MINNEAPOLIS – The idea of living in covenant with God – listening, hearing, responding, following, being faithful, being loved – is both basic and complicated stuff.

Preachers and professors at the national gathering of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, which has drawn just over 400 people to Westminster Church  in Minneapolis on Nov. 6-8, have been trying to tease their own meanings out of the idea of an enduring and challenging covenant with a faithful God.

The theme of this conference is “Covenant: God is Faithful Still.”

Here’s some of what those speaking in Minneapolis had to say about that.

Walter Bruegemann. The author and theologian, retired as a professor of Old Testament from Columbia Theological Seminary, spoke on Nov. 7 of God making two kinds of covenants.

To Abraham, God offered an unconditional, unilateral covenant – “I will make of you a great nation and bless you.” Abraham would leave his homeland, as God instructed, and many blessings would follow.

To Moses, God offered a bilateral covenant, Brueggemann said. That is, “if you listen, if you heed, if you pay attention, you will be my people.”

Those different types of covenants are a reflection of the complexity of God, Brueggemann said. The same God who can be demanding, crushing and reprimanding also can be welcoming and affirming.

God is capable of self-criticism and of “more than one possibility,” Brueggemann said. God has “a capacity to come at the covenant partner in various ways, sometimes with cranky self regard, sometimes with generosity that only considers the partner.”

But the human response to that offer of covenant can be flawed, he said.  Some long for a God who is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient – a God of certititude.

So we become “selective fundamentalists,” choosing sides, looking for escape hatches. Sometimes conservatives lean towards absolutism, towards a God who is an oppressive, absolute sovereign. Liberals lean towards personal autonomy – to the idea of “spiritual but not religious.” In some ways, autonomy “sounds very much like U.S. policy,” Brueggemann said. “We’re not related to anybody, we’re not accountable to anybody.” But they are “twin violations that in the end make life unliveable.”

Instead, he called for a faith that embraces a “dialogical” God – a God who calls people to be in relationship with God and with each other.

Given their differences, can conservative and liberal Presbyterians live together in covenant, Brueggemann asked. And he gave his own answer, saying that he is grounded in the United Church of Christ and referring to “one of our finest theologians who recently said, ‘Yes, we can!’ ” – meaning, of course, Barack Obama.

During a question and answer session, Brueggemann was asked for examples of absolutism.

“Churches that want to excommunicate anybody who doesn’t toe any particular line the power structure has opted for,” he replied. “Super-patriots who believe that criticism of the United States is treason – that sort of business. It’s all around us.”

Someone else asked about how to learn to risk opening up to those who hold very different views.

“The point is to listen to the unarticulated narrative,” Brueggemann said. “The deepest, deepest yearning I have in my life is to have someone honor my narrative . . . Every one wants their narrative honored.”

Get beyond the mantras, “to find out who’s over there behind that mask,” he said. “If we do that at all, we can live in the same church.”

Diane Givens-Moffett. Givens-Moffett, pastor of St. James Church in Greensboro, N.C., preached during the evening worship Nov. 6. She is the daughter of an insurance salesman – a man who encouraged comprehensive coverage for everyone. The covenant God offers “is an assurance policy,” purchased by Jesus for the family of God, Givens-Moffett said. “We did not pay for this coverage because we can’t afford the bill.”

She used as her text a passage from the 15th chapter of Acts, in which Paul and Barnabas were involved in a church debate over the Gentiles. And she made the analogy that debates within the church are not necessarily bad – that “when we can argue well and debate openly, a new day can dawn, a new season can emerge, a new time can spring forth and our comprehensive covenant can be strengthened.”

Sometimes debate and discussion can open our eyes to the errors of our own thinking, Givens-Moffett said. And sometimes the furious debates “allow us to see a different picture and make a new sketch that is more in keeping with the God revealed in Jesus Christ.”

With time, “we can see how God keeps breaking out of the boxes we place God in, refusing to be shaped in our image, defined with our lines and drawn with our limited understanding.”

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