Stirring Waters: Wrestling with Faith in a Restless Age

By Bart L. Brenner and Wayne E. Purintun

In Stirring Waters, Brenner and Purintun tackle a host of questions surrounding the traditional understandings of Christian beliefs and present a variety of perspectives on the key topics of Bible, God, Yeshua, spirit, and more. They go beyond the “why” to asking, “so what.”

Through questions and discussion starters, Stirring Waters offers a fresh way of making sense of faith and church. It wrestles with the ambiguities, uncertainties, and risks of this age and discusses the possibilities the authors have discovered for making sense of life and death. It delves into a conversation about faith and understanding of those mysteries Christians often associate with God and the religious life.

I can’t tell you what kind of book this is—theology, spiritual autobiography, memoir, practical guide. It is all of these and none of these. Probably, it is a category that has not been invented until this moment. I can tell you that this book did for me today what Marcus Borg and Dom Crosson did for me at the end of the last century.”
[From the Preface by Dr. David R. Sawyer]

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781489724144

Bart L. Brenner

Bart L. Brenner and Wayne E. Purintun draw upon thirty-five years of a spiritual journey in which they committed themselves to reflect together on their ministry as pastors and denominational executives. Out of their experience, their engagement with creative thinkers and their continuing conversations, they have begun to ask different questions about foundational matters relating to the journey in faith.

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Copyright © 2019 Bart L. Brenner and Wayne E. Purintun.

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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this publication are from the Common English Bible. © Copyright 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked (GNT) are from the Good News Translation in Today’s English Version- Second Edition Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by Permission.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2413-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2412-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2414-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019909959

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 08/28/2019

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Ponder, Wander, And Wonder

Introduction

A Spirit Of Restlessness Stirs The Waters

Chapter 1    Engaging Scripture

How Can I Believe The Bible When It Says The World Was Created In A Week?

Chapter 2    Windows on the God Event

What Is This Presence That Keeps Troubling Me?

Chapter 3    Parables About Yeshua

Who Is Yeshua And Why Does He Keep Invading My Space?

Chapter 4    Invitations from the Spirit

Why Is Mystery So Mysterious?

ChapteR 5    Musing on Church and Community

Will My Christian Community Ever Resemble Yeshua’s basileia theou (Kingdom Of God)?

Chapter 6    Faith and Spirituality

Am I On A Faith Journey, Wandering Through The Wilderness, Or Just Wobbling?

Chapter 7    Justice and Culture

When God And Pharaoh Clash Inside Me, Is There Any Hope?

Chapter 8    Looking Ahead

In The Final Analysis, Is There Any Final Analysis?

Chapter 9    Drinking from Deep Wells

Our Search For The Lost Things; Our Standing As Rightful Owners

A Concluding Postscript

Learnings, Challenge, And Benediction

Addendum: Select Readings

An Invitation To Go Further

Notes

FOREWORD

Here is a book that fits the definition of radical—"of or going to the root or origin; fundamental: a radical difference. Thorough-going or extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms" (dictionary.com). The first clue is the title that invokes the image of the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem described in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John. One who enters the water while it is whirling and bubbling can be transformed. The usual translation is that the person can be healed, but it also means a deeper, more fundamental change of heart and mind.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, ideas about religion are very much swirling around us. The old certainties about the Christian faith are wearing thin and traditional church leaders have been reluctant to look around and realize the furnishings of the house of faith are a little shabby around the edges. Stirring Waters is the result of Bart Brenner’s and Wayne Purintun’s cleaning out their intellectual basements of worn-out hand-me-down beliefs and practices that have outlived their usefulness.

I’ve closely observed Bart Brenner and Wayne Purintun as they eased into the stirring waters that led to this book. I have known them almost as long as they have known each other and they are probably my closest friends. My own struggle with antiquated beliefs has paralleled theirs. After they retired from active church leadership, they recognized that the words and images traditionally used to describe the Christian faith have become unintelligible to use the word of theologian Gordon Kaufman. Through a self-imposed program of reading, they searched widely and deeply in challenging current and ancient writers. Each author awakened new insights and fresh answers that allowed them to jettison those worn-out hand-me-down beliefs and practices that have outlived their usefulness. In that process, they did not abandon their Christian heritage. Instead they discovered fresh perspectives on the ways of Yeshua and the church that has emerged along the way.

The act of turning that into a book was unexpected, however. Not so much for Bart, who has written extensively on his Blog and in articles. But Wayne always said that the option of writing a book was absolutely out of the question for him. Here’s what I saw happening. After more than 30 years of sharing their spiritual struggles and insights with each other, and going on retreats together, leading retreats and workshops together, they both came to imagine something more. It started with rewriting the Psalms, finding ways to make sense of the parts that are definitely uncomfortable. Next, they started long-distance discussions about what they were reading. As that interchange progressed, they began piecing together ways of understanding faith that matched their own spiritual experiences. Those conversations became for them a creative playground of fertile imagination and dialogue. Then, without warning, Wayne was ready to write a book!

As long and close as their friendship has been, they are quite different from each other. I’m not sure I fully comprehend what they mean when they write that Bart is the haunted writer, the one with imaginative ideas, and Wayne is the ghostfeeler, the one with compassionate feelings and experiences. I do know that they discovered in their basic and real differences the creation of fresh new intelligence that could not have existed without the combination of their unique perspectives.

In these pages you’ll experience not only a fresh way of making sense of faith and church, but an original way of writing. You will not find here answers to either their or your questions. Rather as good teachers and designers of educational events, they offer the reader questions and discussion starters. Along the way they throw in some hints about how they are living with the ambiguities, uncertainties and risks of this age, and about the possibilities they have discovered so far for making sense of life and death. Clearly, they are two wise and fallible human beings writing for this postcertain age.

I can’t tell you what kind of book this is—theology, spiritual autobiography, memoir, practical guide. It is all of these and none of these. Probably, it is a category that has not been invented until this moment. I can tell you that this book did for me today what Marcus Borg and Dom Crosson did for me at the end of the last century.

As you dip your toe into these waters, I commend to you the example of Nahshon, from a Talmudic expansion on the story of Moses and the people of Israel standing on the banks of the Red Sea. Before the waters parted, as fear and doubt crept into everyone’s hearts, Nahshon, brother-in-law to Aaron, plunged in chin-deep fully trusting that the waters were going part.

Go ahead and wade right in, fully expecting to think creatively about living in the early twenty-first century as a person of faith.

David R. Sawyer

Flourishing Church Consulting and Coaching; retired Professor of Ministry, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary; author of Pathmarks to New Church: a Workbook for Leaders of Communities in Search of Innovation

PREFACE

PONDER, WANDER, AND WONDER

This book is the product of conversations between the authors that began in June 1983. Those conversations have been punctuated by retreats, study, teaching, grieving, and mutual commitment. As church leaders and men of faith, we have pondered, wandered, and wondered together for thirty-five years We lamented, repented, and then attempted repairs.¹

Pondering

Our pondering becomes lament when we hear God described as using his [sic] power to sacrifice his son to satisfy his goals, and when the church denies or opposes the core values inherent in Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) challenge of institutional power. We lament when others worship Yeshua² as a God, to the detriment of his humanity. We ponder how symbolic images, such as heaven and hell, transfer attention from life to life after death. We lament when the Hebrew and early church scriptures are used to create an air of superiority by excluding (and damning) those who believe differently.

Who would not lament when Christians revile one another over doctrinal differences? Who would not ponder when hearing Israel’s prophets or Yeshua’s challenging the existing power structures to focus their attention on the marginalized and poor rather than the privileged and powerful? Our pondering becomes lament when immigrant children are separated from their parents and then placed in detention camps that are prisons. Our pondering passes into lament when political maneuvering causes those who are struggling to lose hope.

We find echoes of our pondering and lamentation in the scriptures of Israel and the early Christian church. Those echoes remind us that ponderings and lamentations are not final resting places. They are discovery tools, invitations that open up the creative doorways to the wandering and wondering that follows in the way of Yeshua.

Wandering

We characterize the Christian life as a journey of faith. The journey can seem erratic and random—the forty-year wandering of the Hebrews, heading for the land full of milk and honey (Exodus 3:8, et al.); specific and determined—Yeshua’s final journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:53); or a hope for the future—Paul’s intention to visit Spain (Romans 15:24). Our thirty-five-year journeying together has had the same variability. In the early years of our friendship, our wanderings took us to the Ecumenical Theological Institute in pursuit of D. Min. degrees that grounded our ministries in a deeper spirituality. As a result, we looked more deeply into the grounding of our faith journeys and invited those with whom we ministered to explore how their ministries, as laity and clergy, were grounded. We encouraged them to continue learning how the mystery³ of life that comes in the name of God grounds them, others, and the world.

In retirement, our footing has changed. Not that we have lost our edge, but our edge has changed. We are no longer dependent upon clock and calendar. Because we do not need to tightly scheduled our days, discretionary time is heightened. We are more aware of the broad sweep of things. Ironically, while our retirement income (Social Security plus church pension) comes directly from civil and religious empires, we have the freedom (and one would hope, the maturity) to take a broader, deeper view of life and its mystery.

Retirement and the death of our spouses has intensified the aloneness of our lives. Our aloneness has been punctuated by retreats, joint travel, and the development of a daily reading lectionary in the areas of particular challenge: radical theology, continental philosophy, biblical exegesis, mystical tradition, the intersection of religion and science, and progressive thinking about the faith journey. We meet monthly for a twenty-four-hour retreat with a group of friends and colleagues, and periodic retreats at monasteries. As we travel together, our wanderings have taken the shape of pilgrimages—not to holy sites, per se, but visits with family and friends, and to new places—experiencing the mystery of holiness that is already present in people and places. In Truro, Nova Scotia, it was Victoria Park where, after a day of driving, we found hiking trails for wandering and picnic tables for wondering and journaling.

In retirement, we have honored our commitment to lifelong learning by adopting a process of wandering by guided reading. Each day we both read the same chapter in a particular book and then discuss, via telephone, how what we have read challenges our thoughts, feelings, and faith journeys.

We find ourselves in conversation, not only with one another but also with the authors we are reading. Our agreements and disagreements with them and with one another challenge us. When reading, one of us tunes into the structure of the author’s thinking, while the other is more attuned to the feelings and experiences of the author. Our conversation blends heart and head. Sometimes that leads to new insights which challenge and transform our faith journeys. At other times, we repent as individuals and as members of the church.

As ministers serving congregations and regional denominational bodies, we often did not breathe new life into traditional Christian doctrines. In retrospect, we think we were trained to provide leadership for a dying church. Looking at the state of health of those churches that used to be called the mainline denominations, we must accept the failure of our generation of seminary-trained ministers. The church has experienced a serious decline in church membership on our watch. There has been a significant increase of those called the nones and dones.⁴ But that is not the end of the story.

Wondering

Our ponderings and wanderings have taken us to places where our sensitivities are rubbed raw, along with the sensitivities of others. While this book shares some of our pondering, wandering, lamenting, and repenting, it is much more about our wondering how we might address the current spiritual crises of church and society. We wonder how we might repair and renew a broken world, starting with our broken selves.⁵ Our retirement wanderings have prompted us to wonder in ways different from before. We have taken the time to sit and wonder during our wanderings.

We wander far and wonder deep. We look for theopoetic musings, rather than rationally discursive answers. We are intrigued by impossible possibilities that spook us, rather than theological verities that inform us. We know that there are no simple fixes, no short answers, to life’s mystery.

What we offer here are our wonderings. We wonder if new ways of talking about religious experience, without depending on all the traditional theological buzz words, might open us to a deeper spirituality. We wonder if the simple, radical way of life—the commonwealth of peace and tender justice⁶—taught and lived by Yeshua might not be a way to move beyond the complexities of contemporary political bluster and social exclusionary practices. We wonder if having a religious or spiritual approach to life—grounded in faith, hope, and love—might mean that we can at best feel our way, like a blind man with a stick, unsure and unsteady, trying to be prepared for something that will take us by surprise.⁷

Surprise is a hallmark of a living and dynamic faith. We continue to ask, along with Paul, What’s next. Papa?⁸ We are not asking for a detailed plan for the future. Instead, we are declaring ourselves open to whatever the future discloses. No matter how outrageous or uninspiring the present seems, nor how dismal the immediate future portends, we will stay anchored in the present moment—the eternal now, shaped by memories of the past and lured by the undisclosed future.

We ponder, wander, and wonder. We wait and we ask questions. This book is a product of questions that have arisen in our expectant, anticipatory waiting. It reflects our commitment to dig deeply into much that we had previously taken for granted. We stay grounded in the present moment.

Do you ponder and lament about the headlines of violence and destruction? Have you wandered into the mystery? Do you wonder how the world, that seems careening out of control, might be repaired and restored? If you are looking for quick answers, this is not the book for you. Instead, we will offer a variety of perspectives on the key topics of the book—Bible, God, Yeshua, Spirit, et al. As we proceed, we value questions over answers, curiosity over certitude, and relationship over doctrine. We try to go beyond the dead end that Why? secures. We move beyond Why? by continually asking So What? When answers to our questions do not come, we are content to embrace the discomfort and stay in the moment. We invite you to join with us in our continuing conversation

INTRODUCTION

A SPIRIT OF RESTLESSNESS STIRS THE WATERS

This book results from a thirty-five-year friendship between two pilgrims who have covenanted to take the risk of journeying together in faith, challenging and supporting one another. In retirement, and after the death of our wives, we developed a lectionary of readings that probe deeply into the dynamics of faithful reflection. Our covenant is to read, to talk daily by phone, and to share retreat time together periodically. The resulting conversations have engaged the two of us in a process of lectio Divina: exploring the way each one’s life and faith intersect with the divine mystery. Each has become anam cara, soul brother to the other.

I, Bart, am an unregenerate retired progressive Presbyterian minister who likes to think outside the box. I have always bridled in the face of traditional theological formulations while appreciating the concepts that seem to lurk behind those formulations. Too many of the formulations seem locked in a worldview that no longer is valid; inadequate for meeting the demands of life in today’s world. They suggest beliefs and actions that seem so contrary to the intentions demonstrated in the life and teachings of the one who is proclaimed Lord and Savior—leading followers toward violence instead of peace, separation instead of solidarity, consumerism instead of stewardship, and paternalism instead of justice.

I, Wayne, am also a retired Presbyterian minister, also progressive, and one who is comfortable operating outside the box. I have a deep compassionate heart for those who are the victims of injustice and a strident opposition toward those who perpetuate the injustice. As an unashamed people watcher, I am stirred to ask How is that going for you? What is the core of what you are feeling? I have often found myself in situations where, to my surprise, I have been asked to provide leadership. I am impatient with worn out theologies and religious practices. I cherish those who will work on building communities of meaning and purpose. For me God doesn’t exist; God persists by nagging, luring, and calling me to a fuller life of compassion, peace, and justice.

In the early stages of our writing, Bart realized that his ideas and regular trips to the thesaurus lacked something that Wayne provided: his relational compassion and sensitivity to the feeling level of experiences. Recalling how some authors have used a ghost writer to improve their writing, Bart exclaimed, I am not working with a ghostwriter, but a ghostfeeler!

Wayne retorted, noting that Bart had changed from his earlier years of trying to make rational sense out of mystery to something akin to the hauntology of John Caputo and Jacques Derrida. Bart is a haunted, haunting writer, finding presence and mystification amid everyday life, displac[ing] reality with specters… . God [being] that than which there is nothing spookier, nothing more haunting, nothing more haunted.¹

So, we are a team—a haunted writer and a ghostfeeler—committed to a hauntological theology. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, [w]e are spooked by voices coming back from the dead [the history of Christian theology], or luring us from the future, calling from who knows where, calling and disturbing us in the night.² We are spooked by the unconditional.

A common factor has bound us together over the years. As each of us has journeyed through life on a faithing pathway, we know that both our rootedness and grounding is in something bigger than who we are as individuals. We also experience a restlessness that results because we cannot fully know or understand that which grounds us and spooks us.

Two images have helped us attend to both the rootedness and the restlessness. The first is the interplay of Presence and Absence, of meaning and meaninglessness. The tension between Presence and Absence teases a richness of understanding out of us. Instead of having to choose one or the other, it is as if they are inviting us to dance together with them.

The second image is one that we have only recently discovered: Jacques Derrida’s pregnant image of a blind man poking with a stick. The words jumped off the page as both of us exclaimed That’s me! That’s the story of my journey in faith. I am a blind man poking around with a stick.

Feeling restless is not unique to us. It is characteristic of this postmodern, postcertain age in which we live. Each of us has experienced restlessness in differing ways, as nagging issues that continue to shape our lives, as they once shaped our ministries.

When Wayne transitioned from the pastor of a small congregation to a staff member of a regional denominational office, he began to ask a question that lasted for the entirety of his ministry as a regional executive. His question was Where is church for me? He was responsible for over fifty congregations