It might be protested that the references to friendship as such in the scriptures are few, especially in the NT. The ecclesio-relational metaphors that are most prominent are organic or filial ones – the Vine, the Body, the Brotherhood. This certainly helps protect the church from becoming a community of people I like, or of people like me: in that friends are typically freely chosen for friendship, whereas ecclesial relationships are established on an entirely different basis – namely by the choice of God.
On the other hand, the church is not a biological entity either, in the sense that it is not composed only of people who have a particular genetic or racial identity in common. The NRSV’s decision to render the Greek 'adelfoi' as ‘friends’ rather than ‘brethren’ would completely change the grammar of ecclesial relationships (if accepted). What is perhaps most overlooked in this discussion is that material in the NT which is actually most relevant – the actual ecclesial experience of Paul and the others that we glimpse in the greetings and farewells of the epistles (e.g. Phil 4:1; Romans 16). Here we see that there is apparently a genuine and heartfelt experience of ‘friendship’, touchingly and lovingly recorded in these incidentals. These are those who Paul addresses 'agapetai', 'dearly loved ones' (2 Cor 12:19). But this of course is given to us alongside the experience of a painful enmity, too, from within the ecclesial sphere. The apostle does not always count his enmity as outside the church and his experience of friendship as inside. Rather, he actually encounters both in the present reality of church. There is a reminder in this that Judas was one of the Twelve; and that opposition to and treachery against Jesus came from within the small band of apostles who were with him from the very start.
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