ia Verhoeff: John Chrysostom on Friendship with God

In John Chrysostom’s homiletical discourses, he employs a wealth of analogies, images, and metaphors in order to sketch a vivid image of the Christian life, both individual and communal. A prominent image he uses is that of “friendship,” and this paper will explore the meaning of friendship with God in Chrysostom’s sermons.

In late antiquity, the notion of friendship with God was virtually unheard-of outside of Christian contexts, and even in Christian circles, the entrenched concept of God’s transcendence inhibited a robust theology of friendship with God. However, Chrysostom’s theological understanding of synkatabasis (divine condescension exhibited most dramatically in the incarnation) is a hermeneutical key permeating all his works (cf. Rylaarsdam, 2000), and this key allows him to explore ideas that are (to the ancient world) remarkable, such as God himself pursuing the friendship of human beings and believers entering into friendship with God by making him their debtor.   

This paper will seek to elucidate this concept of friendship with God in Chrysostom’s works by sketching the complex blending of rhetoric and theological content. Sherwin (2004) has shown that Chrysostom employed “the analogy of friendship with God as part of his attempt to establish a new form of patronage in the Christian community” (388). I will argue that Chrysostom’s concept of friendship with God is not merely opportunistic (seeking to co-opt the classical notion of patronage for Christian purposes), but that for Chrysostom, friendship with God is closely connected to divine filiation and thus to the heart of his soteriology. By presenting friendship with God as an indication of divine-human communion, as the sharing of the believer in the divine life, Chrysostom even exhibits a surprisingly rich soteriology of deification.