covenant “friendship” relationship within the personhood of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a social relationship of love, mutual respect, common interest and relational joy: “Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). Behind Aelred of Rievaulx’s paraphrase of 1 John 4:16 (“God is friendship”) is the implication that whoever lives in friendship lives in God. James adds to this the boundaries of God-inspired friendship by reflecting that friendship with the world is enmity with God: “Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4 RSV).

In a strangely provocative parable Jesus seems to argue for a certain expediency in friendships in view of the ultimate reward of living with friends eternally in heaven, for who would want to live in a friendless heaven? In Luke 16:9 Jesus said, “Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” His intent was not to encourage the commercialization of relationships (use you money to buy friendships), but to use your money to meet needs, and the relationships springing from this will last for eternity (the very thing the rich man in the parable in Luke 16:19-31 refused to do).

The last parable in Luke 16 invites the consideration of how to be friendly. In Luke 10:36 Jesus asked, “Which of these . . . was a neighbor . . . ?” in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?” in Luke 10:29. In like manner, the question “How can I be a friend?” is more important than the frequently asked “Who is my friend?”

The Art of Friendship

Direct teaching on friendship is found in Proverbs, in which there is distilled wisdom on how to make and keep friends: being trustworthy and keeping secrets (Proverbs 11:12), being willing to forget offenses (Proverbs 17:9), renouncing conflict (Proverbs 25:8) and cultivating openness (Proverbs 27:6). In contrast, the book of Job pictures how not to be a friend through the negative example of the three “miserable comforters” (Job 16:2) of Job: “In the book of Job friends are used as the audience for the man whom God has allowed to be deprived of everything. Eventually even the friends are gone. . . . The problem of Job is not whether or not to believe in friendship: it is whether to believe in one’s friends” (McGuire, p. xix).

Job’s friends started well: they had good intentions (to sympathize); they engaged in a joint effort (Job 2:11); they took a decisive step (set out from their homes); they responded genuinely (wept aloud; Job 2:12); they identified with him (sat on the ground for seven days; Job 2:13); they understood communion (no one said a word; Job 2:13). But when Job would not comply with their theological expectations, they stopped being friendly and became his enemies. In the depths of his loneliness, though surrounded by his friends, Job cries, “A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends, even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty” (Job 6:14), which is sometimes translated, “He who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty. My brethren are treacherous as a torrent-bed” (Job 6:14-15 RSV).

When Job’s friends attacked, instead of inducing guilt they provoked Job to self-justification (which ironically seems to have moved him from his suicidal despair). Only later, when God’s love was revealed, could Job repent on his own. Job’s friends reacted rather than responded. They were threatened by a problem they could not solve, so they attacked the sufferer. Their theology was inadequate to cope with unjust suffering, but instead of talking to God about this, the way Job did and so was justified (Job 42:7), they tried to talk about God to Job. The negative example of Job’s friends invites the consideration of what, positively, makes for friendship that is not only the mutual enjoyment of persons but also the mutual enrichment of spiritual life.

Spiritual Friendship

Soul friendship, as Aelred stated so succinctly, like friendship in general is nonutilitarian: “For spiritual friendship, which we call true, should be desired, not for consideration of any worldly advantage or for any extrinsic cause, but from the dignity of its own nature and the feelings of the human heart, so that its fruition and reward is nothing other than itself” (p. 60). David and Jonathan exemplify this in the Old Testament. Jesus’ startling address of Judas, at the moment of his treachery, as “friend” (Matthew 26:50) is the superlative New Testament example. But spiritual friendship is not merely the enjoyment of another. It is companionship and mutual encouragement along the path of discipleship; it is friendship with Christ together. So Aelred says to his friend Ivo, “Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, in our midst” (p. 51). Spiritual friendship is having “the same opinion, the same will, in matters human and divine, along with mutual benevolence and charity” (Aelred, p. 54).

People do not suddenly attain a deep level of soul friendship. Thus, Aelred analyzed the types and stages of spiritual friendships; they are functional (based on mutual interests), receptive (a person with strengths with a person with weaknesses), reciprocal (in which friends are pilgrims together, progressively taking off layers of masks) and the knitting of souls (through which, by an act of grace, two people are supernaturally joined and knit together). True friendship is mutual equality and intimacy reaching toward God. It is both a gift of grace and an accomplishment. True friendship is not playing God, not encouraging codependence, not advice giving, not controlling, not directing another, not counseling and not an alternative to counseling. It is listening to the heart, getting in touch with the movement of God in another’s life (1 Samuel 3:8-21), prizing the unique spirituality of one’s friend, exploring the full meaning of another’s life in God, nurturing a friend’s spiritual life and on occasion confronting a friend with hard issues (Acts 18:24-28). A spiritual friend is “someone to whom you dare to speak on terms of equality as to another self, one to whom you need have no fear to confess your failings; one to whom you can unblushingly make known what progress you have made in the spiritual life; one to whom you can entrust all the secrets of your heart and before whom you can place all your plans” (Aelred, p. 72). Telling an unedited version of our inner life is not something that can be reduced to a technique or an instant formula. Aelred wisely advised progressively disclosing oneself to a friend, testing and deepening the relationship and, when a friendship proves inappropriate, unstitching it stitch by stitch, the way it was formed.

So friendship is a way of understanding God. Friendship is a way of describing the Christian life. Friendship is an important addition to fellowship (koinōnia) in the church, for koinōnia includes all Christians and is based solely on grace, our common share in the saving work of Christ and our common family experience in God. But too often people in a Christian fellowship rely solely on the bond of grace and neglect the challenge of developing the skills of friendship, skills of loyalty, caring, listening, celebrating and discretion that can greatly deepen the life of the Christian community. But finally friendship is a way of describing spirituality, for we intuitively know that when we turn friendship into a technique or use it, we have debased something holy. James Houston says,

A true friend can never have a hidden motive for being a friend. He can have no hidden agenda. A friend is simply a friend, for the sake of friendship. In a much greater way, love for God is love for God’s own sake. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that our natural inclination is to love for our own sake. When we learn to love God, we still love him for our own sake. As we grow in friendship with God, we come to love him not just for ourselves alone, but also for God’s sake. At last, we may reach a point where we love even ourselves for the sake of God. (pp. 195-96)

» See also: Community

» See also: Discipleship

» See also: Fellowship

» See also: Love

» See also: Spiritual Growth

References and Resources

Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, trans. M. E. Laker (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1974); D. Allen, Love: Christian Romance, Marriage, Friendship (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1987); J. Houston, The Transforming Friendship: A Guide to Prayer (Oxford: Lion Books, 1989); W. Hulme, Dialogue in Despair: Pastoral Commentary on the Book of Job (New York: Abingdon, 1968); W. P. Jones, “Friendship and Circles of Commitment,” Weavings 7, no. 3 (1992) 36-40; M. Kelsey, Companions on the Inner Way (New York: Crossroad, 1983); R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1970); K. Leech, Soul Friend: The Practice of Christian Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977); C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Collins, 1960); A. L. McGinnis, The Friendship Factor (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1979); B. P. McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350-1250 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988); H. Nouwen, Reaching Out (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975); M. Shuster and R. A. Muller, Perspectives on Christology: Essays in Honor of Paul K. Jewett (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991); P. J. Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).

—R. Paul Stevens