Published by Baker Academic on April 21, 2026
Genres: Academic, Non-Fiction, Theology
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Friendship has the capacity to elevate our lives and make us better people. It plays an important role in our moral development, spiritual growth, and personal flourishing. This is true of friendship between humans, and it is also true of friendship with God in Christ. What did friendship with Christ mean for Christians in ages past, and what can it mean for us today?
In Friendship with Christ, John Vissers offers a robust biblical, historical, and theological study of friendship with God in Christ. Rooted in the "friendship teaching" of John 15, this book draws on the threefold office of Christ as prophet, priest, and king to develop a theology of divine friendship against the backdrop of the biblical record and historical tradition. Friendship with Christ, Vissers argues, is a theological truth and experience that continues to provide consolation and hope in a secular age and a suffering world.
With a foreword by Hans Boersma, this book shows that friendship with Christ has been central to the experience of the providential love of God throughout the church's history and that it still matters today. Friendship with Christ will appeal to professors and students of theology, Christology, and spiritual formation, as well as to pastors and church leaders.
The idea of friendship with Christ is often been relegated to the realm of feel-good worship music and colloquial, folksy sermons. God as your buddy or your pal has—in more “intellectual” academic circles been sort of looked down upon as an improper view that doesn’t take into consideration God’s holiness, otherness, or ineffability. If God is viewed in terms of human relationships, it’s the term “Father” that becomes the theological focus. Friendship with Christ makes us feel too familiar, too equal with Jesus—who is our prophet, priest, and king.
Dr. John A. Vissers is here to dispel all those notions. In Friendship with Christ: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Account, he carefully and methodically traces a thorough history and theology of friendship with the Divine. That term “Christ” is important. This is not mere friendship with Jesus—the Palestinian Jewish teacher—but a friendship with Jesus the Christ, the Savior and Messiah of Israel. Most evaluations of friendship in connection to Jesus focus on his humanness, but Vissers argues that our friendship with Jesus is integral to understanding and responding to Jesus as the divine Christ.
Friendship with Christ begins with a chapter called The Biblical Doctrine of Friendship with Christ. This is a decent chapter, but I found the title to be a bit of a misnomer. Vissers spends half of his time focused not on the Bible but on Greco-Roman writings. It does provide a bit of context and comparison/contrast to the biblical teaching, but the end result is that there really isn’t too much explication of the biblical teaching. The second chapter covers a history of friendship with Christ in early Christian thinking. Here, Vissers basically gives a series of sections, each dedicated to cataloguing major Christian thinkers’ writings on the subject. Vissers lets the ancient authors speak for themselves, making it a valuable resource and research tool, but I would have liked to have seen a bit more engagement with their thinking.
All of this is really just setup to the meat of the book, which is a focus on friendship with Christ through the lens of the threefold office of prophet, priest, and king. Friendship with Christ gives readers an introductory chapter on the concept, one chapter on each office, and a concluding chapter on application. The strength of these chapters is their clear and compelling argument that one can engage in relationship with Jesus as a friend even though Jesus also functions as our prophet, priest, and king.
As an aside, while it’s not a focus of or really brought up within the book, that argument also has compelling implications for clergy/parishioner relationships. If Jesus as King can still engage in friendship with his followers, how much more can clergy engage with their congregation in a way that integrates themselves into the community of faith as friends with those whom they serve? In an ecclesiastical world where clergy are often disconnected from their congregation because of their office, Friendship with Christ shows pastors a model in Jesus for friendship connection that does not denigrate the pastoral office.
Friendship with Christ is an important work that argues for friendship with Christ not from a pastoral or sociological perspective, but from a rigorous academic, intellectual, theological perspective. Friendship with Christ is integral to the Christian life. It shapes us and our response to Jesus and his leadership. It informs our day-to-day life and our over-arching theological perspectives. It breaks down some of the hierarchical barriers that humans place between themselves and God and tries to change our followership of God from one of compulsion or fear to one of friendship. It’s a needed change, particularly for the Reformed perspective that Vissers writes from and speaks toward. Christ is our friend and that means everything.