Theologian Kelly Kapic joins us again to talk about our new book You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News.

TRANSCRIPT

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Welcome to Jessup tank. I'm your host Mark Moore,

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and your co host, Rex Gurney.

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nd Rex. We are so privileged to have back on the show, Kelly M Capic. He's a professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he has actually taught there for 20 years, and he has a new book coming out called Your Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News.

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I think you really enjoy this podcast, I know that I personally am getting a lot out of what he has to say in that book.

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So excited to have you back on the show. This is time two. So you are definitely a friend of the show. Now your official status. We're, we're still Rex is going to be mad at me because we're still working on the t shirt friend of the show. It's only been three years since we've been trying to get the t shirt.

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But well, we have an official paid minion now. So at least that's you know, that's that's somebody

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closer. But excited, excited to have you on the show and excited to talk about your new book. You're only human how your limits reflect God's design and why that's good news. And I really appreciate it how you framed it through the idea of, of limits, because I think sometimes when we, when we talk about being human, it's we approach it more of how can we push past our limits? Right? How do we, how do we break this limit barrier? But I think you you did a really good job of kind of framing it like hey, your your limits actually show something about God and God's design and have something to teach us. So I'd love to kind of start there and and see, you know, why? Why are limits good? Right? And how do they kind of reflect God's design?

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Yeah, I mean, it's, thanks for having me again. And I'm interested in this because I think, you know, I don't think this is what we talked about last time. But some years ago, I wrote a book on suffering through our family, we went, my wife had cancer and and since 2010, has dealt and still deals with chronic pain. And so reflecting on that through a book called embodied hope, and the importance of lament, and trying to be honest, both about how hard life can be and also how good God is. And not picking between those two is a big challenge for us. But having gone through that, I actually felt ready to finally write something I've been thinking about for decades. And that's this idea of the importance of being human. Because one of the things that became clear to me or even more clear, is that part of the reason we so struggled to understand lament and suffering in a in a holistic and more faithful way, is because we struggle to think about being human in faithful ways. And in particular, I think we confuse finitude and sin all the time. And I know finitude isn't a word a lot of people use, it sounds, you know, philosophical or abstract. Or they think of death. And it doesn't, it doesn't have to mean death. finitude, just as its basic meaning just means limited in, in space, time, knowledge, power, right, those kinds of limits. And once you put it that way, you realize, even even if there were no sin in this world, part of the definition of being a creature is you're here and not there. You know this and not that you can have this many relationships and not all relationships, right. And yet, I think we confuse finitude and sin all the time. So Christians constantly feel guilty for things I don't think they necessarily should. I'm a reformed theologian, if that means anything to your audience. So we're all about sin. I'm not I'm not trying to downplay sin. But having said that, I think you can go sideways. And this is January that we're recording this with everyone making new year's resolutions and stuff, which, you know, mayb