Forgotten Friendship

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

C. S. Lewis

If we remove friendship from the world, half of our joy goes right out with it. This is because friendship is the ultimate end of our existence and our highest source of happiness. Friendship — with one another and with God — is the supreme pleasure of life, both now and forever, and no one can fully enjoy life without it.

Am I overstating things here? If you think so, you'll have to take it up with someone else. I can't claim much originality for that paragraph. It is essentially derivative. It paraphrases perspectives shared by diverse thinkers through the centuries, from ancient philosophers to great theologians and from modern atheists to devoted Christians. All of these agree: friendship is not only one of the greatest sources of happiness, but as essayist Joseph Epstein put it, "without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost."

But we don't often esteem friendship this highly. Every other week my wife brings home from the library about twenty books to read with our sons. The most common theme among the children's books is friendship. Yet very few adult books share this focus. Why is that? Is it because the rest of us have friendship figured out? Probably not. True, some groups of people value friendship today; even so, high praise doesn't always translate into thick practice.

One of the central purposes of this book is to make that translation happen — to help us value friendship more highly and then enjoy it more fully.

In Praise of Friendship

So that you know my word is good about that first paragraph, let's take a brief tour of some historical highlights of friendship. We'll start with Augustine, the great theologian and early church father from North Africa. He preached in a sermon, "Two things are essential in this world — life, and friendship. Both must be prized highly, and not undervalued." I can't think of anyone who would disagree with the first necessity, yet the second may be a surprise. But he means it.

The eighteenth-century American pastor Jonathan Edwards also thought deeply about the most important realities in life. He wrote that friendship "is the highest happiness of all moral agents." That's quite a claim, especially from someone who was precise with words: friendship is our highest happiness.

Esther Edwards Burr, Jonathan Edwards's daughter and the mother of the third US vice president, Aaron Burr, reflects this truth more personally. She wrote to her friend, "Nothing is more refreshing to the soul (except communication with God himself), than the company and society of a friend." She added that it is "a great mercy that we have any friends — What would this world be with out them? ... [Friendship] is the life of life."

John Newton, slave trader-turned-pastor and author of the hymn "Amazing Grace" wrote, "I think to a feeling mind there is no temporal pleasure equal to the pleasure of friendship." So if we set up life's pleasures at the starting line, Newton says that friendship finishes first every time.

These and many others not only highly valued friendship; they also deeply enjoyed it. Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great were early church fathers and well-known theologians. But they were also best friends. Their friendship endured through distance and even significant relational challenges. Gregory once wrote to Basil, "The greatest benefit which life has brought me is your friendship." He also wrote, "If anyone were to ask me, 'What is the best thing in life?' I would answer, 'Friends.'"

We know the Reformation-launching Martin Luther, but his friends also knew him for his "table talk" — his lively doctrinal discussions around the dinner table. His wife, Katharina, also enjoyed her own close circle of companions.

We might think of John Calvin pondering great thoughts at a lonely desk, but "a close study of Calvin's career reveals that friendships were the joy of his life." Addressing two of his closest friends, he wrote, "I think that there has never been, in ordinary life, a circle of friends so sincerely bound to each other as we have been in our ministry." Esther Burr enjoyed deep friendships, especially with her friend Sarah Prince. She wrote to her, "It is a great comfort to me when my friends are absent from me that I have [them] somewhere in the world, and you my dear ... I esteem you one of the best, and in some respects nearer than any sister I have. I have not one sister I can write so freely to as to you, the sister of my heart." True friends are soul siblings.

The Bible praises friendship with as much vigor as any source, ancient or modern. The story of Scripture is carried along by stories of friendships. Naomi had her Ruth, David his Jonathan, and Paul his Timothy. Jesus too had his Peter, James, and especially John. According to the Bible, friendship is an essential ingredient of the good life. The Scottish pastor Hugh Black said of the book of Proverbs, "There is no book, even in classical literature, which so exalts the idea of friendship, and is so anxious to have it truly valued, and carefully kept."

We've seen this praise of friendship span centuries, genders, and ethnicities; it also spans worldviews. Aristotle, like other ancient Greek philosophers, considered friendship indispensible for life. A. C. Grayling, a modern atheist philosopher, claims, "The highest and finest of all human relationships is, arguably, friendship." One doesn't need to acknowledge the friend of sinners to recognize friendship as one of the deepest pleasures of life.

Yet Christians have a deeper warrant for this kind of praise: friendship is the meaning of the universe. We aren't just made for friendship with each other; we are made for friendship with God. Jesus, the great friend of sinners, came to befriend us. He said to his disciples, "No longer do I call you servants. ... I have called you friends" (John 15:15). These familiar words are more profound than we may realize. On the eve of his death, Jesus wanted his disciples to know that the cross was not only the greatest demonstration of love but also a cosmic act of friendship. He said, "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). The cross was history's most heroic act of friendship.

History, it turns out, is nothing less than the story of how the triune God welcomes us into eternal friendship with himself. To be a Christian is to know Jesus — and to be known by him — as a dear friend. As the great nineteenth-century pastor Charles Spurgeon preached, "He who would be happy here must have friends; and he who would be...