Book Reviews You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News

by Kelly M. Kapic

TODAY THE “SUPPLY CHAIN” is often a topic of daily radio programming, a reminder of our human interdependence. Despite constant clues of our dependence on others for the food we eat, the buildings we inhabit, the cars we drive, and the infrastructure of our cities, we regularly forget that we are dependent and believe that we are independent—and that we can be and do everything. Kelly Kapic’s newest book, You’re Only Human, has us instead look down at the belly button we all possess and know that we need other people. God himself stated, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). This book is a needed salve in our world of increasing isolation, of “bowling alone.”

It seems to me that You’re Only Human, without citing it, unpacks arguably one of the most neglected doctrinal truths in the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF): the communion of the saints. While I would venture to guess that WCF 26 is rarely studied and celebrated, it profoundly communicates our need for fellowship and community:

All saints, that are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by his Spirit, and by faith, have fellowship with him in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory: and, being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other’s gifts and graces, and are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, as do conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man. (WCF 26.1)

The confession goes on to say that believers are called to relieve “each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities” (WCF 26.2). You’re Only Human unpacks these truths from a variety of angles. Reminding us of biblical metaphors of the church as a body (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12–27), Kapic remarks that “God created us for mutual dependence and delight within a life-giving community: that isn’t merely a goal; it’s how we are built” (177).

Kapic addresses the common quandary of being drawn to so many good causes in life. There is prison ministry. Children’s ministry. Discipleship and evangelism. There are worthwhile civic causes to engage—so much to do but so little time. Here, Kapic wants to free us to realize that despite our limits, we can be involved in various things through our union with other believers in the church.

God’s Spirit has united me to Christ and, because of that union, to my sisters and brothers of the faith. . . . As part of God’s church, we have people doing prison ministry, caring for children, feeding the hungry, praying, preaching, and caring for orphans and widows. I am not the body—I am just a part of it. (178)

Kapic makes the provocative claim that “in our union with Christ, we benefit from the vicarious work of Christ. But we also benefit in some vicarious way from the work of our sisters and brothers” (179). Here he connects anthropology, a biblical understanding of humanity, with ecclesiology, a biblical understanding of the church. He also touches on a biblical understanding of vocation:

Only when we live in our interconnectedness will we stop belittling those with “secular” vocations who honor Christ as painters and teachers, as landscapers and homemakers, as politicians and software engineers. Rather than disparage someone else’s work, we can see it as part of the whole. (179)

Particularly, Kapic commends prayer as one way we join ourselves to the various activities of others (180).

Understanding all this, Kapic suggests, protects us from burnout, gives us the ability to say no to good things that might unhealthily stretch our limits, and encourages us to healthy rhythms “like Sabbath, exercise, friendship” as well as sleep (183). Pastors especially need to read this book and take his advice (181–86). Yet all Christians are called to give time to contemplating God and all things in relation to God; all Christians are called to family worship and to be good stewards of our bodies. Amid a world of frenetic busyness, Christians are called to be people of peace who value activities such as prayer that produce little visible or immediate results. As Christopher Holmes recently wrote in A Theology of the Christian Life: Imitating and Participating in God, “Hallowing God’s name is the ultimate time waster,” but this is what is “demanded” of God’s people, mirroring the Trinity, each person “delighting in one another ‘uselessly’” (Holmes, 154). Arguably, until we do this, we are unfit to go out into the world as salt and light. You’re Only Human addresses numerous aspects of our humanity. Readers should not be dissuaded by the book’s slow start as it gains considerable steam after the first few chapters. Kapic reminds us that our limits as creatures are not sinful in themselves and that “being dependent creatures is a constructive gift, not a deficiency” (10). No doubt the apostle Paul would agree that we must depend on God (2 Cor. 1:9; 4:7; 12:7–10).

Kapic’s second chapter brings awareness to the particularity of God’s love for us as individuals, with the reminder that he formed us with specific gifts and needs. The third chapter points to Jesus’ humanity as proof that having a physical body with physical limits is not inherently bad. Chapter 4 engages human experience in powerful and practical ways, speaking of the sexualized ads that surround us at the grocery store as well as the pressure on both men and women to have a particular body shape. Kapic not only speaks to the embodied gathering of God’s people, which paused for so many during the early days of COVID-19, but also of the power of touch.

Chapter 5 could be viewed as a helpful but brief supplement to Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, for Kapic here reminds us of our dependence on those around us even to identify ourselves. When we tell others about who we are, we necessarily speak of the people and institutions that shape us and our history (77). Kapic grounds his explanations in the Bible and answers the “Who am I?” question ultimately through our relation to God (e.g., 90). He even tackles unhelpful ways of speaking about struggles with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia: instead of identifying ourselves with a behavior, “distinguishing the person from the addictive behavior helps the patient identify, fight, and resist the self-harming actions” (93).

Part 2 of the book discusses “healthy dependence,” where Kapic begins with a recovery of true humility and joyful realism. “Humility,” he writes, “consists in a recognition of (and a rejoicing in) the good limitations that God has given us; it is not a regrettable necessity, nor simply a later addition responding to sinful disorders” (103). Kapic makes the interesting claim that humility should be viewed in terms of our creaturely limits, not just our sinfulness (112). Humility also means acknowledging the gifts that God has given to others. One commendable aspect of the book is that Kapic inserts Christology into each chapter, showing how Jesus lived out what Kapic is observing. However, I felt that he did not connect those dots sufficiently when it came to Christ and Kapic’s paradigm of humility.

Kapic’s chapter on time is one of the book’s highlights, and his history of how the clock has come to control our lives is fascinating. There are many gems of wisdom here, such as “We have often tried to make machines that are like humans, but now we often expect humans to be like machines” (126). Similarly, chapter 8 shows from the Bible that God is comfortable with change over time, process. This chapter will surely help Christians lamenting their slow progress in sanctification. Kapic ties our impatience here to the desire for efficiency, but “love, community, and growth of character are often—though not always—at odds with efficiency. . . . One of the most inefficient things you can ever do is love another person. . . . Loving another creature requires engagement, response, and patience” (149). As a parent of small children who sometimes laments how child-rearing hinders my productivity, I needed to hear this.

Kapic’s final chapter reminds us that “trying to ‘have it all’—all at once—sets us up for frustration and failure” (197). Here, he reminds us that there are different seasons in life, that we can admit our vulnerabilities, we can lament, and that God made us as creatures who need rest, including sleep. Kapic posits that “sleep is an act of faith. It requires us to see our finitude as a good part of God’s design for us” (217). The Sabbath also should be celebrated: you get to say “no” to work one day a week (219), in imitation of God (Gen. 2:3)!

Today, realism is often labeled “defeatism”— certainly when it comes to sanctification; endtime views that deny worldly triumph or transformationalism are viewed as pessimistic and resignation, while traditional doctrines, such as the spirituality of the church, are rejected as quietism and political cowardice. Such labelers may find You’re Only Human to be defeatist as well, just as some eschewed Michael Horton’s excellent book Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical,

Restless World (Zondervan, 2014). Others will find it refreshing, freeing, and challenging to our modern idolatries.

Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500–1620

by Christine Kooi

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2022 | 236 PAGES (PAPERBACK) | $39.99

AS AN AMERICAN who used to live in the UK, British news commentary on American politics always left me with a sense of dysphoria. Although they named the right topics and assessed them in terms of familiar-sounding categories, I was always left with the experience of hearing commentary about the issues of my homeland that sounds nothing like what I make of the issues as a cultural insider.

Christine Kooi’s treatment of the Dutch Reformation, including political and religious change in the region now called the Netherlands, largely left me with the same feeling as watching British commentary on American politics: speaking the same language but always with a foreign accent Kooi’s book is highly informed, with a clear grasp of social, economic, and political issues. Yet it never sufficiently connects the dots on the religious issues involved. In this sense, Kooi has produced a thoroughly modern work, noting how religion was important for them as driving factors—even instigating war—but downplaying how theology genuinely intertwined with political and cultural stances in the hearts and minds of the subjects of her study.

This book’s strength provides a coherent narrative of events in what became the Dutch Republic, moving from medieval Christendom to the pluralist States General. English-language literature has not surveyed the Dutch Reformation as extensively as the Reformation in Germany and England. In this respect, Kooi’s study makes a welcome contribution. It fully covers the contours of Dutch society, geographically and socially, in the early sixteenth century, providing needed insight to understand major cultural shifts. It also traces political developments, connecting the Netherlands to the changing face of other Continental powers and authorities and their implications for Dutch society. Perhaps most importantly, Kooi grants the English-speaking world summary access to the more extensive Dutch-language literature on the Dutch Reformation.

Kooi’s language throughout her narrative appears partisan, biased in favor of the Roman Catholic side of the Dutch Reformation. Throughout the book, Roman Catholics are said to hold to “traditional” religion. In itself, this point is not controversial—if all that she meant is that Protestants developed some views and practices different from what had prevailed in their culture before the Reformation. Kooi, however, seems to mean something more, consistently labeling Protestants as heretics and their opinions as biblicism. Although historians can rely on this sort of language with some objectivity to convey one group’s impressions of another group, Kooi’s depiction does not seem so objective. This language of Protestants as heretics is not limited to the sections written about Roman Catholic reform in the Netherlands but prevails throughout.

The upshot of Kooi’s historical argument is that the Dutch Reformation produced two countries: Protestants in the north and Roman Catholics in the south. This aspect of her thesis is intriguing and well supported by her presentation of the data concerning the migration of, and boundary divisions between, those holding to each confession and their respective political allegiances. Yet biased language again intrudes.

Although Kooi admits that the Protestant northern territory developed a more pluralistic society, tolerating and making space for disagreement, she continues to present Reformed Protestants as oppressors who victimized dissenters. On the other hand, Roman Catholics in the southern territory, although far more strident in legal persecution of dissenters within their borders, are presented as succeeding in producing a confessionally unified society.

Kooi’s descriptive bias plays out in other ways in the book. Perhaps most striking are her descriptions of those killed for their faith. Although conceding that both Romanists and Protestants bestowed martyr status on those within their communions who died for their faith, Kooi does not speak equally of the two. Rather, her dispassionate depiction of Protestants being executed comes across simply as what happens to rebels (as she labels them on a number of occasions). On the other hand, when Roman Catholics are killed, she calls it brutal murder or, in one instance, “blasphemous violence.” My point is not to justify either side but to highlight how Kooi by her use of imbalanced language seems to prosecute one side and pardon the other.

Kooi’s seeming lack of Protestant sympathy extends to her discussions of theology and piety. Her specifically religious analysis is rare and when present falls significantly short. This becomes most clear in her discussion (163–70) of the Synod of Dort. First, Kooi seems to pit John Calvin and Theodore Beza against each other on the doctrine of predestination, harking back to the outmoded Calvin versus the Calvinists thesis.

Second, Kooi fails to explain the actual theological disagreements involved in the debates about predestination. She locates the center of the debate between infralapsarians (those who hold the fall to be logically prior to election in God’s eternal purposes) and supralapsarians (those who hold election to be logically prior to the fall). Rather, the center of the debate was between Reformed theologians, who held to both infra and supra views on one side, and Arminius and the Remonstrants, who held to election on the basis of foreseen human faith on the other side. Finally, with respect to Dort, Kooi entirely omitted the controversy over Alfred Molina’s teaching about middle knowledge, which caused debates within Roman Catholic theology itself, making the controversy at Dort about much deeper and more complex theological issues than the author seems sensitive to: about the nature of God’s purposes and the relationship between his sovereignty and human responsibility. These were issues wrestled with by Protestant and Catholic alike. the Reformed faith in the Dutch Republic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Of the six women included (Cornelia Teellinck, Susanna Teellinck, Anna Maria van Schurman, Sara Nevius, Cornelia Leydekker, and Henrica van Hoolwerff), I was familiar only with Anna Maria van Schurman.

If this book were a defense of the Roman Catholic reformation, its partisan language would be understandable. But it is presented as a historical study of the Reformation in the Low Countries across confessional divides. In that case, one could wish for less bias and more analysis.

Harrison Perkins is pastor at Oakland Hills Community Church, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, online faculty in church history for Westminster Theological Seminary, and author of Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2020).

I had read about the Dutch Reformation, as well as its Second or Further Reformation ( Nadere Reformatie ) and some of its male participants, such as William of Orange, Gisbertus Voetius, and Wilhelmus à Brakel. Most accounts made no mention of women apart from powerful figures such as van Schurman and Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate. I was looking forward to knowing more about this neglected portion of history, and Pipkin’s book didn’t disappoint. Besides her thorough treatment of the lives and works of her six protagonists, she gives a clear and informed explanation of the times in which they lived and the opportunities afforded to women to teach, write, hold religious meetings, and house ministers and refugees. She also provides an interesting account of how these writings were viewed and appreciated, as well as the various reasons for their almost unanimous acclaim by pastors and theologians.

Dissenting Daughters: Reformed Women in the Dutch Republic, 1572–1725

by Amanda C. Pipkin

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2022

| 288 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $100.00

WHEN I FIRST NOTICED the publication of Dissenting Daughters: Reformed Women in the Dutch Republic, 1572–1725 , I was curious to read it. It revealed, the description said, the vital contribution made by devout women “to the spread and practice of

In discussing the contributions of women within a traditional patriarchal society, Pipkin provides a useful section where she examines a variety of scholarly opinions on the role played by Protestantism. She finds it “curious that Protestantism, whose proponents insistently supported a hierarchy that privileged the male head of households at the expense of their wives, children, and servants, provided some women with opportunities to express their religious authority during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”

(4). She believes her study contributes to the discussion “by shifting the attention from the father at the center of the story of Protestantism to the network of women surrounding him who studied, taught, wrote, and printed devotional texts”

(4). In fact, while the father remained the de facto spiritual head of the family, women took over this role whenever working fathers, especially traveling merchants, “could not or would not offer sufficient domestic religious instruction. . . . Moralists deemed the mission of reforming households so vitally important and onerous that they authorized women to take leadership of domestic religious instruction and worship whenever patriarchs were not willing or able to do so” (45).

Pipkin explains that by encouraging women to put into writing the teachings they were dispensing within their families, “Protestant ministers, church elders, and schoolmasters in the Netherlands . . . transformed women’s traditional work of nurturing and instructing children into an esteemed religious vocation” (19). Most of the influence of these women was amplified by the international network that had been growing throughout Europe. They seemed to be, however, more deeply affected by mysticism than their English counterparts (mysticism and medieval devotion played an important role in the Second Reformation).

After summarizing these facts in the introduction and first chapter, Pipkin devotes a chapter to the Teellinck sisters, one to Anna Maria van Schurman, one to Sara Nevius, and one to Cornelia Leydekker and Henrica van Hoolwerff. I am glad that Pipkin chose to quote quite generously from their writing as most of their works are not available in English in any other volume. These writings afford us a glimpse into these women’s minds and hearts and help us to sympathize with them, their struggles, queries, and conclusions. Even those who don’t agree with their decisions or interpretations can appreciate their questions, concerns, and serious desire to be of service to Christ and others.

Dissenting Daughters is enriched by a large number of endnotes (placed at the end of each chapter) and by a substantial bibliography and list of digital resources at the end of the volume. While this is delightful news for those who want to expand their research, their excitement may be dampened by the fact that most of these references are in Dutch, and that most of the women Pipkin briefly mentions have not been researched at all. Pipkin is fully aware of this obstacle. In fact, she concludes the book by saying,

There remain so many unanswered questions and potential discoveries. This book is a net cast into a deep lake. My intention was to draw in and identify as many women as possible so that others can take up the net again.

(230)

Besides this unavoidable disappointment of whetted appetites, some might be slightly annoyed by Pipkin’s repetition of concepts (and in least in one case, an entire sentence). I was not bothered by this since much of this information was new to me and the repetition helped to fix it in my mind, but she might need a more careful editor in the future. As it is for most academic books, the price of this book is also prohibitive for most readers hoping to own their own copy.

Overall, Dissenting Daughters is a fascinating journey into the early history of the Dutch Reformed Church, and one that warrants repeated readings. It introduces us to women who lived in a context many of us will find both radically different and strangely familiar. It is also useful to anyone interested in the history of patriarchy within the church. In fact, we need more of this type of serious and objective examination of history to bring clarity to difficult issues and model an honest and respectful way to address them. I hope that Pipkin will continue her research and inspire others to do the same, and therefore cast more nets into these deep and largely unexplored waters.

Simonetta Carr is the author of numerous books, including Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them: Schizophrenia through a Mother’s Eyes, and the Christian Biographies for Young Readers series (Reformation Heritage Books).