Humans, man

No.130: October 21, 2022

Oct 21, 2022

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

I really like round numbers, and that one in the subtitle pleases me: 130. With the exception of two Fridays, that means one hundred-thirty straight weeks of delivering this newsletter to your inboxes! That’s two and half years without taking a vacation—at least from the newsletter, that is. I’ve mentioned it before, but I began The Square Inch because I’d experienced a lengthy period of writer’s block. Giving myself a Friday deadline meant forcing something out of me every single week. And I think it is safe to conclude that this worked: since moving to a paid subscription model I’ve been producing three newsletters a week, on a pace for something like a quarter million words over the course of a year. Maybe I’ve killed the writer’s block for good?

Thank you all for agreeing to be on the receiving end of all this.

I’d like to keep it a little lighter today by telling you a personal anecdote and then to offer some reflections on human powers and capacities.

Hopefully the saga of the lemon BMW is at a close.

Finally having solved the mysterious and ghostly throttle body problem (yes, I fixed it!) I knew that one remaining issue is a faulty oil level sensor. That sensor sits at the bottom of the oil pan, and when I got under there to see about swapping it out I realized that my real problem is that my oil pan itself is seeping oil. The gasket is failing, and as long as I’m going to be draining my oil to replace the sensor, I might as well change the oil pan gasket, too. Right?

Heh. The nightmare begins.

I watched a YouTube video carefully about how to perform this fix, and I knew it is a pretty involved process. But I had no idea what I was in for. Because I, without realizing it, was watching a guy replacing his gasket on a 2002 330i, not a 330xi. What’s the big difference between “i” and “xi,” you ask? His “i” is a two-wheel drive vehicle. My “xi’ is a four-wheel drive vehicle. That means I’ve got all the drivetrain assembly stuff in the front of the car and the front axles go straight through my oil pan.

The entire subframe of the car has to be removed, with the engine hanging in suspension from above so it doesn’t go crashing to the floor. The front axles had to come out. And then the oil pan is held together by thirty bolts, many of them in extremely hard-to-reach places.

What I had planned to be a day-long project became two very long days. And I could never have done this by myself, nor could I have done this in my driveway with the car on jack stands. Heroes to the rescue!

This year our middle daughter is apprenticing at a motor and forge shop in Small Town, Montana (welding, car and small engine repair, vintage car restoration, etc.), and they generously lent us the use of their shop, tools, brilliance, brawn, expertise, and, most importantly, their mechanical lift! On Day 1 we managed to tear the car apart and get the oil pan out. On Day 2 we (barely) managed to put it all back together again. And I believe the surgery was a success. I physically feel like a BMW rolled over me a dozen times, but we got the job done.

And what a delight watching my fifteen-year-old girl be such a competent and cheerful shop hand, handling all the tools and troubleshooting with extensions and joints and such, and cleaning my oil pan until it gleamed. I’m kind of in awe of her.

I am in awe of human beings in general, actually. In Monday’s Off The Shelf I reflected on Bertrand Russell’s intellectual and spiritual failure to recognize our sheer dependence on God, the world, and others. I closed that essay by saying that the way to intellectual fruitfulness is humility, not pride.

You know what makes that so difficult? We humans have so much to be proud of. Of course not in any kind of ultimate sense; everything we do and accomplish is because of the grace and generosity of the Lord. But God warned the Israelites that they would experience so much success in the Promised Land that they would forget that it is God’s doing, and they would begin to think it was their smarts and their powers that brought them success. That’s a temptation for all of humanity. And do you know why? Because we collectively—if not always individually—experience incredible success.

It is not at all blasphemous to recognize that human beings are … awesome. We were created imago Dei, commissioned to cultivate and take dominion over the material world. Yes, we fell into sin and rebellion and our capacities and powers are now twisted and corrupted in selfish and wicked ways. If you want to focus on that, you will have never-ending material. But that’s not the whole story. God did not completely withdraw our capacities and powers. The earth now yields up “thorns and thistles” for us; it is recalcitrant, as though only reluctantly yielding to human lordship. But it yields nonetheless!

I got to thinking about this while driving to Small Town, Montana to fix my BMW. It started when, driving along the Interstate, I glanced to my right and saw a massive, sprawling train yard. Hundreds upon hundreds of rail cars being swapped around and formed into trains. Have you ever stood next to a humble rail car? When seen from a distance, they look so cute, all lined up and following the leader. In reality, a rail car—the kind that, say, carries coal from Roundup, Montana to Seattle—is an enormous feat of manufacturing and engineering. It is massive. A behemoth of raw steel—how did they even make it?—that, when you’re standing next to it, you cannot begin to fathom how heavy it must be. And that’s without carrying anything! How could one even move such a thing, let alone a hundred of them at a time? Who devises the means of swapping out these beasts, mixing and matching them like Legos, and then pulling them thousands of miles? Humans, man.

I looked to my left and what did I see? A city built entirely by plumbers. Over many acres I see miles and miles of steel pipes weaving and dancing in a thick web of organized chaos. It’s an oil refinery. Resources pumped from 15 to 20 thousand feet under the ground make their way here and are routed through this mesmerizing maze and emerge useful petroleum products. Who built such a thing? Who is the genius? Humans, man.

The Interstate casually curves and rolls to the west. I see a thick cloud of smoke billowing from a small settlement of farmhouses off to the north in the distance. I wonder if there is a structure fire or something, but as I get closer I see that somebody is burning a field. They’ve harvested their corn, and now they are burning off the stubble. I thought to myself, “Oh, that’s just a controlled burn.” And then I caught myself: a controlled burn? Controlled? Who has the confidence and expertise to tame fire, so that it burns only what one wants it to burn? Humans, man.

If you open your eyes to it you can’t unsee it. I could go on about the numerous feedlots I pass where animal husbandry has been perfected to deliver you the perfect Filet Mignon. Humans, man.

And then there’s the BMW itself. I can tell you with real-life experience that German engineers do not care one whit about your comfort or ease in fixing their creations. And it is right and meet that we should all grumble and complain about that fact. They should love their fellow-man more. But in all our grumbling and complaining we should not fail to notice the sheer elegance and brilliance of the actual engineering. That engine. It’s a work of art. Who devises such a thing, that can hurl you from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in 6.6 seconds? And that’s even pretty old technology. And then there are the dozens and dozens of ingenious tools made to manipulate the dozens and dozens of parts and fasteners. There’s a tool for everything. Humans, man.

The Humanists and Enlightenment pagans were not dreaming. In the face of all this ingenuity and mastery over the material world it is so easy and enticing—as it was for Bertrand Russell with respect to intellectual matters—to conclude that we must be gods. But this is nothing new, for the Bible tells us that that is exactly the temptation we should expect.

But don’t miss the key, underlying, God-glorifying, and mind-blowing point: we experience this temptation precisely—and only—because God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth continues to enable us to succeed. This seems the primal sin, does it not? To presume upon his grace; to take advantage of it and to pretend that we’ve earned it all by our own merits; to pretend that it is we ourselves who are to be thanked and glorified (Rom.1:21). Moses puts a fine point on it:

You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth […] (Dt.8:17-18

Glorifying God and giving him thanks is not at odds with recognizing the glory in which he made his image bearers, and it is not sinful or wrong to celebrate the beautiful wealth he enables them to achieve. Not just material wealth or riches, but also intellectual and artistic wealth, too. Yes, we’re broken and twisted and selfish and need renewal and redemption. All true. But also …

Humans, man. Thank God.

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