Friendship (Pastoring for Life: Theological Wisdom for Ministering Well)

Lee Austin Victor

Description

"A rare and wonderful theological book that turns something ordinary--being a friend--into an expression of God's greatness."--Jeremiah Rood, Foreword (starred review)In this vibrant theological reflection on the meaning of friendship, experienced pastor and leading Christian ethicist Victor Lee Austin argues that friendship is the medium through which God shares grace with his creatures. Mixing personal reflection and theological commentary, Austin provides a fresh reading of classical writers and biblical texts; shows how a robust theology of friendship addresses contemporary controversies in the areas of marriage, celibacy, and homosexuality; and draws on cultural examples of the desire for true friendship. Ultimately, Austin helps readers understand the strange yet real possibility of friendship with God.About the SeriesPastors are called to help people navigate the profound mysteries of being human, from birth to death and everything in between. This series, edited by leading pastoral theologian Jason Byassee, provides pastors and pastors-in-training with rich theological reflection on the various seasons that make up a human life, helping them minister with greater wisdom and joy.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 21 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493421565
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Half Title Page
Series Page

Theological Wisdom for Ministering Well Jason Byassee, Series Editor
Aging: Growing Old in Church by Will Willimon
Friendship: The Heart of Being Human by Victor Lee Austin
Recovering: From Brokenness and Addiction to Blessedness and Community by Aaron White
Other Books by Victor Lee Austin
A Priest’s Journal
Up with Authority
Priest in New York
Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed
Losing Susan
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Victor Lee Austin
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2156-5
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James (Authorized) Version of the Bible.
The Scripture quotation labeled NRSV is from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Scripture quotation labeled RSV is from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Dedication
To my friends and Friend
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Series Page iii
Title Page iv
Copyright Page v
Dedication vi
Series Preface ix
Invocation xi
Introduction: An Invitation to Friendship 1
1. The Limits of Marriage 7
2. The Confusions of Friendship 13
3. Friendship as Success at Being Human 29
4. Friendship and Beauty 39
5. The Weirdness of Divine Love 49
6. Biblical Friendships 59
7. Christian Friendship and Christian Love 75
8. Unapologetic Celibacy 93
9. Is There Friendship in the Trinity? 117
10. Examples of Friendship 125
11. All Together Now 143
Postscript: Concrete Practices 151
Credits and Acknowledgments 157
Notes 159
Scripture Index 169
Subject Index 171
Back Cover 174
Series Preface
One of the great privileges of being a pastor is that people seek out your presence in some of life’s most jarring transitions. They want to give thanks. Or cry out for help. They seek wisdom and think you may know where to find some. Above all, they long for God, even if they wouldn’t know to put it that way. I remember phone calls that came in a rush of excitement, terror, and hope. “We had our baby!” “It looks like she is going to die.” “I think I’m going to retire.” “He’s turning sixteen!” “We got our diagnosis.” Sometimes the caller didn’t know why they were calling their pastor. They just knew it was a good thing to do. They were right. I will always treasure the privilege of being in the room for some of life’s most intense moments.
And, of course, we don’t pastor only during intense times. No one can live at that decibel level all the time. We pastor in the ordinary, the mundane, the beautiful (or depressing!) day-by-day most of the time. Yet it is striking how often during those everyday moments our talk turns to the transitions of birth, death, illness, and the beginning and end of vocation. Pastors sometimes joke, or lament, that we are only ever called when people want to be “hatched, matched, or dispatched”—born or baptized, married, or eulogized. But those are moments we share with all humanity, and they are good moments in which to do gospel work. As an American, it feels perfectly natural to ask a couple how they met. But a South African friend told me he feels this is exceedingly intrusive! What I am really asking is how someone met God as they met the person to whom they have made lifelong promises. I am asking about transition and encounter—the tender places where the God of cross and resurrection meets us. And I am thinking about how to bear witness amid the transitions that are our lives. Pastors are the ones who get phone calls at these moments and have the joy, burden, or just plain old workaday job of showing up with oil for anointing, with prayers, to be a sign of the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing goodness in all of our lives.
I am so proud of this series of books. The authors are remarkable, the scholarship first-rate, the prose readable—even elegant—the claims made ambitious and then well defended. I am especially pleased because so often in the church we play small ball. We argue with one another over intramural matters while the world around us struggles, burns, ignores, or otherwise proceeds on its way. The problem is that the gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t just for the renewal of the church. It’s for the renewal of the cosmos—everything God bothered to create in the first place. God’s gifts are not for God’s people. They are through God’s people, for everybody else. These authors write with wisdom, precision, insight, grace, and good humor. I so love the books that have resulted. May God use them to bring glory to God’s name, grace to God’s children, renewal to the church, and blessings to the world that God so loves and is dying to save.
Jason Byassee
Invocation
Many pastoral situations involve change: a new life or a life passing away; the arrival of a new love or the loss of love; the launch of a new job and career or the dwindling of powers and opportunities, being laid off, laid aside, passed over. As the Preacher said, “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; . . . a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing” (Eccles. 3:2–5). Wisdom recognizes that human life is full of transitions.
What remains constant? What endures?
This book about friendship is about something that lasts. You can lose your job, but that need not make you less human. You can lose your spouse, your bank account, your country, your digital identity, your health. None of these losses need diminish your humanity. Because through every transition of life, friendship is the heart of who you are.
Friendship is why we exist in the first place. Friendship is also our final end in the kingdom of God. Out of friendship God has made us, for friendship he has died for us, to friendship he ever draws us.
Let us pray. Dear Lord Jesus, only Son of the Father, we entrust unto thee all who read this book, that thy Holy Spirit would preserve in their heart whatever is true herein and drive from remembrance anything that may be false. In every transition of our life, we, children of dust, place our trust in thee: our never-failing, ever-merciful, tender, and firm to the end Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend . 1
Introduction
An Invitation to Friendship
The Background to This Book: The Death of Susan
Susan and I had married right after college, in a traditional Episcopal Church ceremony of “holy matrimony,” promising therein to have and to hold in sickness and in health “till death us do part.” I had loved her from the first time I heard her talk, which was in a Bible study at the decidedly secular St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was fifteen years into our marriage when her brain tumor was found. The medical professionals successfully treated it—first with surgery and then, when the biopsy showed that her astrocytoma had a mid-grade malignancy, with radiation and chemotherapy. Her cancer never returned. But the treatments weakened her brain in ways that, although slow to manifest themselves, proved inexorable. She needed more sleep; she lost the capacity to initiate tasks and carry them through; she grew quieter as she found it harder to locate the words she wanted to say. These were some of the manifestations of her brain disease, which, although it took nineteen years, in the end took her life.
I had longed for Susan to love me and for me to be able to love her. In giving her to me, God, true to his promise, had given me what I most desired. So does one read in, for instance, Psalm 37:4, “Take delight in the L ORD , and he shall give you your heart’s desire.” 1 Yet I believe it is necessary to say that God also took my heart’s desire away. I don’t mean that at a particular moment (a Monday in late Advent, about 9 a.m. eastern standard time) God looked down from his seat in a distant heavenly abode and said, “I’m going to take Susan away from Victor and bring her home to me.” Such a view of God is crude and nonsensical. God is not in any place. And he is not in time. Which is to say, he is not an actor within the universe. God is not like the president of the United States, who could indeed say that he is going to remove his ambassador from Austria and bring her home to Washington. He is not like the CEO of IBM, who could say that she is going to close down operations in Houston and lay off workers there and leave them to their own devices to find other jobs. (Dear readers in Houston, this is a hypothetical. I write these words having no idea whether IBM has ever had operations in your fair city.) And God is not like the head honcho of a smuggling operation, who could decide that a particular individual is no longer of use but unfortunately knows too much to remain at large and therefore must be terminated.
No, God did not take Susan away in a fashion comparable to any possible action of an in-the-world actor. Rather, it is as the one responsible for the world being a world in the first place that he took her away. The world that exists—the world that God is responsible for—is, as Antoine