Iron Sharpens Iron

The modern world, with its emphasis on speed and busyness and the mis-named "social" media, has not been an especially welcoming place to develop long-lasting, solid friendships that help to nurture the heart.

Providing exemplars and guidance in this challenging situation, this book on friendship looks at some of the details of the friendships of the eighteenth-century pastor-theologian Andrew Fuller to help us think about and engage in meaningful relationships that provide joy and comfort (in the older sense of that term as "strength") for the Christian journey.

This is an ideal study for anyone desirous of being a better friend, as well as for those interested in knowing something of the history of Christian friendship.

1. Opening Credits
2. Epigraph
3. Dedication
4. Introduction
5. Chapter 1: Friendship in the West | From Antiquity to the Age of Reason
6. Chapter 2: Who Were Andrew Fuller and John Ryland?
7. Chapter 3: To “Take Sweet Counsel Together”| The Friendship of John Newton and John Ryland
8. Chapter 4: We Must … Be Together as Much as Possible” |The Friendship of Andrew Fuller and Thomas Steevens
9. Excursus: A “Once Intimate Friend” | How the Friendship of Edward Sharman and Andrew Fuller Ended
10. Chapter 5: A Fountain of Sweets” | The Friendship of Andrew Fuller and John Ryland & Robert Hall’s Minidiscourse On Friendship
11. Afterword
12. Appendix: Lemuel Covell and His Letter on Christian Friendship (1801)
13. Closing Credits