How Does God Say “I Love You”?

This interview appears in the Law & Gospel issue of The Mockingbird, now available for preorder here.

“God speaks and acts so that we are interpreted by scripture. It is less true that we read the Bible; it is truer that the Bible reads us.”

So says Jonathan “Jono” Linebaugh at the start of his new book The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. Due out August 2025, the book’s central argument is that God’s word does two things: it honestly unveils and mercifully overcomes human weakness. Like much of Jono’s work, there’s a sensitivity to human suffering, matched by a rigorous investigation of Scripture, that together explore and announce the divine grace that compassionately meets us in our need.

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The Well That Washes What It Shows is Jono’s third single-authored book. His earlier books, The Word of the Cross (2022) and God, Grace, and Righteousness (2013) are scholarly explorations of the theology, contexts, and history of interpreting Paul’s letters, emphasizing especially the incongruous nature of grace — what Jono calls “the merciful surprise” that is the gospel. He has also authored dozens of academic articles and edited three celebrated anthologies: The New Perspective on Grace (2023), God’s Two Words (2018), and Reformation Readings of Paul (2015).

With a PhD from Durham University, Jonathan A. Linebaugh was, until 2022, a professor of New Testament at Cambridge University and a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Ordained in the Episcopal Church since 2008, he now serves as Anglican Chair of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Christian Theology at the Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham (USA this time), where he lives with his wife, Megan, and three children: Liam, Callie, and Anna.

— Interview by CJ Green.

Mockingbird: With the law/gospel distinction, are there any common misconceptions that you would like to take this opportunity to set straight?

Jonathan A. Linebaugh: Yes! The distinction between the law and the gospel is, at bedrock, a description of what God does through God’s word, and therefore also what God’s human creatures experience as they are addressed by God, who moves them from fear and hiding to honesty and hope. It’s inaccurate to construe this distinction as first or fundamentally something we do as interpreters of God’s word and/or something we are in control of as ministers of God’s word.

We might think the distinction between law and gospel invites an indexing approach to scripture in which we read and label each passage as either law or gospel. One version of this misunderstanding is to correlate the distinction between law and gospel with the Old and New Testaments. But as Philip Melanchthon put it, “The gospel is scattered, and the promises are sprinkled throughout all the books of both the Old and New Testaments.” And similarly, the “law is also scattered in all the books of both the Old and New Testaments.”

Or, as ministers, we might think the intention of our words is sufficient to determine their effect (and also forget to listen to the perhaps unspoken but still heard “I’ll love you if” operative in hurting human hearts).

Both of these are inversions of the distinction between law and gospel, because they focus on the activity of the creature rather than God — who creates, diagnoses, and redeems by speaking. Hebrews 4 says, “The word of God is living and active,” a reminder that, as Melanchthon says, law and gospel name two “words of God” (verba dei) and also describe two “works of God” (opera dei).

A common confusion, in other words, is assuming God’s word is dead and needs our interpretive action to revive it. It is, rather, we who are “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2), and it is God who speaks and acts at the grave: a word that diagnoses the dead and seals the tomb; a word that gives the risen Jesus and so rolls away the stone.

It is one thing, therefore, to identify what these words — law and gospel — say. (The law describes reality that runs with the grain of what God created and calls good. The gospel tells the story of Jesus and makes a promise to those Jesus lived, died, and rose for.) It is also necessary, however, to describe what these words do. Scripture witnesses to the double-work of the divine word. 1 Samuel 2: “the Lord kills and makes alive, the Lord brings down to Sheol and the Lord lifts up.” Romans 11:32: “God has imprisoned all in disobedience in order to have mercy on all.” It is God who is acting: a word that unearths human wrong, weakness, and woundedness so that another word — the gospel — might speak mercy, forgiveness, and freedom. The gospel is not only about Jesus. The gospel gives Jesus at the site of concrete and actual need, and thereby redeems, resurrects, and forever loves.

To put the emphasis on God’s word and God’s work — to insist with Luther that “only the Holy Spirit can practice this art” — is not to exclude the human person from this encounter. The human is a hearer, one who is addressed by God and who undergoes this divine word of diagnosis and deliverance. That too can be described as a concrete experience and a pattern of emotion: from the disquieting experience of honestly confronting the need we often feel but are too afraid to face, to the unburdened, liberated, peaceful, and surprising experience of being understood and loved in, and also forgiven and set free from, our patterns of bondage and fear.

M: This all feels very related to your upcoming book, The Well That Washes What It Shows. What inspired that book? What do you hope people take from it?

JAL: The seed of this book was a series of lectures I gave for Olympic athletes who were training to be Olympic chaplains. That means questions of ministry orient the approach, and the audience includes those without previous theological education.

The title comes from a poem by George Herbert called “The Holy Scriptures I.” That poem includes a line that serves as a sort of thesis for the book: Holy Scripture is a “well” that does two things — it “washes what it shows.”

This book is very much an introduction and invitation to the Bible. As I explore the subject matter and structure of scripture, I also attempt to trace the ways that, from Genesis to Revelation, God’s word is shaped by a twofold pattern. God is unearthing, surfacing, naming, and knowing honest human need — scripture shows. Because human history and life are often defined by denying, burying, or distracting ourselves from our need, this diagnostic work is a divine love that speaks louder than our illusions and pretenses and lands at the bedrock — that place where the human cry is given honest voice: “Who will deliver me?”

But the word that shows our need is also the word that loves us in and overcomes our need. The answer to the anguished “Who will deliver me?” is the merciful surprise of grace: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord… There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” This is the well that washes, the word that gives the crucified and risen Jesus and thereby does the divine work that raises the dead, forgives the sinner, and finally says to the fearful and lonely, “You are my beloved child.”

Alex Webb, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2003. Fuji Crystal Archive print, 30 × 40 in.

M: That’s so beautiful. You mentioned George Herbert — I’ve also seen a lot of Thornton Wilder references in your work. Tell us about some of your non-theological guiding lights.

JAL: In finalizing the bibliography for this book, I noticed something I suppose I’ve long known: I don’t recognize a distinction between theological and non-theological authors. The index has a lot of Luther, Augustine, and Julian of Norwich, for example, but just about as much W. H. Auden, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Pindar, George Herbert, and Thornton Wilder (especially The Alcestiad) — not to mention Madonna and Dylan.

Those voices almost force their way into my writing because of the way they address the realities of human living, yet somehow hold that honesty within an even more basic reality of hope.

There’s a moment in George Eliot’s novella, Janet’s Repentance, where Janet, a character in a time of acute, exposed need, gives voice to a perennial human cry: “Can you give me any comfort — any hope?” This kind of question lives right at the bedrock. And miraculously, in that story, Eliot finds a way to answer that question with an emotionally plausible and resonant “yes.”

Or W. H. Auden, in a poem called The Sea and the Mirror, after unmasking the performing and acting that makes up so much of human life, finally says, “It is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in that perfected Work that is not ours.” It’s in the place of honest and unveiled need — among the ruins and the bones — where we rejoice, because God empties the grave.

Art that does what Nietzsche felt Greek tragedy did — art that is a “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed” — art that does that, it seems, often (or always) is shaped by this pattern: meeting pain and need with a hope that only holds because “love is as strong as death” — or stronger, as this love died, and behold he lives (Song. 8:6 and Rev. 1:18).

M: You mentioned one of Wilder’s lesser-known plays, The Alcestiad. Can you tell us how that connects to these themes?

JAL: Thought you’d never ask! It’s a retelling of what in the classical Greek period was a beloved myth, the story of Alcestis, who willingly dies so her husband King Admetus can live. (Euripides’ Alcestis is the most famous telling from fifth century Athens, but it also appears in Plato’s Symposium, for instance.) In the 20th century, Thornton Wilder wrote a three-act play that reworks the tragedy. As he said, his version, was “a comedy about the extreme difficulty of any dialogue between heaven and earth.” Apollo loves Alcestis, but as a herdsman asks at one point, “How would [the gods] speak to us…when there is so great a gulf between the lovers.” The play explores “how Apollo searched for a language” and “how Alcestis, through many a blunder, learned how to listen.” That, it seems to me, is right at the core of the theme we’re discussing: How does God say I love you?

In the play, this language takes on a whole life: self-giving love, a defeat of death, and what Wilder describes as “the thousands of days and world of cares.” But the “I love” finally gets to the “you.” And isn’t that what’s often so hard and yet so urgently needed?

A deep part of the puzzle of human living is that our desire to be understood and loved is often buried under a fear that if we were seen, the other wouldn’t and couldn’t, looking right at me, say “I love you.” Life is often a cruel combination of “sighing to be approved” (George Herbert) and yet living among others as what Taylor Caldwell calls “sealed vessels” (The Listener). Trapped in this habit of hiding — of shame and secret-keeping — any “I love you” feels like it comes with a footnote: The “you” that is loved is not actually you, but only what Thornton Wilder describes as our poses and “postures before a mirror”: the image we show the world while under the surface hides a lonely, longing, yet still unseen someone.

God’s love is a for-us-as-we-actually-are kind of love. This is one significant implication of God speaking, of the word becoming flesh, of that enfleshed word being promised in bread and wine and water: embodied love that makes contact with actual humans. This love also makes contact with real rather than ideal people through the diagnostic word that unmasks us, that finds us in our hiding, that speaks louder than our lies. To quote Wilder again, he says that what we are gesturing towards when we say art is “true” is that when a painting or poem or song or sculpture encounters us we find ourselves saying, “Oh, that’s the way it really is.” God’s need-unveiling, honesty-evoking love is like that. It reveals what really is. It digs deeper than our denial and reveals that God has “searched me and known me” (Ps. 139), that before this God “all hearts are open, all desires are known, and no secrets are hid” (Collect for Purity). And here — where and when “you” can only mean “you” — the gospel gives the one who “loved me and gave himself for me.”

Thinking with The Alcestiad, you might say that the distinction between law and gospel describes the language God speaks so that those God loves can hear, receive, and experience that love. God unearths our honest need, and so says, “I know you.” And to “you” — with no footnotes — God speaks his first, fundamental, and final word: “I love you.”

M: I was really struck by a line you quote in God’s Two Words. It’s from Theodore Beza: “Ignorance of this distinction between law and gospel is one of the principal sources of the abuse which corrupted and still corrupts Christianity.” Do you see law and gospel as a matter of urgency in this way, for the church?

JAL: Theodore Beza is an interesting case. He was in Geneva where John Calvin was, and so he speaks from within the Reformed tradition. This is an important reminder that the distinction between law and gospel is not a Lutheran idiosyncrasy; it’s the common inheritance of the churches of the Reformation.

Beza’s claim is that if we don’t make this distinction, what results is theological and pastoral confusion. Both Luther and Calvin say similar things. For Luther, the “ruler and judge” of doctrine is that we are made righteous not by works of law, but only by the gift of Christ. For Calvin, this same doctrine functions as a “hinge” in theology. The essential point here is that, as the theologian Robert Jenson put it, the mission of the church is to speak the gospel. That requires some criterion by which to identify and say no to not-gospels, and also to pick out and proclaim the one and only gospel of Jesus Christ. The distinction between law and gospel is sourced from a crisis and confusion of this kind — Paul’s letter to the Galatians — and also serves the speaking of the gospel by proposing a criterion to avoid this confusion: do not condition the gift of Christ by any performance, pedigree, or potential; rather, give Jesus as an unconditioned gift to the captives he came to set free.

Beza’s claim also points beyond doctrinal clarity; it indicates the pastoral significance of this distinction. In his larger Galatians commentary, Luther says the distinction between law and gospel isn’t only a matter of words but also something that needs to be learned in experience. At the level of words, he says, this “distinction is easy to speak of,” but “at the level of experience” — when we are suffering, aware of sin, or near death — this distinction is the hardest art, as the human heart has the “unhappy habit” of assuming the value of and the verdict on our life is determined by our pedigree or performance, by what we have done and left undone. The only hope stronger than this habit is the promise that proclaims and gives Jesus, who while we were still sinners loved and died for us (see Rom. 5:6-8). To the question of our being loved, the answer is not our biography but rather, “Behold: the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Illustration by Aubrey Swanson Dockery.

M: You mentioned that the law/gospel distinction is not an exclusively Lutheran inheritance. Can you talk a little bit about where we might see this distinction outside of Luther, maybe even preceding the Reformation?

JAL: There are two threads to this history. There is precedence for this distinction, but at the same time, Luther said an awareness of this distinction was the one thing he lacked. There was a tendency in late medieval theology to relate law and gospel as old to new and as imperfect to perfect. Educated in this tradition, Luther remembered that he “made no distinction between the law and the gospel. I regarded both as one thing and said that there was no difference between Christ and Moses except time and perfection.” For Luther, the move from “no distinction” to discovering that “the law is one thing and the gospel is another” was decisive.

On the other side of this discovery, Luther sounds different. Instead of speaking only of the difference between the old, imperfect law and the new, perfect law, Luther now speaks of a sermon that is shaped by a distinction:

This is the sermon which we should daily study … In it both imprisonment and redemption, sin and forgiveness, wrath and grace, death and life are shown to us… The first thing about sin and death is taught us by the law, the second about redemption, righteousness and life by the gospel of Christ. One must preach both. One must preach the law so that people come to a knowledge of their sins… One should preach the gospel so that one comes to know Christ and his benefits.

The story of how Luther came to this, however, includes encounters with similar patterns deep in the theological tradition. One crucial moment occurred in 1515. Luther had finished lecturing on the Psalms and turned to lecture on Romans; at the same time he began an extensive study of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings. Augustine can, at times, sound similar to Luther, emphasizing the way God’s law reveals sin and so points to Jesus: “The usefulness of the law lies in convicting human beings of their infirmity and moving them to call upon the remedy of grace which is in Christ.” Augustine also distinguished between, in his terms, law and grace, to indicate that while the law “makes us know what we should do,” it is grace “that moves us to action”: “This grace not only makes us know what we should do, but also makes us do what we know.”

On the one hand, then, there is precedence for an analogous if not always identical pattern of distinguishing law and gospel (or grace). On the other hand, it is precisely this distinction that Luther said he lacked as an heir of the late medieval tradition.

M: Jono, you’re obviously a very fun, lively person, but academic theology may not necessarily call to mind “fun,” for certain people at least. What attracted you to this field?

JAL: I’ve never stopped being the kid who wants to play with his friends: surfing, rock climbing, and of course … research! I’m with W.H. Auden here: engaging art and language, reading (and so also research) are “our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” Being an “academic” just means my friends include our ancestors, and so my “job” is to learn from, to weep and laugh and play with, my friends — mostly long dead, but still a ton of fun.

As to how I found myself having this kind of fun: My question was and is Janet’s question from the George Eliot novel I mentioned: Is there — actually and for me — any comfort, any hope?

Holy Scripture and the long history of Christian theology became, during my university years, a sustained and exciting way to explore the pain and confusion of human living and the hope that holds even when life and death are fully faced.

As my reading and my honest asking came together, it was first and most powerfully the letters of Paul and the theologians and ministers of the 16th century Reformation that helped me make sense of human existence and expressed in ways I could hear what the Book of Common Prayer calls “the comfortable words.” Luther wrote in 1518 that he was “investigating truth for the consolation of troubled consciences.”

What I can say is: his words consoled me. Thomas Cranmer, a reformer in England in the 16th century, wrote, “The commandments of God lay our faults before our eyes… The gracious and benign promises of God by the mediation of Christ sheweth us, (and that to our great relief and comfort)…that we have the forgiveness of our sins, [are] reconciled to God, and [are] accepted.” What I can say is: his words communicated those “gracious and benign promises” to me, and they were and are a “great relief and comfort” for me.

M: Tonally your writing is very different from what one encounters in a lot of other theologies — it’s readable, vibrant and, at times, pastoral. I imagine that’s intentional.

JAL: It’s both intentional and, given the bit of autobiography I just shared, almost inevitable. My research has never felt academic or scholarly instead of personal and pastoral. Rather, research and writing have been a form of asking my honest questions.

This is probably evident in the focus of some of my studies. My earliest academic question was why the gospel is both good and news. I did comparative research into Paul’s theology, placing Paul’s letters in conversation with his near contemporaries. The hope was to situate Paul within his contexts, in part to understand how he was similar, but especially to explore how and why he stands out. I wanted to hear the surprise of grace, the scandal of the cross. I was after what made the gospel news. But along with that I also asked why this news was good: what made it mercy and grace, freedom and hope, life and love. For Paul — and for many of his readers over two millennia (which is my other main area of research) — the gospel is news and good because it announces a merciful surprise: God’s love looks like this, that while we were sinners Christ died for us; and this love, well, not even the past or the powers or life or death can separate us from this love that God has for us in Christ Jesus (Rom 5 and 8).