“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”: Friendship as a Theological Approach Toward the Teaching of the Threefold Office of Christ

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe traditional teaching of the threefold office of Christ requires a dogmatic revision. This article attempts to use the friendship motif as an interpreting tool that might provide a hermeneutical key to this powerful soteriological teaching and reveal the systematic-theological potential that this teaching still holds for modern theologians. In this regard, the Johannine use of the term friendship, as it is unfolded within the Gospel according to John explicitly in the second farewell speech and implicitly in the story of the footwashing, proves to be an apt interpreting tool for the teaching of the threefold office of Christ. The friendship motif is able to shed light on all three aspects of the threefold office: 1) the prophetic aspect of the revelation of God's will in the sense of the ground of knowledge and the actual ground of friendship, 2) the royal aspect as a reinterpretation of all dominion as symbolized by the foot-washing, and 3) the priestly aspect, as illustrated by Jesus giving his life for his friends in an act of inclusive surrogacy.