Evan Tinklenberg
I.
A pastor stands in front of a crowded classroom. He’s speaking to future pastors, a group full of grand visions of what it will mean to lead God’s people in worship, preach life-changing sermons, and counsel sufferers into new joy and hope. He says the words that would ring in their ears years later:
“John Calvin went to the bathroom.”
The long pause grows uncomfortable in the room of aspiring God-talkers. The pastor continues, “Even all-night prayer meetings get interrupted by yawns, sweat, and growling stomachs.”
What this pastor was getting at is this: nobody, not even the holiest of saints, escapes the basic reality of being human. We all need to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, and exercise. We can’t try every food, or see every award-winning film, or read every important book (or even most of them). We can’t help every person, fix every problem, or know everything there is to know. And God has declared this reality “very good.” To be human is to be limited—because we are not God. Our first parents got hungry before they ate from the tree.
In You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News,1 Kelly Kapic has written a book meditating at length on the goodness of our finite humanity. Let me come right out and say it: this is a book that I needed to read. And there’s a good chance that you do, too.
II.
Kapic begins the book with a chapter raising the question that is the seedbed for the rest of the book: is our finitude a result of sin or simply the reality of creatureliness? As the book’s subtitle suggests, Kapic takes the latter course. He argues that we must not only come to terms with our limits but come to “praise God for our limits” (11).2 This highlights the way in which this book is challenging—not so much for its logic or its prose (both of which are clear) but by virtue of the very subject it addresses.
As Kapic establishes in this chapter, recognition and enjoyment of our finitude is an extraordinarily rare disposition for people in the modern West. Nearly every cultural product with which we interact daily pushes us toward thinking of ourselves as beings whose limits are an obstacle to be overcome, not a gift to be received. Kapic draws a careful distinction between limits themselves, which are God’s good design, and our resistance to those limits, which is the result of (and motivation for) sin. As he puts it, we don’t need to ask for forgiveness for not being able to do everything; “we need to ask forgiveness for ever imagining we could” (14).
From this point, having let readers feel the force of this opposing posture toward human limitation, Kapic roots his discussion of human createdness firstly in the love of God for particular persons. Rightly recognizing our tendency to abstract this notion from our own lives, Kapic dwells intentionally on the very specific affection God has for each of his creatures. Lingering on the apostle Paul’s words in Gal 2:20, he underscores the intensely personal nature of those words, with their repeated first-person singular pronouns I and me:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
This brings Kapic to clarify a point of Reformed soteriology that is easily missed: “The you that Christ lives in is still you. He does not obliterate, deform, or deaden you” (33). Talk of the Father seeing Christ instead of the believer when his or her sins are covered obscures this and risks treating human persons for whom Christ died as by nature unloveable, needing to be disguised in order to receive the love of God the Father. Kapic opposes this formulation, firmly insisting that God in Christ loves persons in their particularity (though not isolated from the whole body, as he demonstrates in chapter 9).
Kapic then dwells on two Christological or, rather, incarnational motives for appreciating our finitude as a good gift. Chapter 3 centers on the goodness of embodiment per se, while chapter 4 further considers embodiment more concretely, as necessary for relationship and worship. As Kapic argues, the divine Son did not despise his incarnate self or the bodies of those with whom he interacted, and neither may we denigrate physicality as less real or less significant than spirituality. Moreover, our spirituality is necessarily expressed through our physicality: the synapses in our brain don’t stop firing when we pray or meditate, and we trust that our circulatory system won’t shut down in the midst of spiritual fervor. These chapters reject the popular distinction “I am a soul, and I have a body,” which also allows for a poignant discussion in chapter 4 of the betrayal of the goodness of touch in acts of physical and sexual abuse.
Having touched on what being an embodied creature means for our identity, Kapic turns in chapter 5 to consider in greater depth the question of identity construction and how that is changed in light of our creaturely limitations. The simple fact of our belly button reveals that the modern ideal of the self-made woman or man is folly. Kapic does well to show his readers that what is necessary to enjoy—not merely tolerate—our created finitude is no less than to give up trying to figure ourselves out or construct our own identities and instead to receive from God the gift of existence as such. We are freed from the unbearable pressure to establish an identity and live a meaningful life on its basis, and we are freed to live as Christ’s own, a fact which carries with it sturdy anchors for our identity and a wealth of meaning we could never exhaust.
After this, the book turns to various aspects of our finite humanity that are illuminated in the light of this different perspective. Part 1 (chapters 1–5) sketched the contours of particularity and limits, while Part 2 (chapters 6–10) begins to reflect on what those contours mean for several aspects of the Christian life. The nature of humility, our relationship to time, our understanding of sanctification, our need for the church, and our spiritual practices are all implicated in the task of recognizing the necessary limitations of being human. If we are finite, embodied creatures who don’t construct our own identities, then of course we need each other. These chapters therefore look at helping us establish healthy interdependence with other followers of Jesus (a point not insignificant in our highly individualistic culture), rooted in our ultimate dependence on our Creator and Redeemer.
III.
Kapic strikes an irenic tone that is well-suited to his topic, and as a result, You’re Only Human reads like a pastoral letter. Like a faithful pastor, Kapic writes to ease the consciences of the innocent, to quiet the hearts of the anxious, and to give a defense to the skeptics. He remains sensitive and compassionate throughout, and in moments of frankness or even indignation the reader will have a sense of his pastoral concern for his audience. Kapic does not lose sight of that audience as he presents his arguments—everything from the chapter headings (e.g., chapter 1: Have I Done Enough? and chapter 2: Does God Love…Me?) to the caveats he offers to various readers demonstrates this fact. Kapic raises questions that often accompany the issues addressed in this book—what impact trauma has on the goodness of physical touch, how to distinguish faithful humility from unhealthy low self-esteem, and many more—and carefully and graciously responds to them. The book has a word for every burnt-out or exhausted Christian, and one would be hard-pressed to read it and not feel as though the author has gone out of his way to care for his readers.
That is not to say that Kapic retreats from saying difficult things. He refuses glib answers to the question of finitude, and he gets at the core of our questions and anxieties, diagnosing several symptoms of the basic issue of our discomfort with finitude. Kapic addresses them all directly: we don’t like that we have bodies; we distrust others’ physical presence; we prefer to imagine that we are self-created; we don’t find ourselves loveable in our particularity; we find humility impossibly challenging; we expect unlimited productive hours each day. This leads to a work whose cumulative effect is a well-balanced mixture of grace and truth.
You’re Only Human is a rich feast for pastors, scholars, and laypersons alike. Kapic is skilled at calibrating his writing in order to reach a wide audience, and this book is no different. There are a few sections that may be difficult for lay readers, but Kapic’s experience teaching undergraduate students prevents him from wading too deep into more austere theological language. A book which exhibits such irenicism and avoids technical jargon may be thought to be shallow, but Kapic’s book is impeccably researched and will likely stretch many readers to think more deeply.
This book is not a massive tome—its roughly 250 pages sail by all too quickly—and there are undoubtedly many things Kapic could have touched on and did not. It comes as little surprise, perhaps, that a book whose main focus is to engender joyful contentment in the limitations of our present lives would not be as concerned with matters of eschatology, but this may well be the area where the book’s brevity is most acutely felt. I wish Kapic would have devoted a chapter (or even a few paragraphs) to reflections on our glorified finitude in the new heavens and new earth. Given the popularity of the view that humans slough off their humanity when they go to heaven, a word on new creation would have been a rich addition.
Similarly, Kapic does not take time to apply his thesis to what seems to me to be an obvious aspect of human life: friendship and marriage. Perhaps recognizing the potential for alienation among some readers, or simply out of concern for space, there is not much discussion of what finitude means for these relationships. But such a discussion would be eminently valuable. A commonly held belief, implicit among many Christians especially, is that the perfect spouse will “complete me” when in reality no human being is capable of bearing such an existential weight for another. In the same way, no one friend can be everything to another. This is why we need one another in community—because we can all bear one another’s burdens together. Perhaps this is an easy enough application to draw out from Kapic’s book, but together with some reflections on eschatological finitude, a word about these relationships would have made the book a one-stop shop for practical theological anthropology, exactly the resource from which the church in our day would greatly benefit.
IV.
Nevertheless, these are minor critiques in light of the magnificent achievement of this book. By giving us several years’ worth of study and reflection on our creaturely limitations, Kapic has produced a work which awakens hope in the infinite God, our good and wise Creator. His work is well-researched, even-handed, and pastoral. It is a timely book that gently yet firmly resists the modern push toward limitlessness.
I would submit that few books published in the last decade are as relevant for nearly every modern Western Christian as You’re Only Human, and fewer still are as pastorally sensitive or gracious. The book provides a much-needed reorientation of our self-understanding and calls us to be more truly who we were made to be. Any human would do well to take a week out of their allotted four thousand (give or take) and digest it.
Evan Tinklenberg (MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary) is the Director of Youth and Worship at Discovery Christian Reformed Church. He and his wife Kim live in Grand Rapids with their son Isaac and their black lab Henry. Evan blogs occasionally at constructioadsensum.blogspot.com.
Image: Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters
- Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022).[↩]
- Note: page numbers reflect those of the review copy; they may not match the published edition.[↩]