Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship. Anne-Marie Ellithorpe
a bridge to the “ethical realm” and to foreshadow community.53
Other Europeans, however, discounted friendship as being of ethical significance. During the early decades of the twentieth century, much was made of the nuances between the various biblical and Hellenistic Greek words for love. The differences were at times overstated, as is apparent in Swedish Lutheran scholar Anders Nygren’s influential Agape and Eros. This work proposes a sharp distinction between two kinds of human love: self-giving altruistic love descending from God (without attachment or the need for reciprocation) and self-loving desiring love seeking to climb to God.54 Nygren had little use for philia, the love of friends, which he regarded as essentially selfish in nature and being based in part on desire for the other.55 It is worth keeping in mind that Nygren’s fundamental concern in this work is the source of human fellowship with God, rather than relationships between humans. Nevertheless, while his personal practice, as teacher and bishop, may have been substantially different, his writing effectively dismissed philia as a subsidiary of eros, a love that seeks reward. While Nygren’s anti-Hellenistic theory is now widely recognized as extreme and as inconsistent with linguistic evidence within the Greek Bible, his polemic has nevertheless been highly influential. His perception of Christian love as unconditional altruism was widely accepted. Nygren’s work has been described as “the most influential Protestant account of love in the twentieth century.”56 Friendship became a disdained term among seminarians, or at least among certain types of seminarians.57 The ideas of Agape and Eros ruled in many classrooms and pulpits.58
Nevertheless, in 1938, Anglican priest and Cambridge scholar John Burnaby became the first academic since Thomas Aquinas to argue on a scholarly level for friendship as the quintessential model for Christian love. In Amor Dei, Burnaby challenges Nygren’s anti-mystical tendency and champions the love for God that energized the Christian mystical tradition. Burnaby found the delight, desire, and devotion inherent to friendship with God to be immeasurably greater, both like and very unlike that shared with a human friend.59
Subsequently, a variety of reflections on friendship emerged from the Second World War years. Simone Weil, a French philosophical writer, mystic, and activist in the wartime Resistance, asserted that whereas natural affection tends to be based on a relationship of necessity, pure friendship surpasses nature. For Weil, friendship was a miracle, with a sacramental character.60 In a letter written from prison shortly before his execution by the Nazis in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wondered about friendship as a subdivision of the concept of culture.61 Noting the challenge of classifying friendship sociologically,62 Bonhoeffer questioned the restrictiveness of Reformed domains of ethical existence, namely family, state, and work,63 and the Protestant sidelining of the whole sphere of freedom, including friendship, art, education, and play.64 As Liz Carmichael notes, “it is in the experience of such struggles as that in which Bonhoeffer was caught up in that the ethical significance of friendship makes itself starkly evident.”65 Bonhoeffer depicted friendship as a rare and precious treasure, not to be compared with the values of the divine mandates (church, marriage and family, government, culture, and work), yet “as much in place amongst them as the cornflower in the wheat field.”66 Friendship was thus portrayed as self-sown, unique, and fragile. It is not deliberately planted, nor does it belong to or receive support from the main crop.
C.S. Lewis wrote broadly and explicitly on friendship. In The Four Loves, Lewis sought to establish, from his nuanced understandings of love, implications for contemporary living. Yet Lewis tended to overdraw the distinction between the terms agapē, eros, philia, and storge. Reality is more complex than his four categories of love allow. Friendship is depicted as invaluable, yet unnecessary. Lewis considered the cultivation of true friendships to be almost a lost art and expressed disappointment at the neglect of friendship within modern society.67 Lewis favored friendship love as being the most closely aligned to divine love, because he viewed it as the most spiritual and least physical of the loves, an affair of “disentangled, or stripped minds.”68 Yet within this work he made minimal use of the tradition of ethical or theological writing on friendship, but rather wrote a somewhat personal essay, reflecting the kind of companionship he himself enjoyed. While Lewis does not explicitly target Nygren’s Agape and Eros in The Four Loves, this work implicitly criticizes Nygren’s denigration of eros as having no part in agapē.69 Lewis’s portrayal of these four loves in the novel Till We Have Faces is perhaps even more critical of Nygren.70
Liberation-oriented thoughts on friendship emerge in the writings of German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who, after being drafted and taken prisoner as a teenager in the Second World War, was helped and forgiven by his captors. These experiences contributed towards a sense of sympathy and solidarity with those experiencing oppression, along with a deep awareness of God’s participation in human suffering and hope.71 He invites his readers not only to know Jesus as friend, but also to live out his love as “open friendship.”72 Further, he suggests the addition of Jesus the Friend to the traditional titles given to Jesus, asserting that it best describes the “inner relationship between the divine and the human fellowship.”73 When other roles have been left behind, friendship remains. Moltmann came to see friendship as essential to ethical life, and as the enduring element in all loves.74
In the late twentieth century, a variety of theological perspectives on friendship emerged with the potential to enrich the theological imagination. Belgium moral theologian Servais Pinckaers asserted that ethics could be approached by the question of happiness or of obligation. Friendship, he wrote, had disappeared from modern ethics due to the latter’s emphasis on obligation. After all, “friendship, being free, could hardly be considered an obligation.”75 Yet friendship is easy to reinstate when we begin with a consideration of happiness rather than obligation.76
North American feminist and ecological theologian Sallie McFague found that friendship-love thrives on difference and extends to strangers, as she explored friend as a non-authoritarian, non-familial, non-gender-related metaphor for God in Metaphorical Theology and in Models of God.77 While including both classical and newer ideas of friendship, McFague accepted Lewis’s