This week, I want to highlight a lesser-known collection of essays from Eberhard Bethge from 1995 on Bonhoeffer, Friendship and Resistance: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It contains a beautiful essay on Bonhoeffer's "Theology of Friendship" that I wish were more well-known and widely-circulated. That essay offers, I think, lots of fodder for the contemporary lack of dialogue in the Church towards those whom Christ has called his "friends". For Bonhoeffer, friendship was an important theological category precisely because Bonhoeffer's particular approach to friendship which emphasizes concrete, personal encounter with "the other" in community is uniquely suitable for Christians in an increasingly pluralistic, politically-polarized and techno-social world.
His theology of friendship is deeply grounded in the paradox of what God is doing in Jesus Christ. That I-Thou relationship (which he highlighted in his initial dissertation, Communio Sanctorum) becomes the analogue for Christians to relate to our neighbors, strangers and -- because both can become this -- our friends.