Beeson Podcast, Episode #619 Dr. Linebaugh Sept. 13, 2022 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. We are excited to introduce you to one of Beeson’s wonderful new faculty today. The day this episode airs, September 13th, is a Preview Day at Beeson. And preview days are the best way to get a taste of what Beeson is like. Our next Preview Day will be October 21st. That’s a Friday, and the first day of our first ever Preview Weekend here at Beeson. That Preview Weekend will be even better than our usual Preview Days. It will include a dinner at my home here in town, a tour of downtown Birmingham, a visit to a farmer’s market, worship at a local church, and more! We would love for you to join us. Please find out more at www.BeesonDivinity.com/previewday. All right, Kristen, would you please introduce today’s special guest? >>Kristen Padilla: Thanks, Doug. Today’s guest is Dr. Jonathan Linebaugh. As Doug just said, he is one of our newest faculty members, having recently moved to Birmingham from Cambridge, England, he is our Anglican Chair of Divinity and Director of our Institute of Anglican Studies. Dr. Linebaugh is a world renown New Testament scholar who also loves studying and reading Martin Luther. So, we’re excited to introduce him to all of you and to have him on the show for the first time today. So, welcome, Dr. Linebaugh, to the Beeson Podcast. >>Dr. Linebaugh: Thank you so much. It’s very good to be here. I’m a long time listener of the Beeson Podcast and glad to be on this side of it. I’d like to go to the Preview Day and Preview Weekend as well if that is possible. >>Doug Sweeney: Maybe you’ll be a part of that day. >>Kristen Padilla: So, come meet Dr. Linebaugh at Preview Day and Preview Weekend. Well, as we’ve already said, we want to use this opportunity to allow our listeners to get to know you better. So, why don’t you begin by telling us about yourself, your family, where you’re from, how you came to faith, and what drew you to the Anglican Church? >>Dr. Linebaugh: Well, thank you. It’s really good to be here. It’s nice to have a chance to reflect, as we’re coming to a new place, on where we’ve been. I’m married to Megan, my wife of just about 20 years, and we have three children: Liam, Callie, and Anna. My wife is from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. I’m sort of from Pennsylvania, because all of my family is. But just before my brother and I were born, my parents moved to Washington, D.C. So, I actually grew up in northern Virginia, just outside of D.C. One of my very earliest memories is actually when my family was going through some fairly hard times of my mother walking around the house singing, “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.” I can’t actually remember anything earlier than that. And I also can’t remember not believing that. I grew up in a context where that just seemed to be true. There’s been plenty of times I’ve doubted it, plenty of times I’ve compartmentalized it, but that was kind of the bedrock in my family and in my church. Trusting the promises of scripture as God’s word and those promises pointing to Jesus Christ as the friend and savior of sinners. And I took that good news with me to university. But I think what I didn’t know until I got to my college days was that I had sort of internalized an idea that the good news of the gospel, of God’s love in Jesus, was sort of how you became a Christian, or it was your entry pass into the Christian life. But once you had walked through that door of forgiveness and mercy, the real work was what the Christian does. It was less the life and death of Christ and it was more the work in the life of the Christian. It was really as I felt the burden of that, the fragility of that, that I sort of fell in love with studying scripture, studying church history, by discovering the gospel that was re-discovered and proclaimed at the protestant reformation. The good news that God’s love for sinners is also God’s love for Christians who never stop needing mercy. My journey into the Anglican tradition really coincides with that. There’s a lot of things about Anglicanism that I’ve come to love. It’s a huge and diverse 85 million plus global communion. It’s got a long history of beautiful liturgy. But what really drew me to it was the way in which in that time of asking, “Is God’s love and grace for me,” the way God’s “yes” in Jesus Christ came to me most clearly was through what Thomas Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer calls, “The Comfortable Words.” I heard those promises as promises for me. They were deepened by reading Calvin, by reading Luther, by getting to know the reformed tradition. Frankly, I never felt like I needed to choose between the Lutheran tradition and the Reformed tradition, because the Anglican tradition is one that learned from both. And so I love the Anglican tradition in its sort of original 16th century form, the way it’s grown and diversified internationally over history. But the thing that drew me to it is the thing that still keeps me there. The way it summarizes and says the good news that God, in Christ, came into the world to save sinners. Hear these comfortable words. And I certainly understand my ministry in the Anglican Communion to be to study that, to receive that, and to pass that on. >>Doug Sweeney: Dr. Linebaugh, we’re all very excited that you were willing to move from Cambridge University, one of the oldest and best universities in the world, to come and join us here at Beeson. We’ll ask you how you got to Beeson later, but for now let me ask you to help our listeners understand what’s Cambridge like? And what’s it like to be a professor at Cambridge? And maybe most importantly, how do you think God used your time at Cambridge to develop you as a Christian and a teacher? >>Dr. Linebaugh: Yeah. That’s the kind of retrospective that will probably be clearer in a couple of years. We’ve just moved about a month ago from Cambridge. But we were there seven years. Before that I had done my doctoral work there. So, we spent a total of ten years in England. And Cambridge was a very special place to be. It is, as you said, an old university. It was founded in 1209. England’s second oldest university. But the town is much older. It’s a Roman town. That’s how it got its name. The River Cam is there and there was a bridge that the Romans built across it. So, CAM-BRIDGE becomes Cambridge. And before the university came there were monasteries and houses of study. So, it’s been a place of Christian learning for 1500-1600 years. Part of what you realize when you come there, there’s lots of great resources now, but you just walk the streets really of what is the kind of medieval town at this point. And you become instantly aware that you’re not the first person to study God’s word, to minister God’s word in this place. You’re kind of surrounded, as Hebrews 11 puts it, with the cloud of witnesses. Sometimes very literally. On the outside of buildings you’ll see Thomas Cranmer standing there, or J B Lightfoot standing there who was a professor. And you remember, “Oh, 500 years ago people were doing what I was doing now.” Actually, I had this very fun office. I was a Fellow of Jesus College. There’s a strange college system in Cambridge and Thomas Cranmer, the protestant reformer in England, was a fellow and before that a student at Jesus College. When he was a student he was learning his Greek and Latin and the Grammar School where he learned his Greek and Latin actually became my office. So, as I would sit with students to teach them Greek, for example, I was sitting in the place where Thomas Cranmer learned Greek. So, there’s all these things going on all the time, which are really special. But maybe the most special thing ... and this goes to your question of sort of what we learned in the way God hopefully used our time there was we get unbelievably capable students who come to Cambridge to study. They’re very talented. They’re sharp, they’re willing to work hard. But for all sorts of historical and cultural reasons, for many of them especially the ones studying theology, they have not encountered God’s word in scripture before. So, it’s this combination of really willing to read a text closely if you ask them to and yet sometimes it’s the first time. And we do a lot of one on one teaching in the Cambridge system. There’s some lecturing, but there’s also a lot of what we call supervision or tutorial. And I would get the chance year after year to sit down with an 18 or 19 year old student, very well read, very bright, but this is the first time they ever read the gospel according to Mark. And just hear the surprise as they encounter Jesus of Nazareth for the first time. They had assumptions about who he was and what he did, but those assumptions almost always were upset by the text itself and the man they met in the text. And getting to see that again and again was beautiful. The other really nice thing is working at a university like Cambridge, you get invited to do lots of things you wouldn’t get to do otherwise. So, I got to speak to bishops and I got to serve on theological panels that the Church of England was putting together. I got invited to teach the reformation or the bible in Germany and different places, and North America. And those were doors that were opened because I was at Cambridge. I can look back gratefully. I sometimes felt like in the classroom I couldn’t always proclaim the good news as clearly as I wanted to. And yet I can see how being there, there were other times and other places where I got to proclaim the good news. To say, again, “hear these comfortable words” to quote Cranmer’s prayer book again. Because I was there, I got to do it in these other places. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, you know this, but I’ve spent about six months in Cambridge with my husband on his sabbatical and it’s a beautiful place, a wonderful place. And it’s hard to imagine leaving it, but you did. You left it to come to Beeson. So, what attracted you to Birmingham, to Beeson Divinity School, that you felt like, “I think God is calling me to this place?” >>Dr. Linebaugh: I think the way you asked the question is the right way to do it. What attracted us to Beeson? I want to be clear about that because it wasn’t that we were looking to leave Cambridge. There was almost nothing pushing us away from Cambridge. We’re originally from the US, as I said; Pennsylvania and Virginia. We missed family. But we were finding ways to navigate that and we still felt close with our families over the years. We had been there seven years. We were permanent residents. We had done the immigration thing. Our children had friends. All of the hurdles you get over when you move to a new place were in the rear view mirror. So, there was nothing at this point pushing us away from Cambridge, and frankly we’re missing it a lot. We’re missing the place, we’re missing the people. But there was something that drew us to Beeson. There was something that we came to. There’s a song by a band called The Abbott Brothers that says, “If you run, make sure you run to something and not away from.” And we didn’t feel like we were running away from, we felt like we were running to something. We were being called to a place. And that place was Beeson Divinity School. And that also meant Birmingham, Alabama. And what drew us here was a deep sense that theology, as I’ve been called to do it, and as our family has been called to kind of live it together, is not complete if all you’re doing is studying the content or the history of an idea or a biblical passage. That theology, for it to be properly Christian theology, always needs to move towards and finally get to the horizon of proclaiming the good news. And it was that disconnect between studying the content, the history, the doctrine, but not ever really being able to get to speaking it, proclaiming it, sharing it, ministering it – we just felt as a vocational gap, almost constantly. It wasn’t just me. This was very much a kind of family decision. But that’s the way the vocation was playing out in my life. I’ve often thought about this in relationship to a very early writing of Martin Luther in the reformation, it was about 1518. He wrote a little treatise called, “An Inquiry into Truth.” That sound academic. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I was employed to do at Cambridge. But then the title has a second half, which is, “And for the Consolation of Troubled Consciences.” And for Luther that was one thing. That was what it meant to do theology and minister the word. And while I felt that one half of that was happening at Cambridge, I felt that what God was calling me and my family to do was to fully participate in both halves. To make an inquiry into truth through study, through research, to receive the good news, to hear the good news, but so that we could speak it and share it with a weary and wounded world. To say again, and I’m just going to keep coming back to this phrase, “hear what comfortable words our Lord Jesus Christ says, come unto me all you who are weary, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” I just don’t think theology is fully itself if it doesn’t make it to that place of actually making the promise for you in the present tense. And that disconnect kept us a little unsettled where we were. And when Beeson became an opportunity, not just any place. I mean, specifically Beeson, which is a place that is committed to residential education in the tradition of the protestant reformation, that is evangelical but broad and comprehensive enough because it intentionally represents a diversity of denominations and protestant traditions ... when that opportunity came, it felt difficult in some ways to leave, but the most natural thing in the world – to come here and to both make an inquiry into truth and to do it for the sake and for the consolation of troubled consciences. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, we thank the Lord that he led you here, for sure. The thing we say all the time, Dr. Linebaugh, about your coming is that you’re serving as the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson. And of course that is the main thing you’re doing here at Beeson. But along with that, you’re going to direct our Institute for Anglican Studies. And I bet lots of our listeners will be interested to know what does Dr. Linebaugh think about that institute? What does Dr. Linebaugh want to do with that institute? Is he formulating some kind of a vision or a plan for the institute? So, it’s early, you just arrived, but as of today, what are you thinking about what the Institute of Anglican Studies will look like moving forward? >>Dr. Linebaugh: Yeah, it is early. One of the things I’m trying to do is learn what it has been and what it is. And that partially means talking to students about how their experience has been rich, the things that have been really beneficial and are preparing and forming them for the ministry they’re going into, and also what might be missing. Looking at the history – I’m looking at what we offer and I’m asking those kinds of questions. And one of the ways I’ve thought about this is as I’m talking to people in the Anglican Communion, whether it’s potential students, or to bishops who are thinking about where to send their people to train for ministry, or to pastors or ministers in local churches who are asking that same question – Why Beeson for someone training for Anglican ministry? I think there’s a couple of ways in which that question has to be answered and they’re all really important to me. One of them is before you even say, “Why come to Beeson as an Anglican student?” It’s just, “You should come to Beeson.” One of the reasons to come here is not just because we have an Anglican track and an Anglican institute, it’s also because you get to come to Beeson. You get to come and do residential education. Ministry in 2022 and beyond is not getting easier. It doesn’t require less depth of preparation and formation to minister. If anything, it requires more. And I think Beeson takes that seriously. Our degree is not getting easier. It’s maintaining its standards, not just because we want to be rigorously academic, but academic rigor is part of preparation for real, meaningful Christian ministry. If you come to Beeson, you’re going to learn your Greek, you’re going to learn your Hebrew. You’re going to learn your history and doctrine. And you’re going to be in a community of shared creedal evangelical confession and also diverse expression in the protestant tradition. And that’s a really meaningful context in which to prepare and be formed for ministry for anyone. It’s also a really good one for Anglican students to do. Because what Anglicanism is historically is a church that emerged at the protestant reformation. Obviously, Christianity in England predates the reformation, but as a distinct Church of England, we’re talking about a 16th century reformation reality. And it’s one that was committed to maintaining its roots and it’s kind of anchor in the canon of holy scripture. It was committed to being faithful to the summary of that biblical teaching in the tradition of the apostles and Nicene Creed. And then it had its own formularies, is what the Anglicans often say. Instead of talking about a confession, we often talk about a formulary, the kind of documents that define or determine Anglicanism. And we have three, maybe four of them, but especially three. The Book of Common Prayer, a lot of people have heard of that. We have the 39 Articles, which are the closest thing Anglicanism has to a confession of faith, and that’s really what it is. And we often have a Book of Homilies, or a series of sermons. So, Anglicans are canonically rooted, creedaly faithful, and confessional in the sense that through the prayer book we pray, through the homilies we preach, and through the 39 Articles we profess the reformation faith that we believe. But for all kinds of reasons, Anglicanism was also a pretty big tent version of Protestantism. And because of that, it’s also comprehensive. It has a clear and consistent protestant identity but one that said, “Oh, you’re a little more Lutheran, you’re a little more reformed, there’s room for you here.” And it’s interesting how that lines up with Beeson’s identity as interdenominational, in-person education, that’s evangelical, and reformational. And you think, “Wow, creedal, canonical, confessional, and comprehensive?” Beeson’s identity and historic Anglican identity really are a meaningful match. So, that’s one of the reasons Beeson makes good sense, to come here and do Anglican ministry. It’s also true though that what we do and what I hope to enrich is offer specifically Anglican formation. If you come to Beeson because we have the certificate of Anglican studies and because we have the Institute for Anglican Studies, you can come here and take some specific classes. You’re going to do history and doctrine in the Anglican tradition. You’re going to do worship in the sacraments using the prayer book and the theology and the practice of the Anglican tradition. You’re going to do a supervised ministry practicum in an Anglican context that suits the denominational background that you come from. You’re going to get to participate in Anglican lunches, where we bring in speakers; clergy, theologians, leaders from across the Anglican Communion. You’re going to have fellowship with other Anglicans. So, there’s this really deep, meaningful, specifically Anglican formation that’s happening, like you would hopefully get at an Anglican or denominational seminary. But you get that in the context of this interdenominational academically rigorous in person reformational seminary. And I just don’t think that combination can be found anywhere else. And it’s one of the reasons I was excited to come here. It’s a community I’m really excited to be a part of. And it certainly captures the vision and the spirit of the Anglicanism I hope to teach and share and worship with, with the students who come. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, I’ve been hearing from students who aren’t Anglican that they’re excited to have you in the classroom and to take classes from you. And just looking at the course schedule for the next year, you’re teaching a wide array of different courses between the fall, inter-term, and spring. The course you are offering this fall semester is called, “Reformation Theology For Preaching and Pastoral Care.” Again, I’ve heard several students talk about how they are eager to learn from you in this class. I think I know the answer to this question, just hearing all of your answers up until this point, but how is this class a reflection of your scholarship, your passions, your ministry? And what do you hope that the students walk away from with at the end of this course? >>Dr. Linebaugh: Thanks. I think on paper and with my previous job titles, for example at Cambridge I was Professor of New Testament, I specialized in the letters of Paul, you might think, “Oh, there’s not a perfect match between a class called ‘Reformation Theology For Preaching and Pastoral Care.’ And what you research and write and do.” But actually there is. I am going to get on to teaching a lot of this New Testament stuff. So, don’t worry, that’s coming, too. And that’s important to me. I get to teach a New Testament context, so Greco Roman and Jewish literature in our January term and then I’ll be doing some Greek III later in the year. So, there’s going to be plenty of New Testament as well. But one of the things I’ve been interested in really since the beginning of my academic life is the way that the protestant reformers read the New Testament and specifically the letters of Paul. So, my own writing and research the theology of the reformation has always been a part of it. But it’s always been tied to the letters of Paul in a very specific way. But as you heard from my own personal story, the way that the good news that Paul and the whole bible proclaims came to me when I was asking, “Is there any comfort? Is there any hope?” To quote a George Elliott novel. The way God’s yes and amen in Jesus came to me was by encountering the theology of the reformation. And especially in its English reformation form, through the prayer book. And I’ve thought since then, and this has been confirmed as I studied theology, but I sort of intuited at that moment that theology had to actually speak and minister and communicate the good news. That our honest questions and our open wounds had to make contact with the comfortable words, or else there had been a short circuit somewhere in the process of what we call theology. There’s a Lutheran theologian who I’ve learned a lot from named Oswald Byer and he puts it this way. He says the task of theology, but also the thing that makes it very hard and certainly the thing that makes preaching and pastoral care hard, which is where we’re trying to get in this class is that what we’re supposed to do, what we’re called to do, really the only thing we can do as ministers is speak the gospel anew without saying anything new. So, we have to say it again. We have to say it in a way that connects and compels but we have to make sure what we say actually is the gospel and not something else. And that’s really what this whole class is about. We work through the things that are built into the reformation theological tradition. Now that doesn’t just mean the 16th century and afterwards. The reformation confessions in that tradition starts with statements that holy scripture is the authoritative word of God and so we look at that. It also includes in almost all of the confessions a statement of the creeds. At least says we affirm the creeds, if not actually writing them entirely out. So, we also look at the Apostle and the Nicene Creeds. And we ask questions like, “What does the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the divinity of Christ actually mean in terms of what we can say to suffering people, to people who are feeling ashamed or alone or exhausted?” What can we actually say if this is true? And then we get into the kind of debated questions of the reformation, justification, doctrines of grace, theology of the sacraments, and we keep asking the same question. If it’s true that Jesus is risen from the dead, and in his name God forgives sins apart from our works, but because of his mercy in Christ, what does that mean for the person who calls you on Friday night and says, “Life has just gotten too hard. I can’t take it anymore.” And so it’s this constant movement and we just keep circling back around from history, doctrine, case studies of how would you preach it, how would you minister to a person. And what happens for me there is that we actually get to do theology. That’s what I would call the class. I would just call it “theology.” But I don’t think that would communicate what we’re going to do. So, we said, “Theology For Preaching and Pastoral Care.” But the heartbeat of this is to do what we’re called to do as readers of scripture, as theologians, as ministers of the word, as students preparing for ministry in churches is always to carry the gifts of God to the people of God. To receive God’s comfort in Christ. And then to pass it on. And I just think theology is what lives between those two moments. We hear the gospel, we think about it, we store it, we receive it so that we can speak it again. And when that’s happening and then happening again, and then happening again, theology is happening. So, I think this class is an exciting opportunity to at least share with the students the things that are closest to my sort of sense of vocation and passion and my beating heart. >>Doug Sweeney: Dr. Linebaugh, you have a new book hot off the press. We want our listeners to know about it. It’s entitled, “The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul,” about the epistles of Paul in the New Testament. Can you tell us just a little bit about it so we can encourage our listeners to read it? >>Dr. Linebaugh: Sure. I’m excited to have this book called, “The Word of the Cross.” And that title really maybe is the best way to introduce what I’m trying to communicate. There’s a bit of tendency in New Testament studies and certainly in the theology and reading of Paul for a while now to try to really situate Paul in his first century Jewish and Greco Roman context so that he fits there and makes sense there. There’s all kinds of ways in which that’s right. And I definitely try to do this in this book. There’s three sections. One just offers readings of passages from Paul. Another offers readings of passages from Paul in conversation with Jewish texts that were written either shortly before or about the same time. So, I’m really trying to situate Paul in that sense. And also that I look at some reformation readings of Paul by Thomas Cranmer and Martin Luther. And I do want to situate Paul within his context. But what happens when you situate Paul in his context is you also start to notice that there’s ways in which he stands out in the tradition that he stands in. And I’m trying to trace throughout this whole book that surprise of the gospel. When you read Acts you get people saying about Paul, “He’s turning the world upside down.” Or, where this line, “the word of the cross” comes from in 1 Corinthians, Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified, but that’s foolishness to the Gentiles, and it’s a stumbling block to Jews, but to us it’s the power of God.” And I’m trying to capture that surprise again. I think the way you capture it most compellingly, or at least the way I’ve heard it most compellingly in this book and tried to share it is when you realize that Paul says that in the gospel God gives Jesus as a gift. And yet the gift is given not to those who are in any sense worthy to receive it. That was the normal way gifts were given in the ancient world. You gave it to a person who in some sense was a good recipient of it. Maybe they came from a good family, maybe they had a good pedigree, maybe they were morally or athletically or academically impressive. You just made sure that there was a fit between the gift, the grace, and the person who received it. Paul turns that completely upside down. He says in Romans 5, “At the right time, while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” Or two verses later, “God demonstrated God’s love like this. While we were still sinners Christ died for us.” And it’s that amazing mismatch of mercy. That’s what I call in this book the merciful surprise. That I think takes it right to the heart of it. God gives Christ at the site of bondage, sin, and death, and through that gift he sets free, he justifies, and he makes alive. I try to trace that throughout Paul’s letters and try to see how the reformers tapped into that, and most of all I just hope that can sound again as surprising, merciful, good news for a weary world. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, listeners, you can pick up Dr. Linebaugh’s new book, “The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul,” on Amazon, or perhaps anywhere you buy books these days. Before I ask Dr. Linebaugh this last question, I just want to say if you’re listening and you’re encouraged by what Dr. Linebaugh is saying, you can always come and visit Beeson and meet him. You can come to Preview Day. I’m sure if you did a campus visit he would be glad to meet you. He will be preaching our opening convocation for the spring semester. So, this is many months in advance, but we will invite you back in January to hear him preach. So, Dr. Linebaugh, we always end these shows by asking our guests what the Lord has been teaching you these days that would be a word of encouragement to our listeners as we end the show. So, is there something specifically that you could share with us today? >>Dr. Linebaugh: As I think is probably clear, as I’m being introduced at a new place in a new position, implying that we’ve just moved, it’s been a significant move. It’s across an ocean. It’s with three children. It’s after seven years in a place. It’s a real transition. And as I said, the decision to come was on the one hand very easy and natural, vocationally and in terms of family it just felt like the right thing to do. And God gave us tremendous peace about making the decision. But it was also a hard decision sort of practically, the logistics of moving, saying goodbye to people in a place that we loved, watching our children say goodbye to their friends. All sorts of things have been difficult. But we really felt as we were leaving ... My wife is very good about sort of sensing this and not just keeping it to herself, but sensing it and then saying it to the family. That God’s promise to be with us is not just a promise to be with us right here where we are now, his promise is to be with us always even to the end of the age. His promise that there’s nowhere you can go and nothing you can do that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. It doesn’t just apply if you stay where you are. But that as we go, that promise goes with us. It goes ahead of us. It stays behind us. And it’s all around us. And with us the whole way. And my wife saw that. She sensed that. And she said it. And that has really been a kind of sustaining word of God to me and to the whole family through this process. And there’s been moments of joy and excitement, moments of sadness, and moments of frustration as belongings are delayed on a ship somewhere in the Port of Savannah. So, if anyone could unload those for us we’d really appreciate it. But through it all, with all those kinds of emotional and real life ups and downs, that promise has felt not just intellectually true, but it’s felt like life and hope and comfort. That God is with us. And even though we left somewhere what we didn’t leave, and what we couldn’t leave, and what moving has reinforced is that we never can leave – is the love that God has for us in God’s Son Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. >>Doug Sweeney: Amen. You have been listening to Dr. Jonathan Linebaugh. He is the new Anglican Chair of Divinity here at Beeson Divinity School, and Director of the Institute of Anglican Studies. He is quickly becoming a beloved member of our community. We are so excited that he’s joined the Beeson family. We look forward to more opportunities to letting you get to know all about him and his scholarship and his ministry. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for being with us at Beeson and being with us on the show today. Listeners, as always, thank you for tuning in. Please pray for the students of Beeson Divinity School. We love you and we say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.