Baxter Kruger

Weekly wanderings

Lindis Pass

Davey Henreckson on Charles Taylor and on Calvinists and disenchantment.
Beth Doherty on Haiti and the best and worst of Christianity.
Bruce Simpson asks (hopefully) whether the whole Google and China thing might be the thin end of the wedge.
Thomas Bartlett on why ‘Google needs to realise that China is simply being China’.
American VI: Aint No Grave by Johnny Cash – it’s a coming soon!!!
Michael Wood reviews Avatar.
Jessa Crispin, the editor and founder of Bookslut, on ‘the predictable American response to translated literature’.
Mike Bird on ‘What is happening to Intervarsity?’
Andrew Errington posts 10 reasons on ‘why I believe in infant baptism’.
Robert Fisk on the never-ending exodus of Christians from the Middle East.
C. Baxter Kruger on why Paul Young (author of The Shack) and Athanasius are singing from the same song sheet.
The Karen Human Rights Group has produced a 98-page photo album containing 125 images of life in rural Karen State. The book is called Patterns of Abuse: Photographs of rural life in a militarized Karen State. It’s a fundraiser for a very worthwhile group, so please join me in buying a copy – or more – if you can.

Baxter Kruger has entered blogdom

C. Baxter Kruger has started blogging. When he’s not fishing, Dr Kruger (whose doctoral supervisor was James Torrance) serves as the Director of Perichoresis Ministries. He has authored 7 books, including The Great Dance, Jesus and the Undoing of Adam and Across All Worlds (which I mentioned here). I also mentioned Baxter in this review on the recent book, An Introduction to Torrance Theology.

He writes on in his first posting:

It was not the Father’s anger or the Holy Spirit’s that was poured out on Jesus; it was ours. We rejected him, cursed him, beat him and brutally murdered him. Either the Father, Son and Spirit were caught off guard by our horrific response to Jesus, or our bitter rejection of Jesus was clearly anticipated and deliberately used as the way of reconciliation.

Along with the launch of his blog, Baxter has made available a copy of his latest essay, ‘Bearing Our Scorn’. Here’s a taster from that essay:

The eternal, unflinching purpose of the Father, Son and Spirit is to share their trinitarian life with us, and to bring us to taste and feel and know and experience their shared life—adoption. But such sharing of life necessarily involves meeting us where we are in our tragic alienation. “Reconciliation means sharing in all that the other is.” But how can the Lord really meet us in our fallenness, share in our confusion, and identify with us? It would seem impossible that the blessed Trinity could so enter into our miserable, projecting nightmare as to make contact with the real us. But what is reconciliation if it leaves the real us trapped in our confusion, unable to hear and see and receive the Father’s love? What kind of reconciliation would it be that declared humanity legally clean, yet left us lost in the cosmos of the fallen mind and its appalling pain?

Across All Worlds

C. Baxter Kruger’s writings have always been a real blessing to me. His latest offering, Across All Worlds, is no different. The book is written in honour of his PhD supervisor, Professor James Torrance, and is a tribute with which JB would be pleased. Here’s a poem from the book’s opening:

Across all worlds
He came for us
With Father’s passion burning

With strength unknown
In Spirit’s fire
He fought for our undoing

What love, what care
What fearless joy
Has found us in the night

That we may know
As he has known
The everlasting light

Awake, My child
Your fear lay down
There’s hope for which you long

The night is day
The Son has come
The Father’s heart is strong