Re: [TruthTalk] Kruger

[ShieldsFamily]

Okay, I know you are all just hanging on the edge of your seats waiting to hear my pronouncements Re: Kruger.  Anyway, perhaps at least I won’t receive the devastating silence that I did on my LAST book report:   Some of what Kruger wrote in The Great Dance was nice.  Like, “There has never been an act of God that was not the act of Father, Son, and Spirit.”  Meaning they never act outside the knowledge of each other.  Makes me think of a good marriage.   HOWEVER, he also said that the holiness of God does not include “law and order, crime and punishment, blind and cold justice. Reconceived within this stainless steel world of pure law holiness came to mean legal perfection or moral rectitude. This notion of holiness was then taken back into the doctrine of God and substituted (by Western theology) for the Trinity as the deepest truth about God—the driving force of divine existence.”  Kruger only accepts in his definition of holiness things such as “joy,,,fullness…love…mutual delight and passion, sheer togetherness of their (Trinity) relationship, its intimacy, harmony, wholeness, wonder, beauty, health and rightness..”   In other words, Kruger rejects all the “negatives” of the justice side of God and accepts only the positive goodies.  This is so New Age that I don’t think I even have to point that out.  Kruger is unbalanced from the start.   Kruger then goes on to encapsulate the typical gospel message of “the human race fell into sin and is liable to punishment.  Jesus Christ…comes to satisfy the holiness and justice of God. On the cross…punishment is poured out upon him. God’s justice is satisfied and we are forgiven—legally clean.”  He then goes to say that this is “disastrously wrong”.  “Gone is the great dance of the Trinity and the astonishing vision of the Father, Son and Spirit reaching out to share their life and glory with us.”  (Well, what does he think Jesus Christ was—chopped liver???) “In its place we have a divine legalist who is extremely upset over human failure and  sin, and we have Jesus coming to rescue us from God. The death of Jesus us now aimed at God rather than at human corruption and alienation. Jesus comes to do something to God, to satisfy his white-glove legalities, even to change God so that we can be forgiven.”  And worst of all, Kruger states, “This shift from the centrality of Jesus Christ to the centrality of the cross is the great sin of the Western Church and the greatest sin of all disasters.”   I could stop right there and ask you—who can possibly have a saving relationship with Christ with such a belief?  I think no one.    Kruger says that “We hear a lot about forgiveness, but very little about the staggering reality of our inclusion in Jesus’ relationship with his Father in Spirit.”  (Obviously Kruger has never had the charismatic experience.)  “When people speak of Christ as the Mediator, they mean that he stands between an angry God and sinful people and straightens out the legal mess. Gone is the vision that he is the point of union between divine human life. Gone is the vision that he is the connection between the Trinity and humans and he mediate the Triune life of God to us.”   I don’t know what planet Kruger inhabits—but the very lack of the experience that he says people have who believe in the “legalist” God is exactly the kind of relationship I have always experienced since coming to Christ through that very legalist God that he says prevents it!  Obviously Kruger has never had a saving experience, has no understanding of the crux of the salvation message because it is abhorrent to his sensitive sensibilities, and so he has bypassed the very core of the gospel to create a new, cross-less “glorious relationship” without the Blood that purchases this very thing and fills us with the Holy Spirit—who alone can convey spiritual understanding of the spiritual concepts that Kruger does not understand.   He claims that thru the “legalist” gospel “There is no Trinity in it, no divine life, no divine dance. It is just human. Our lives and the totality of our human existence fall under the heading of ‘ordinary’.”  I find it absurd that he thinks one can circumvent the cross and find any true joy and satisfaction in life—and certainly anything beyond that—which I have long experienced THROUGH the cross!  Certainly the Trinity!   Kruger claims that Jesus took on the same fallen nature that all other human beings have been born with.  I don’t even find a problem with that statement, as long as he does not claim that Jesus ever sinned.  This to me is not worth arguing about—although I’m sure it is alarming to others.   Kruger goes on to describe all the delights of life when one enters into the same understanding of the Trinity as he has discovered.  I found it odd that he thought such thoughts were a new way of life that only he had discovered, such as the joy one takes is others, and in one’s work and leisure, and in the creation around us.  If he only knew, Kruger has no monopoly on the delights of walking in Christ—something I discovered many decades ago, and which Brother Lawrence described in the 1700’s in The Practice of the Presence of Christ.  Somehow, though, I’m left with the feeling that Kruger’s delights are more in his mind than in his actual experience (just like his salvation relationship with Christ.)   The amazing thing about Kruger is that he comes up with all of this, and the absolute topper: that what happened to Christ happened to the whole human race; ie: “If he goes down, the cosmos goes down. If he dies, then we die.”  In other words, the whole human race was born-again because Jesus went down and came foth from the grace and “the human race came forth with him, quickened with new life, born again in the Spirit into a living hope.  Whe he ascended to the Father, he took the whole human race with him”…and they were all “embraced and included in the great dance.”  We were all “recreated in the Holy Spirit”.    Please tell that to the parents of the 200 children who were just slaughtered by terrorists in Russia.    All of this with not one scriptural reference.     I could go on and on.  But need I?   Izzy