⁵ Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, ⁷ but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. ⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross…. ¹⁷ Yes, and if I am being poured out as a drink offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. –Philippians 2.5-8; 17

I want to take the ecstatic life of God noted in the above passage, and apply it to a discussion about what I will call the insular life. Right away you might notice the contrasting nature of the sorts of ‘lives’ I will be referring to. I take this issue to be at the very base of the Christian existence. As such, it requires further development and sobriety of thought; hopefully this brief excursus achieves some level of that.

So, I have introduced two terms—‘ecstatic life’ and ‘insular life’—ecstatic life is the sort of life that defines God’s life in Christ for us. In other words, Jesus’s humanity is a life that He is constantly given as the Son of God. It is not something He possesses, per se, but something He constantly, by the work of the Holy Spirit, is given, as He has chosen this givenness for us. What this implies for the way of the Christian, as they find their life in participation and union with Christ, is one that is always already shaped by looking away from ourselves, and to God who gives us life. It is a life, like the triune life, that is shaped by ‘in-relation-to-the-other-and-for-the-other.’

Contrariwise, the insular life is one that only operates for the self. As Luther might say it in soteriological terms homo in se incurvatus (the incurved in oneself human). This is in contest with the ecstatic life, and one that can only be cured by the ecstatic life. The insular life is in bondage to itself; it is a self-possessed demonic chaos that nihilistically seeks and asserts its self to an eternal destruction. It requires a life from outside of itself, an ‘alien-righteousness’ to invade it ‘from above’ and set it free from its inveterate desire to self-destruct. The irony of the insular life is that even when it has been set free by the ecstatic life and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, it continues to desire itself. Again, referring to Luther, he identified this schizoid type of existence as simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’). The Apostle Paul identifies this human duplex in warfare terms: ‘For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish’ (Gal 5.17).

We have a struggle, when we refer to ecstatic life and insular life, in biblical terms, between the Spirit anointed humanity we have been brought into in and through union with Christ versus the insular life which is of the seed of the first Adam who Christ put to death in ultimate ways. No matter what our station in life, priest, pastor, professor, physicist, pharmacist, philanthropist, pilot, or plebian we are all prone to fall back into the dead self-affirming way known as the insular life. Indeed, we might even build whole cathedrals, sub-cultures, halls, cliques, so on and so forth that institutionalize the insular life, and do it in the name of the ecstatic life. In other words, the insular life does not want to go away easy. Even though it has been put to death, as Paul says further ‘The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.’[1] This ‘enemy,’ this insular life, seeks to seduce us into thinking that it is actually the ecstatic life after all. As such, many partakers of the ecstatic life have fallen prey to this seduction, and in the name of ecstatic life, have constructed monuments that, at the end of the day, like the ‘Last Day,’ are actually idols made in the image of residual insular life still that is simultaneously present in the lives of those who are partakers of the ecstatic life.

It seems like I am speaking in code, a bit. But hopefully what I am attempting to impress is impressive enough. What I am really hoping to get across is the point that being a Christian requires dogged vigilance to be for Christ rather than against Christ every second of every day. This requires energy and endurance that we do not have in ourselves. So, I am calling the Christian to a ‘Lord-have-mercy’ (Kyrie eleison) existence wherein we are in prayerful moment by moment contact and posture with the God who is Life in and from Himself; the Life from whom we receive life (so ecstatic life). I am afraid positions, statures, and postures in the Christian world seduce people into thinking that they are in fact living in and from the ecstatic life as the mode of their daily lives when in fact they really aren’t. I’m afraid we have institutionalized things, even good things, like churches, seminaries, the ‘Christian intellectual life,’ so on and so forth in ways that are more in step with the insular life rather than the ecstatic life. As Thomas Torrance has noted we need to be in a constant posture of ‘repentant thinking’ before God, and simply ask Him moment by moment to keep us ‘in step with the Spirit’ rather than in step with the ‘enemy-life’ that is the insular life. Kyrie eleison

[1] I Corinthians 15.26 (NKJV).