Friendship in Christianity: Some perspectives from Jesus to Schleiermacher

Friendship has been a central theme throughout two thousand years of Christianity, though no single, consistent set of Christian ideas or practices regarding friendship has endured across this entire period. This essay examines key examples of Christian friendship within their specific contexts, challenging the common misconception that Christianity significantly downplays the importance of friendship between individuals. The first example is found in the New Testament, where Jesus' disciples are sometimes referred to as his philoi (‘friends’). Another passage describes believers’ trust in God as akin to the trust of friends in need who rely on the support of their good friends. Nonetheless, the Hellenistic ideal of reciprocal friendship is potentially reshaped in Christianity by Jesus’ command to ‘love your enemies,’ which complicates the traditional notion of mutual friendship. A second example is Bardaiṣan of Edessa, a Syriac Christian around 200 CE, who created a synthesis of Christian and traditional Edessan court ethics regarding friendship. The third example considers the ideas and practices of friendship among Greek and Latin church fathers, alongside their classical pagan influences. While some Christian teachings advised against friendships with pagans, in practice, even prominent theologians of late antiquity maintained close friendships with pagan intellectuals. The fourth example highlights the enduring ideal of a friend willing to sacrifice his life, which is shared across pagan, Jewish, and Christian interpretations of the famous Pythagorean story of Damon and Phintias before the tyrant Dionysius of Sicily. The essay explores variations of this narrative across languages including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, English, and German, from the fourth century BCE to the present, focusing particularly on Schiller’s ballad ‘The Pledge’ (1798). Finally, the essay examines the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s early 19thcentury synthesis of pre-Christian, Christian, and modern transreligious concepts and practices of friendship. This exploration reveals the diversity and adaptability of friendship within Christian thought and demonstrates its lasting significance across different eras and cultural contexts.