Book Review: Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship

A comment made by Ellithorpe in her conclusion provides the reader with a useful way of understanding the nature of this book. “I acknowledge,” she writes, “that in some respects this research resembles a broad survey course” (215). This book, then, derives from doctoral studies, and provides a framework for considering the value of friendship for interpersonal and communal relationships within the parameters of a practical theology. A wide-range of topics and issues are covered from the biblical and classical roots of the characteristics and understanding of friendship, through aspects of interpersonal friendships (including family-based friendship), to civic friendship and political associations based on “friendship”, including, for example, covenanted friendship, as in the Treaty of Waitangi.

The book is divided into four parts, following an Introduction, and a brief Conclusion. In the Introduction, Ellithorpe introduces herself and places herself in her social location. She then outlines why she considers friendship an important topic both for the consideration of civic relationships as well as for personal and social wellbeing. She describes practical theology as “the work of the people”, and as an embodied practice of theological reflection and praxis (5; italics original). She uses the language of social imaginary and imagination to refer to the way we envisage our social life operating, how we live together.

In Part One, “The Current Reality”, Ellithorpe first considers “The Place of Friendship” (Chapter One), considering the varying understanding of friendship across the centuries, whether it is to be considered essential or peripheral to being human, and how technology shapes friendships, both helping and hindering them. This chapter discusses the views of a variety of modern writers on friendship, some of whom ignore or downplay friendship, to those who consider friendship an important “social glue”, and see friendship with God a viable possibility. Although friendship is sometimes seen as a “private, recreational relationship based on sentimental attachments” (34), it is also important that it have public and political dimensions as well. In the second chapter, Ellithorpe begins to move towards discussion of more inter-communal type friendship, focusing in particular upon indigenous understandings of friendship, particularly Māori, and describing Te Tiriti o Waitangi as intended to be a gesture of friendship and friendly protection of Māori rights. The chapter traces the betrayal of this intention by subsequent settler and colonial government actors, and the phases through which the relationship went.

Part Two, “A Deep Remembering–Friendship, Community” has three chapters, one looking at friendship in the First Testament, another considering the topic as found in the New Testament, and a third analysing friendship in the classical and (post-first century) Christian traditions. Here, among other aspects, Ellithorpe writes about the fact that being made in the image of God is a motif associated with friendship: a relationship with God, the earth, and an opposite partner. Deuteronomy advocates a form of “civic friendship” where the other is befriended, and the covenant community is characterised by empathy, a concern for justice and “by honoring and empowering actions on behalf of the other” (83).

The New Testament shows a Jesus who has indigenous links (through the four indigenous women in Matthew’s genealogy) which ensures that Jesus is not simply “Jesus the Conqueror” (see 95–96). He is depicted as engaged in fellowship (friendship) with outsiders and marginalised. In John’s Gospel, Jesus entrusts himself to the disciples in friendship, even before they prove reliable. In antiquity and the Christian tradition friendship is seen as fundamental good human life. The practice of friendship is characterised by mutuality, equality, and having “another self”, also benevolence in willing the good of the other.

It is in the last two parts that I felt that Ellithorpe really found her own voice, and the material became more integrated. Part Three, “Theology, Friendship, and the Social Imagination”, comprises three chapters in which she discusses mutuality in friendship, both the mutuality of friendship in the Trinity, and in human friendship with God; with creation, and between human persons. When it comes to civic friendship, this is an important way in which genuine justice can be achieved and a “diseased social imagination” overcome or healed. The Spirit empowers and enables social relationships, while the church can draw on a Christological frame for friendship and be a community of friends. The imaging of a God of love means that friendship acts as a “school of love” (172) that issues in mutuality and equal regard. Spirit-shaped friendship mirrors God and issues in a hospitality which also recognises the otherness of the other, maintaining a distance that allows freedom for the the other; here Ellithorpe draws on the Samoan concept of va (“space between”).

In the final part (Part Four: “Practicing Friendship”) Ellithorpe writes about the relationship of friendship with community. She provides an overview of the benefits of friendship at all levels: that between friends (seen as a more private sphere of friendship) to that within families and whanau, to faith communities and within academia, where a “rich theology of friendship has the potential to profoundly shape the imagination” (205). Ellithorpe writes about “ideals of friendship” which includes “an ideal of holistic private-public Spirit-shaped friendships that overflow into civic friendship, reform, and resistance to oppression” (197–98, italics original). Much of the intention of this book is captured in that phrase.

Ellithorpe writes in a compressed, often summative style. This means that the reader is often left to draw out the implications and further reflect on what is written. In fact, she specifically invites this of the reader in each chapter. This means that it is a book that can form the basis for further exploration. Indeed each chapter can stand on its own: and each concludes not only with endnotes, but a list of references specific to the chapter. Her penultimate chapter reads in places almost like the recommendations of a report. There are sentences such as: “Faith communities can advocate for economic systems, health care, and legal practices that promote justice and friendship” (205); “Imagining ‘resistance that develops community’ is an important yet neglected aspect of theological education” (206). Much of the how is left to the reader. Read and reflect.

Derek Tovey is the book review editor for Stimulus.