Beeson podcast, Episode 471
Kelly Kapic
Nov. 19, 2019

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 in the studio with my co-host, Kristen Padilla, and today's guest, Dr. Kelly Kapic of Covenant College. We have another exciting conversation in store for you today. Let me begin by thanking you for inviting us in each week to share a conversation with a brother or sister in Christ that we pray will encourage and edify you in your walk with the Lord.
                    Please know, we pray for you before we record each episode. We are recording this conversation during our annual reformation heritage lectures, but if you're a regular listener, you are probably hearing this as we head out of town to the annual biblical conferences that many of us seminary types attend every year.
                    The Evangelical Theological Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. I will be attending those conferences this weekend, San Diego, California, along with several of my colleagues here, including Kristen Padilla.
                    If you are a listener and you plan to attend, please look for us in San Diego and say hello. We're looking forward to a wonderful week of connecting with alumni and friends, listening to academic lectures, and sharing fellowship, hopefully with some of you. Now, Kristen, would you please introduce today's guest?

Kristen Padilla:    Thank you Doug, and hello everyone. Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, and to a new episode. As Dr. Sweeney has already mentioned, Dr. Kelly Kapic is joining us for today's conversation. He is professor of theological studies at Covenant College, where he has been teaching since 2001.
                    Dr. Kapic earned a PhD in systematic and historical theology from King's College, University of London, and has written or edited 15 books including the recent Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering, which won the Christianity Today Book of the Year award in the area of theology and ethics in 2018.
                    As Dr. Sweeney has mentioned, Dr. Kapic is at Beeson Divinity School this week for our reformation heritage lectures. He also was a recent guest on the podcast on December 4th, 2018, episode 421, called The God Who Gives. We hope after today's podcast, you'll want to go back and listen to that conversation. Welcome, Dr. Kapic, to the Beeson Podcast, again.

Kelly Kapic:        Great to be here. Thank you guys for having me.

Kristen Padilla:    And the last piece in podcast conversation that you had with Dr. George, you told us a little bit about your roots, your faith journey, a little bit about your family. But for those who haven't listened to that episode yet, could you tell us about what drew you to Jesus Christ, and later to study theology?

Kelly Kapic:        Yeah, that's a great question. Let's give an abridged version, right? So I grew up in a home where we went to the Roman Catholic Church. I remember walking down the aisle. One of my earliest memories as a kid was walking down the aisle and spilling my Cheerio's all over the place during a service.
                    So, when I was in elementary school, my mom and brothers basically stopped going. And so at that point, was basically unchurched. My dad kept going. And so my middle school years were kind of, it was in California. And to be honest, my middle school years were like people's college years in terms of things that I did and what was going on.
                    And through a long story, God, actually, my freshman year in high school, brought me to faith through the ministry of a Baptist church, and that, I got very excited about evangelism, and would gather up all these people for my youth group. And it was great. But later on in high school, started to get interested in theology.
                    A former youth minister who had since moved, but was dear, would send me books and get me thinking and opened up a world for me. And that started a journey. So my wife and I got married in 1993 in California, and since then, have been in Chicago, and Orlando, and ultimately, a PhD overseas. But so faith is often look like this, working out of vocation of theology.

Doug Sweeney:       Dr. Kapic, who are some of the people who have been the most influential on your spiritual formation and spiritual growth over the years?

Kelly Kapic:        One of the people that was very significant to me was a guy named Jeff [Wigam 00:05:06], who was a landscape architect, or, well, he was a landscaper in California, and he was probably in his early thirties at the time. And he had one year of Bible college and dropped out.
                    And he took me and three other guys who were in high school and just kind of put us under his wing. And he would buy a book and say, "Let's read it together." And we'd get together in his attic and talk about chapter by chapter, Chuck Swindoll and these kinds of folks.
                    And he took us seriously, which was, we didn't deserve, and it was beautiful. And the results of those three is that I became a ... I did a PhD in theology. One of the other guys, Ben Merkel, is a PhD in New Testament now, teaches at Southeastern Seminary. One of the guys is an army chaplain, and the other went into social work, and so that's someone no one will know but had a significant influence on my life.
                    And so, I mean, John Owen is a theologian who's had a significant impact, and those kinds of things. But we could go on, but that's probably someone I'd like to mention who won't normally get mentioned.

Kristen Padilla:    As someone who teaches college students, what do you see as some of the spiritual and discipleship needs that face college students today? And for us, who might be long separated from college, or do not have children yet who are college age, how might we encourage and minister to college students in our churches, in their walk with the Lord?

Kelly Kapic:        I love that question. I think it's a great gift to be able to work with college students on a regular basis. It's just a really special time of life, because they have time to think, and they really care. They're not disillusioned. So they really want to, they want to know if life has meaning and purpose, and they are willing to ask very hard questions and they really care.
                    And they are asking questions. They're asking questions about everything, and they're just willing to voice them. Whether, it's not just things like sexuality and politics, but a vocation and work and family and family structures. They care about justice issues in ways that some of us in different generations probably need to listen to, and we have things that we can offer them.
                    But I think it's a great gift, and I really encourage people, when you work with college students, to don't think you're the one who's bringing them everything. You need to be ready to receive what they have to give and to learn from them. It's got to be a mutual relationship. I think, actually, all ministry does, but yeah, there, it's a great gift to work with them.

Doug Sweeney:       Kelly, in just a minute, we want to get you talking a little bit about some of the books you've written in recent years, but before we do that, we thought we'd focus a bit on the reformation heritage lectures that you're giving this week themselves.
                    They've been very well attended, but we imagine there'll be lots of people who listen to the podcast who haven't been able to come to the lectures. So would you mind, for our audience, summarizing for us the lecture that you gave earlier today entitled, Have I Done Enough, facing our finitude? I know this is a hard question, because the lecture was an hour long, but can you give a three or four minute version of what it is people need to understand about finitude?

Kelly Kapic:        Yeah, that's great. So, God graciously provided a grant for me to be able to have my institution hire someone else to teach for me this year so that I'm working on this book project. And the lecture is really about my concern that we confuse finitude with sin. And finitude sounds like a fancy philosophical word, but it just means limits.
                    It just means that humans have limits. You can only be in one place at a time. You can only know so much. You can only do so many things. And we live in a culture with endless demands, endless things you could do and probably should do. It's not just about, sometimes we get confused, and it's not just about not being able to do all the bad things. You can't do all the good things.
                    And so I'm interested in exploring how, sometimes, we feel guilty for not being able to do things, and not being able to be everywhere and do everything, especially people in ministry. And it's almost like we need to ask God's forgiveness, we think, for not being able to do everything and be everything.
                    And when we need to ask forgiveness, that we ever thought we could, we're not God. And when you ask, do you think you're God? We all say no. But when you explore how much weight and anxiety are you feeling, do you wake up every day or go to bed every day feeling like you haven't done enough? I think behind those concerns are a misunderstanding of what it means to be a human creature. So I'm really interested in exploring what that means.

Doug Sweeney:       That's great. And Kristen didn't get to go to lunch with us, but one of the things that you and I talked about over lunch I think would be helpful to share briefly with our audience as well, and that is that so many of us who are serious about our discipleship, and so many of our listeners who are involved in one way or another in Christian ministry, most often in the church, but sometimes in parachurch settings as well, feel like we want to be as much like Jesus as we can be.
                    We want to be self-sacrificial, self-giving people who are spending our lives for the Lord and for those around us, for people he's entrusted to our care. And we have this urge, almost, to deplete ourselves with so much good work in the name of Jesus and in the manner of Jesus. And then, of course, a lot of us experience seasons of, and sometimes more than seasons of, burnout, as well.
                    What kind of wisdom do you want us to receive from these lectures, and maybe even just from this podcast, about how to balance the desire to live a cross-shaped, Christlike, self-giving life on the one hand, with the need to practice sufficient self care on the other hand?

Kelly Kapic:        Oh, that's a great question. You mentioned college students, so I work with college students, and one of the things you can do as a professor of college students is say, "You can change the world. You've got to do all this." Which is really exciting. It's fun, their eyes light up and everything.
                    And then they go out and they pour themselves out and they are willing to do just about anything. And then by the time they're 30, they're about dead. Sometimes even literally.

Doug Sweeney:       Right.

Kelly Kapic:        And so, one of the things you realize is that there's dangers there, right? And so, to get very practical, I do think the gospel tells us to die to self, and to call to sacrifice, but it's like the importance of lament. We are called to lament. But if you and I actually tried to lament for all the brokenness in the world, I think it literally will kill you.
                    And the reason I say that is because I think you can make the argument that's what literally killed Jesus on the cross. He is crying up the song of lament, "My God, my God, why have you?" It kills him. So we participate in lament, but we can't bear the weight of it.
                    Well, similarly, we're called to die to self, but I think actually behind this is some of our misunderstandings and rugged individualism and stuff, where the cross-shaped life has to take shape within a cross-shaped church. So, as ministers, or others who care about ministry, you see legitimate needs. Widows need attention. Meals need to be brought to someone who just had a baby. Bible studies need to be led, and the list goes on and on.
                    All of them are good things. All of them are biblical things. And you can make people feel guilty for not doing them. And that's because it doesn't take you as an individual, it takes the whole church to be the one body of Christ, and part of our discipleship has to be, I am not Christ, but I am a part of his body.
                    I may be a big toe, I may be a left ear. I need to be faithful to what I'm called to, but I'm not called to do it all. And I think that starts with leadership. It's very hard for us to really practice that, but we have to cultivate kind of mutual dependency in healthy ways.

Kristen Padilla:    What's the risk of not realizing, as Christians, our finitude?

Kelly Kapic:        That's a great question. Since we're talking about ministry, but even if you're not in full time ministry, I think one of the biggest risks is bitterness and anger. What you will find is people will pour themselves out and then they just get so spent and angry, because they're like, "Whoa, no one else is doing their part. No one else does this. No one else understands."
                    And then all of a sudden, you also get bitterness. We have countless stories of families, and negligent, they're being neglected. There are consequences, right? If you are going to be a father or a mother, that has certain obligations. It was very interesting. I teach a class on Christian spirituality, and part of it is, they read on the history of the church.
                    And my students, more recently, have figured out when we read about 19th century missionaries who've done these amazing things, but they also read about some of the problems with the families. And as I ask the students, I've been impressed. Some of them have said, "I love what they did. They probably needed to do it as single people."
                    And it's one of the things that, again, this generation, in some ways, is open to honoring singleness in a way that others haven't. But again, you're a creature. So there are obligations when you do this. You can't do everything. You can't be a family person and do all that. So I think there are real practical implications.

Doug Sweeney:       Well, as soon as we're done with this interview, we're going to whisk you back to Hodges Chapel and hear another lecture from you. And the title of the next lecture is one that I think you'd been gesturing toward in this interview already. Humility: Joyful Realism. Can you let our listeners know, especially the ones who can't come to the lecture itself, what are you going to tell us?

Kelly Kapic:        The briefest way I know to explain this is that I've come to believe that I see, particularly in evangelical and other circles, it's not just evangelicals. It's in the history of the church, commonly. When we, as Christians, think you're supposed to be humble, my question is why?
                    And the most common underlying assumption tends to be, you should be humble because you're a sinner. And I think that's a problem. Yes, being a sinner can, should, being aware of that should cultivate a humility. But actually, I think that's building the house of humility on a foundation never meant to support it, and it's a problem.
                    So actually, I think, theologically, we're called to be humble because we're creatures. And even if there had been no fall and no sin, we're to be humble. We were never made to know everything and do everything. Asking for an answer or for help, or, that doesn't have to be in a fallen world. That's just part of saying, "Oh, that's beautiful." Humility doesn't just say, "I'm sorry." It says, "I don't know."
                    So I'm interested, and what I found in the history of the church is that, you will find the church, even someone like Bernard of Clairvaux, who I really love, when he talks about humility, he says, "It's knowing your true colors," which isn't bad, but then he says, "And coming to an awareness of your worthlessness," or it can be translated, "Your vileness."
                    And I think that can create real problems for us. And I do think that's where weird manifestations of people think they're trying to be humble and it's often self-hatred and stuff.

Kristen Padilla:    I've been reading through Second Chronicles about the Kings of Judah, and even Hezekiah, who I just read about this morning. At the end of his life, God tests to see what is in his heart, and there is that tendency, when things are going so well and riches are being built up and blessings, that we stop relying and humble ourselves before the Lord.
                    Where have you seen it, this humility, worked out in a biblical way, perhaps, in your life, and maybe where we need to be cultivating that humility?

Kelly Kapic:        Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things I'll be talking about is, so, a misunderstanding here tends to mean we become so focused. Because we're worried about, we're trying to think about our sin, and that will help us be more humble. And I think Calvin's actually very helpful. He talks about a self-forgetfulness here.
                    But part of what I love that Calvin talks about is all our gifts, all our talents are gifts from God. No, we kind of think, yes, we know we're supposed to say yes to that. But what I love is, Calvin pushes it further, and says, "That means all the talents you see in others are gifts from God, which means you should praise them."
                    And Calvin explicitly says, "Not just praise the talents, but the bearers of them." And we're so worried. Well, I don't want them to become arrogant. I don't want them to ... and Calvin was like, "No, it would be a great evil not to do that." And so one of the things I want to encourage people, because ... Like, you should be more humble. I think that's like going to the dentist. I'm just supposed to think bad about myself.
                    But if you realize, no, humility is about exalting others, it is about encouraging them and delighting in them, not seeing them as competition, but saying, "Oh, look at that. That's really great. Oh, what do you think about this?" That is a positive way to cultivate humility rather than a negative.

Doug Sweeney:       Well, in the minutes that remain, let's talk a little bit about some of the books that Dr. Kapic has written in recent years, one of which is related to the mini series we just finished in this podcast itself, on the subject of grief and doing ministry in the midst of grief.
                    Dr. Kapic has written a book on Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering. How does that book speak in to the questions we've been wrestling with, Kelly, with respect to going through grief in a way that a Christian should go through grief, and then even more difficultly, leading others, ministering to others in the middle of really difficult times in one's life?

Kelly Kapic:        Yeah, that is a great question. And there's a lot that could be said about that. I do think, at least in American evangelicalism, we haven't been great about lament in the past. If you're praying with someone who's who's grieving, and they cry out, "God, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" We tend to think that's a sign of weak spirituality.
                    But that's the Psalmist, and that's coming from the mouth of Jesus, and a real lament and wrestling with God, I think, is something we need to ... That actually is an act of faith rather than doubt. It's an act of faith to see, and it's also very ... It's not just a God, it's my God. Where have you been? What's going on here? That's actually a sign of faith and intimacy that you could do that.
                    So I think lamenting with people and not just trying to fix it. I also think it's very important, when you're ministering with people who deal with chronic pain or grieving, to not feel like you have to tell them why it's happening. It's a strong temptation among us as Christians to say, "Well, I think you're ..." I've heard this kind of thing.
                    "I know it's terrible your child died, but maybe one of the nurses will become a Christian." We think, no, no, no, no, no. You need to be ... Because what happens, when someone say, "Well, that nurse was converted," what happens if two years later, she abandons the faith? So we're just not privy to those things. We need to be silent. We have to love by being present.
                    And again, in the book, near the end, there's a chapter on real practical things, and one of the things is just doing these things as a community. What does compassion look like? One of the things I love about the African American tradition, the black church tradition, is they make a big space for witness. And part of what that tradition has to offer that we need to learn from them is witness always has two sides to it.
                    One is, when someone says, "I need a witness." All right, part of what you're doing is two things. You're saying, "I see and believe how bad it is, and I bear witness to that." And then the flip side is, you're also saying, "And I also see," because sometimes, think, "Well, look at how bad this is," but then we'll also say, "And somehow God showed up."
                    And they need someone else to say, "Oh, I see that it is that bad, and I also see what you're saying, God is showing up." And that twofold side of both being as honest about how bad it is, as it is, and being honest that God is still present and loving and compassionate in the midst of that. And I think we need one another to bear witness in those ways.

Kristen Padilla:    That's good. We'd like you to say a brief word about two of your theology books. One being The God Who Gives, and the other being God So Loved, He Gave. What are you trying to do in these two works, and what is it about God's giving nature that is so life-giving to believers?

Kelly Kapic:        Yeah, in the second book, The God Who Gives, is really an expansion, revision and expansion of the first. I think it's a fresh way of understanding grace. The language of grace, really, can mean the same thing as gift in Greek, and it's even in Latin. And part of what I'm trying to remind us is, the fundamental nature of the Christian story is that God, out of his abundance, gives, and the ultimate gift that he gives is himself.
                    He gives the gift of his son and his spirit, and he gives us, as his children, the gift of participating in his kingdom. And so it is, in a sense, honestly, The God Who Gives is a book where I try and lay out the Christian story from creation to the present life of the church and our great hope through that lens.

Doug Sweeney:       You have been listening to Dr. Kelly Kapic of Covenant College, professor of theological studies, for the better part of two decades, who is on campus with us this week at Beeson, giving our reformation heritage lectures. We thank you very much, Dr. Kapic, for joining us at Beeson this week, and for your willingness to help out on our podcast too.

Kelly Kapic:        It's been great.

Doug Sweeney:       We thank our listeners for tuning in, and we pray God's blessing on your life this week. Goodbye for now.

Kristen Padilla:    You've been listening to The Beeson Podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike [Pasquerillo 00:24:50]. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to The Beeson Podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast, or on iTunes.