God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

The questions of the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the sufferings of Jesus Christ are rarely treated. Our answers follow our larger commitments as to the nature of the atonement. Dr. Kruger contends that the purpose of the atonement is to establish real union between Jesus Christ (and the Father and the Holy Spirit in him) with the human race in its sin. The incarnation involves the submission of the Father's Son incarnate, and the Anointed One to humanity in its darkness and collusion with evil. On the cross, Jesus meets us at our absolute worst, accepts us, and unites himself with us in our darkness, thereby uniting us with his Father and the Holy Spirit. This vision of the death of the incarnate Son at once exposes the abstractness of the penal theory of atonement, and brings into focus Irenaeus' liberating insight that in Jesus the Holy Spirit was accustoming himself to dwell with us in our flesh.