Seeking the Hidden Thing Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.comBen Fleming is back to discuss a work, Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground," that underscores the thesis that the west is largely "stuck" playing out the same themes and ideas from the 1850's-1920's.Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Carl Schmitt's short work "Political Theology" offers some key insights into the nature of LLM algorithms, and their key, fundamental fatal flaw. It's the same problem the "the rule of law" has. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

The politics of ideas -- conservative vs. liberal -- and the notion of popular sovereignty persist to this day. We need to understand why populism is a political dead end. Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

ScriptureEphesians 5:8-148 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light 9 (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) 10 and find out what pleases the Lord. 11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. 12 It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. 13 But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. 14 This is why it is said:“Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”Pulpit NotesToday is the fourth Sunday of Lent and we continue with Lenten themes as we prepare ourselves to remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of our Saviour Jesus Christ.Our text this morning has us mediating on the resurrection life, but in a way where we are looking through the binary battle between light and darkness, the world of light and the world of darkness.The message here is actually a hard sell. It is not one that will resonate with us, given the ways that we have been influenced by the culture around us. Ours is a world steeped in propaganda and propaganda messaging. Many people think of propaganda as the process of making you believe lies. But that is not the true point and goal of propaganda at all.The real purpose of propaganda is mostly to integrate you into modern life, and to support and reinforce the main messages of modernity. One such message is that human beings are always progressing towards a better future. This progress will cost you nothing. It will largely be achieved through social engineering. You will not have to make any hard moral choices and instead will be free to pursue those things that make you happy. Modernity also tells us that there is no God and that all of our needs can be satisfied through material goods.As a cornerstone of this, we are told that because we are free to pursue whatever makes us happy, that the things we do privately to seek happiness are our business and we have a right to privacy.Every day we are bombarded with messages that reinforce these ideas of our fundamental freedoms and the right to do what we please on our own without anyone else meddling in our business.You do your thing and I will do mine. I will leave you alone if you leave me alone.This is the message that we want to hear. Propaganda works best when it is reinforcing messages we kind of want to hear anyways. And it is difficult to speak against the things we want to hear with propaganda. This is the other often misunderstood thing about propaganda: is that we want it, even need it, to survive in the world that modernity has built for us. We are isolated individuals freely pursuing our own private lives as we see fit. This is the world we want, and we want to be told that it is a good thing to want this.We even organize the habits of our church life around this. We struggle to receive elders into our homes for family visits. We don’t want church members to meddle too much in our lives. We like it that the pastor speaks and then we can go away and figure out for ourselves how best to live the Christian life. We don’t want anyone meddling in our lives or trying to disciple us, telling us what to do or what it means to be a good Christian.This message of Paul’s is one that we are going to struggle with because it really pushes back on the spirit of our age, which, truth be told, is an age of tremendous darkness. Paul nails the dirty little secret that no one wants to really acknowledge about the so-called “right to privacy”:“…it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”The so-called “right to privacy” is little more than the right to sin in secret without anyone finding out what you are doing. I have the right to not have anyone looking into or pointing out my sins. As long as I am not hurting anyone, what I do in private is my business. Right?Wrong. And most of us know it. But we don’t like it when people point this out to us.But the good news is that we as Christians, when we are embracing who we are in Christ, don’t live that way. This is not who we are.“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”The first observation we need to make is that this is a simple binary. You are either dark or light. There are no shades of grey. We like shadows and shades of grey because it allows us to convince ourselves that being partially illuminated is better than nothing.Paul here is describing two states of being. Note that he didn’t say were we “under darkness” or “in the light.” Rather, he describes this as the condition of our being, our essence. The NIV here is a really good translation of the Greek.You were once darkness. Your essence, you being was darkness. This was who you are. It’s not like you were a good person trapped in a bad place. Its not like a movie set in a grim, dark world where everything is dark and shadowy and you are good people hiding and huddled away from the forces of darkness just waiting for the hero to come rescue you and bring you to a place of light and goodness where you true nature can now shine.No. You were darkness. You were part of the problem. You were part of that oppressive blackness that kept everyone prisoner in the darkness of their own deeds. This was the essence of your being. Blackened and dark.You needed a change of being, of essence.That change of being has happened because of Jesus. You are now light “in the Lord.” This is a variation of the technical term “in Christ” that I mention all the time. “In Christ” you are light. You have had a fundamental change in your being in your essence.Just as you are a new creation, just as you have already been raised from the dead, so too you are now light. Not in the light, but light itself.Verse 14 ties this to the resurrection by quoting what looks like an early Christian saying. Paul is reminding them of something they already know and is fleshing it out more. The resurrected life is the life of light.We know that who we are “in Christ” is hidden “in Christ” and that the spiritual life is centered around revealing who we are “in Christ.” It is not just spiritual. It is also physical, material. We are light. We are luminous beings who already have our resurrection bodies “in Christ.” Our faith journey is about showing our true luminous nature to the world.Because you are light in Christ, be who you are, live as children of the light. Paul then describes this much like the fruit of the Spirit. In Galatians 5, Paul tells us that if we live by the Spirit, to keep in step with the Spirit. Be who you are. Be a child of the light, not a child of darkness. “In Christ” you are light. So be light. Be who you are.Don’t be the person you were. Don’t be the collection of bad decisions you once were making. Don’t be flesh. Don’t be darkness. That is no longer who you are even if all the evidence says otherwise. This is faith. See who you are “in Christ.” “In Christ” you are light. You are a luminous being already raised from the dead.The fruit of the light is goodness, righteousness and truth. Seek what pleases the Lord. This is a variation of “set your hearts on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”Don’t go back to your old ways. Don’t go back to darkness because this is no longer who you are. Rather, he says, expose the deeds of darkness for it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.And here we need to confront a common misperception of how the Christian is supposed to relate to the world of darkness out of which he has been rescued by Christ.First of all, we need to note that we are in a spiritual battle. This is a war between good and evil, light and dark, between God the true King and Satan the usurper king.So, what is the nature of this battle? Are we supposed to go around pointing out all of the sins of others. Are we supposed to stride into the world of darkness and start speaking out to everyone all the evil things they do?This is a real battle, a real conflict. But it is not a noisy battle. We have to remember, what is one of the names of the evil one? He is the Accuser. Remember our series on Job, where we looked into the meaning of the name, “Satan.” It means “Accuser.” But specifically, it means someone who spies on people to reveal their secrets, the shameful things they do in private.What does Paul say here, “It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”There is a subtle thing going on here. We become the things we focus on. If we are continually focused on exposing the shameful things people do in secret, we become infected by these things we focus on. And more importantly we become imitators of Satan himself, the accuser.Instead, you are to set your minds on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or noteworthy, think about such things.Live as children of the light. This is not being passive. You are engaged in a battle against darkness, but you do not fight it by focusing on the darkness. You fight this battle by focusing on the light and being luminous beings in a world of darkness.The world hates the light because their deeds are wicked and they don’t want them exposed. They fear their deeds will be exposed. By being who you are in Christ, your being light, that alone is an offense to the world. The very fact of your goodness, your light nature, will expose the things of the world. You will not have to even speak about them. It is shameful to even mention them.In our media saturated world there is a great temptation to start talking about evil. Set up a podcast or a Twitch stream and start exposing the world, you know, how terrible our elites are and all the horrible things they are doing. We are going to bring all the dark conspiracies to light. We will expose all the immorality in the world.The problem with this is that we are playing the enemy’s game and trying to be better at it than Satan himself, the accuser. The more you point the finger at the shameful things of darkness, the more you open yourself to the counter-accusations of hypocrisy.It is far better to be the light than it is to be accusing others of living in darkness. The light itself is a form of judgement. Calvin put it this way:“The world neither sees their own baseness, nor do they think it will be seen by God.”Who we are, the contrast between light and dark, shows, rather than tells about the difference. Being the light says, “You are darkness” far better than words ever could. Without words, without accusation, merely by the strength of our presence we say to the world, “We are the light.”The discipleship process is different, though.in that part of being in the community of believers is confession, is talking about the sin and darkness that cling to us and inhibit the light. It means letting the light shine one us. It means welcoming having others reflect back to us the things we cannot see or refuse to see in ourselves. But this is happening inside the community of grace, within the body of Christ where everyone together is committed to revealing who they are in Christ. By declaring our faith in Christ, we are saying that we want to live in the light so that our deeds can be seen plainly.This is why this is the narrow path. It is a hard life. Being the light in a world of darkness is daunting. Christ himself said in John 8:12“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”You are in the Lord. You are in Christ. You are light. You have and show the light of life. You are now a light shining into a world of darkness. So, shine. Be who you are. Be that luminous resurrected person that you are “in Christ.”Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

An interesting piece was brought to my attention: a reflection on the so-called "Cain and Abel" story. I was going to respond with a note, but there is enough here to warrant a short meditation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Some recent questions in my replies require longer answers than a mere "reply" can provide. One such query on immigration got me thinking and gave me an opportunity to think through this issue. Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Black Horse recently posted a monologue on the fertility crisis, making the big point that almost everything you think caused it, didn't because most of your assumptions about it are wrong.Here is the video monologue from The Red Ensign Substack (with charts!): https://theredensign.substack.com/p/tre-special-15-modernity-and-fertilitySponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Ben Fleming and I get together to discuss Edmund Burke because of a series of exchanges on Twitter with Erin O’Toole where he suggested that what is needed today is “ordered liberty.” When we mocked this idea, he suggested that we might benefit from reading more Edmund Burke who is seen as the intellectual forefather of modern conservatism. Ben and I thought to ourselves, “Why not?” So we embraced the challenge and set out to read some Edmund Burke for ourselves, specifically his Reflections on the Revolution in France. I, for one, was glad that I finally got around to doing this reading. It was an interesting read and it explains a lot of what is wrong with so-called “conservatism” today. To his credit, Burke saw today coming. Unfortunately, his prescriptions simply lack any real ability to apply a limiting force on liberal modernity.Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today!Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Pulpit NotesOne of the compliments that people often give when assessing a sermon is that it was “meaty.” What they often mean is that it was heavy in theology or history. It made them think about the text. Perhaps they learned something that they didn’t know before.In our text this morning Paul draws a contrast between milk and solid food. In most of our minds, our default understanding of this is to think of “milk” sort of like a Sunday school level of understanding the Christian faith. Or maybe it is the kind of message that might appeal to new believers.But we want “meat.” Good heavy sermons that you have to chew on for a while first before swallowing and digesting it. Just like a steak. I mean you wouldn’t feed steak to kids. They would just complain how hard it is to chew.So that is the contrast that we have in our minds as we hear Paul writing these words to the Corinthians. But this gets the whole passage wrong.We have to read chapter three here as an application of chapters one and two. In the previous chapters, Paul draws a contrast between the wisdom of the world, which is foolishness to God and the wisdom which comes from God.Paul explains that God’s wisdom comes out of the heart of God, taught to us by the Spirit of God. The man of the Spirit is the one who knows spiritual truths that come from the very heart of God. He is a man, filled with the Spirit, who meets God and is in contact with God throughout his life.The question that Paul is asking here is whether you have made the journey from spiritual infancy and childhood to adulthood. The adult is the one who communes with the heart of God himself by means of the Spirit. He is taught spiritual things by the Holy Spirit, the wisdom that resides in the secret places of God the Father himself.The question that lays in the background here is, “Do you know the heart of God? “Have you met God?” Are you a ‘spiritual’ man, a man of the Spirit?”The implication is that the Corinthians, who love worldly knowledge, worldly wisdom, all the stuff of rhetoric and philosophy, for all their knowledge, they are still children who need milk.What Paul is saying here is that theology, theological rigor, all the things that we would consider to be meat, all of this is the kinds of stuff the world loves. Rational discussions. Debating Christian ideas. Discussing creeds and confessions. Its all spiritual baby food. Milk.What Paul is concerned with here is whether or not you are living the resurrected life. “In Christ” we are a new creation. “In Christ” we have been raised from the dead.Are we living the resurrected life? Are we being transformed into spiritual men and women with spiritual bodies? Are we revealing our resurrected bodies to the world?He draws a contrast in the opening of the passage. Is your focus on “the flesh” or on “the spirit?”Here, the English translation in the NIV is not helping us. Paul is drawing a contrast between two states of being. One is our earthly, fleshly state. The other is who we are in the resurrected life, our spiritual state in the new earth where we have a spiritual, imperishable, resurrected body.The NIV makes it sound like a “horizontal” divide between us and the world. Rather, we should see this more as a vertical divide. Are you stuck in your old, earthly, fleshly way are living; or are you embracing your life that his now hidden “in Christ” in the heavenly realm?The Christian faith is not therapy. It is not life lessons or self-help. The Christian faith is not about getting everything together and living your best life.The Christian faith, the Christian life, the Way, is about revealing the saving work of God that was accomplished in Jesus Christ. Are you revealing the saving work of God in Christ?The σαρκικοί, those who are “people of the flesh” are contrasted to the πνευματικοῖς, the “people of the Spirit.”The σαρκικοί are those who hold on to fleshly characteristics. Paul is thinking here about those who want to hold onto the wisdom of the world. The so-called wisdom of the world tells us we can’t meet God and that if we do there is nothing there to actually know. Not like things you can see and touch. At best all that we can know about God is that we can maybe get a feeling of something greater than us. But this feeling has no real content. There is nothing there to know. It’s just a fleeting emotion.Unfortunately, far too many of us as Christians, most of us, have accepted this critique and said in response, “But God had revealed himself in the scriptures.” So, we study the Bible and we develop complex theologies out of the Bible. None of this is bad. Sound teaching and theology is important. Its just, in Paul’s mind, spiritual milk.The real content, the real meat, comes from meeting God in the Spirit and encountering the deep mysteries of his heart.This is what frustrates Paul. You guys are arguing over who is the better teacher, me or Apollos, but this is the wrong question.Now we have to be clear here, Paul is not saying that theological teaching is a bad thing. Good theology is important. And there is still a battle for our minds, between us and the world. He talks about this in Colossians, that we should not be taken captive by the deceptive philosophies of the world.And we are warned that deceptive teachers will try to worm their way into the community and lead people away from sound teaching.But sound teaching is only the beginning. It is milk. The meat is God himself.By expressing loyalty to earthly teachers or schools of theology, as if giving the correct rational theological understanding of the Bible and theology is the goal, we end up having a diet of nothing but baby’s milk. Baby formula. Correct theology is not the goal. At best, it is the starting point. It is the stuff of spiritual children.Many of us have deep theological knowledge and think we have arrived somewhere, that we have reached the goal. At best we are now ready for the real journey.The real journey is drawing close to God. As I have said before, God is out there, he is in here, he is all around us doing his work all the time. Our journey is to join him in his work.One of the primary outlets, the primary vehicles for him to reveal the resurrected life of the new heaven and the new earth is through us. Even if this is seen but, in a mirror, dimly, this dim reflected light that shines in the darkness will seem like the sun itself is shining upon us and the world around us.Paul is very clear. I planted. Apollos watered. But God makes the plants grow. Whatever happens it is because we are growing closer to God in the Spirit and he is able to reveal in us ever more of his saving work.We come alongside God and we help him in his work. God reveals to the world his saving work through us. Again, Paul is clear. It isn’t about me and my teaching. My teaching just gets things started. You want the real teaching, you want the real wisdom that isn’t taught by human words but is taught by the Spirit of God himself.This is the thing that world denies. That God can be met. In meeting God there is real content, real substance. That meeting is the meat, the solid food that we as human beings crave. God himself is that nice juicy barbecued steak.We often make the mistake, when the milk of a rational, theological faith no longer sustains us, is that we don’t break out of the modern denial that God can be met. Instead, we turn to the emotional. We want our heart to be moved. But emotions are not the same thing as meeting God. They are often a simulacrum: us convincing ourselves that meeting God should feel a certain way and so we go chasing that feeling.And once we start chasing feelings, it’s easy to forget even the spiritual milk of theology and sound moral instruction. We just do what we feel is right.The whole “head/heart” thing has been a disaster for the church.Instead, we should be looking to God, to meet and be with God.It is God who makes us grow. “Only God makes things grow,” Paul says. That includes us in our spiritual lives.Paul is telling us that unity does not come from rational theological agreement. It doesn’t come from feelings. The answer is not going to come from resolving the differences in emphasis or the way that Paul or Apollos give the teaching of the gospel. It does not matter is Paul or Apollos is more sophisticated or has the better answer on this or that question.Real unity does not come from theological teaching. Theology is just milk. It is baby food.Real unity comes because together, sharing in the same Holy Spirit, we are as a people are brought into the heart of God and are taught by the Spirit, spiritual truths in spiritual words. We trust that our differences will be resolved in the presence of God through Christ.What God is looking for is the reversal of the separation that occurred because of our sin in the Garden of Eden.God wants us to be spiritual men who know his heart, his mind, his wisdom.Paul begins by addressing these men as “brothers.” They are believers. But they are children. They are men of the flesh. They want earthly wisdom. They are not seeking the things of God.Just being in the church for a long time does not make one a spiritual man. Being considered wise by earthly standards does not make one a spiritual man.It is a thing that we are seeking with all that we have, it is the pearl of great price. And yet at the same time, even as we work to make ourselves ready, ultimately we are waiting on the Lord for him to make it grow.Sometimes the waiting is the point.As we wait, we read the Word and meditate on its teachings. We pray, continually. We gather for worship and communion. We give our gifts. We serve.In all of this, none of it is the cause of our growth. God can use any and all of these things, just like he used the teaching of Apollos and Paul, he can use all of these things to make us grow, to build us up into his temple, his holy people with whom he can commune.You may trust God, but does God trust you. Remember, God will be revealing his very heart, the spiritual wisdom, spiritual truths, he will be revealing in and through you the heavenly life.We are God’s building, his work.The whole point of it all is that today, here and now, we are able to live and experiencing the new life, the resurrected life, the life of union with God in the Spirit, taught by the same Spirit spiritual truths in spiritual words.This life of union with God in the Spirit is the meat, the solid food that we crave.Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Ever since the phrase, "You can just do things" hit the online ecosystem, it has troubled me, in large part because it gives the promise that "fixing" everything would be easy if we just had the will. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe