The love of friendship has, at the least, established its place as a necessary model of love in Christian tradition. This study shows the deep roots it has in Christian thought, among both ancient and modern writers, and is intended to facilitate further reflection on and exploration of its creative potential now and for the future.

The love of friendship has, at the least, established its place as a necessary model of love in Christian tradition. This study shows the deep roots it has in Christian thought, among both ancient and modern writers, and is intended to facilitate further reflection on and exploration of its creative potential now and for the future.

Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends. –John 15:13 Our culture idolizes romance and the love of parents for their children. But Jesus said there was no greater love than sacrificial friendship love. What’s more, He issued a command to His disciples that they live into this kind of love. Christian friendship isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s vital. But it’s also dangerous. Friends can pull us up when we’re knocked down, embrace us with their love, and spur us on to follow Jesus better. But friends can also grind us to the ground, exploit, or invite us into sin. In No Greater Love, Rebecca McLaughlin walks us through the highs and lows of friendship love—a love that’s been neglected and malnourished in our modern world. She draws especially on Jesus in the Gospels and on Paul to show how powerful and precious Christian friendship is and how we can walk through the hurt, loss, and disillusionment that comes from broken friendship trust. Beginning with the words of Jesus on the night he was betrayed and abandoned, she points us to His battle-tested love as the unending source of our best love for one another. Male or female, single or married, joyful or lamenting, lonely or embraced, we all need friendship love. This book will help us give and receive it in a way that calls us back to Jesus’s commandment: that we love each other just like He loves us.

Theological reflection on friendship, as a particular form of Christian love, emerges in Holy Scripture and continues to be elaborated in the Christian tradition. However, "love of friendship" was at times absorbed into the other traditional understanding of love--"love of God and of neighbor." After a philosophical-historical study of the Greco-Roman roots of friendship in moral reflection, and how (and to what extent) this was appropriated in the Christian tradition, this book illustrates the transcendental character and the novelty of the Christian understanding of friendship found in Holy Scripture, focusing particularly on the most relevant texts in the Fourth Gospel where "love" and "friendship" stand to be important themes. It also shows how Saint Thomas Aquinas, through his exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, his synthesis of the Christian tradition, and his ability to rearticulate Christian theology through Aristotelian philosophy, inimitably defines the theological virtue of caritas as "friendship with God." In so doing he depicts friendship as the finality, the telos, of the Christian life. Finally, the book aims to show how the retrieval of a proper theology of friendship, rooted in Holy Scripture and Christian tradition, can enrich the life of an authentic Christian and contribute to the ongoing process of renewing moral theology.

This book examines the pastor's friendships as they impact a pastor's effectiveness in ministry and his or her personal well-being. Because friendships require high levels of self-disclosure, friendships introduce potential conflict for the pastor as personal self-disclosure may conflict with the pastor's expected role. Taking a qualitative approach, this study looks at how pastors navigate the areas of friendship both inside and outside their congregations. The research involved interviews with ten congregational pastors and reports themes that emerged from the interviews. The researcher developed four friendship types that assist the pastor in balancing pastoral role expectation with expression of vulnerability.