Christ told his disciples shortly before his Passion, "But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved" (Matt 24:13). So Paul in his Letter to the Galatians is similarly frank about the effort that obtaining the promise of salvation will require of us: "And let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not" (Gal 6:9). When, then, Paul in his Letter to the Romans analogizes the path leading to salvation to a race, it is because entrance into the kingdom of heaven demands our endurance. For the obstacles we encounter along the way are prodigious. From frustration with the world's corruption and injustice, to disgust with its hypocrisy or sadness over its many sorrows and sufferings, there are many reasons we might grow weary and despair in the face of the world. It is this fundamentally agonistic dimension of existence which God's word addresses, by exhorting us not to quit. Further developing the phenomenology of faith begun in In the Spirit, Steven DeLay's Faint Not articulates how the existence lived before God--one of hope, faith, and love--is the life which transfigures temporality in light of eternity, the life, in short, which accordingly perseveres to the end, to that of eternal life.
