One of the great ironies of Christian history and American history is that slave masters preached and taught black slaves a racialist form of Christianity. The slavers hoped the religion they preached to enslaved blacks would keep slaves docile. Yet, the teaching that filtered through racialist rhetoric was a story that fired the imaginations of the slaves: the story of the God who rescued the Hebrews from Egypt. That powerful story with visceral imagery ignited a Liberation Theology among those who understood that through the Exodus event God was the God of Liberation and the God of those Howard Thurman would call the disinherited. Some of those disinherited ones, far from resigning into docility, were inspired to rebellion. Both Denmark Vesey in South Carolina and Nat Turner in Virginia were Christian preachers.

Black slaves (and blacks who were free) learned and believed that it was the God of Liberation, the God of the Exodus, who expressed God’s self in Jesus of Nazareth and declared in Jesus that God was also the God of Resurrection power and, later, the God of Pentecost fire. It is that God on whom the ancestors rested their hopes and their dreams for themselves and for their unborn descendants. Those of us born out of those dreams and hopes are the living dreams of those dreamers. That is the legacy of enduring to the end and so their legacy to all Christians is a practical religion of hope born through the endurance of suffering. It is a religion that carries people through the darkest times of human beings’ inhumanity to one another and through the ravages of nature.

Yet, in view of the cruelty of slavery and the Middle Passage, the sickening specter of modern-day slavery, the horror of the Holocaust, using the atomic bomb against fellow human beings, the on-going capacity for thermonuclear annihilation, terrorism in the name of God, sexual abuse against children, the lists of cruelties and suffering seem endless; we are compelled to enter the thicket of theodicy to ask at least this basic question: why is suffering necessary to build endurance? Why redemptive suffering, if indeed such a thing exists? Obviously, there are no easy or fully satisfying answers to the theodicy issue (at least, not for me!). However, our reflection on the nature of God and God’s relationship to human beings must bring us to a place where we can at least project and find a sense of God’s goodness as we contemplate the deep questions of meaning and purpose in light of the existence of evil and suffering.

The scriptures, in fact, tell us that there is something good and noble about endurance and enduring suffering. Romans 5:3-5 declares that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope “and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” It is no coincidence that the Apostle connects suffering to endurance, endurance to character, character to hope, and hope to the love and presence of God in our lives through the Holy Spirit. That is because at least part of the answer we seek to Why endurance? Why suffering? is found in the nature of God. If endurance of suffering produces character, then there is something about suffering and endurance that connects us to God.

The Greek for endurance (perseverance, patience) is hupomone which means steadfastness or “not swerving from one’s deliberate purpose.” It is determination through pain and suffering that produces proven character (NASB). The word in Romans 5:4 for proven character is dokime which means “a specimen of tried worth.” Endurance results in a specimen of tried worth, that in turn is a definition of faith. We trust in the God of promises because we know that God keeps promises. God is a specimen of proven worth. That is what endurance is supposed to produce in us.

How Endurance Connects Us to God

If we are created in the image of God, then our capacity for suffering and our capacity to learn through suffering must be characteristics we inherited from God. God put that capacity in us. Doesn’t that imply that God had that same capacity within God’s self? Did God learn suffering through Jesus at Calvary? Maybe that’s part of Barth’s understanding of the humanity of God. Barth asserts that God through Jesus of Nazareth expresses God’s freedom to love through God’s capacity to bend downward to us.1 God is together with us (i.e., God is our partner), Barth says,2 in part, that God intends to see us through to spiritual, and indeed, human maturity. We learn, grow, and are molded through suffering that produces endurance which produces character which produces a hope that never dies and which connects us to God’s love. If we recognize the humanity of God through the Holy Spirit breathing and expressing God’s self through the universal church, the Body of Christ, i.e., through us, then part of what we recognize must be God’s capacity, not to mete out arbitrary sufferings (injustice), but God’s capacity to suffer. As James Cone states so eloquently, God is struggling with us!3 Then God’s capacity and ability to endure, is, in turn, poured into our lives by the Holy Spirit. This all happens because God loves us and wants us to reflect God back to God through the actualization of our capacity to grow. Endurance is growth.

For all our concern about why God requires suffering and blood, maybe it’s not God who requires suffering; maybe it’s us. Maybe human beings need the suffering to build the endurance that builds character. Our capacity for growth can be stretched by that which is noble and beautiful and by that which forces us to overcome. That kind of endurance is active, not passive, and that could be one of the ways that humans were created in the image of God. We have the capacity to suffer and to endure; we have the capacity for action over passivity; we have the capacity to choose love over hate; and we have the capacity to choose justice over injustice.

This is where we can address Sartre or Nietzsche. The meaning and purpose of our lives is rooted in our capacity for transformation. We can transform ourselves, and our world. Unlike the nihilistic existentialists, we do not believe all actions are morally equivalent or that all actions have no moral worth. Evil is real but so is the possibility of justice. Endurance is crucial in the pursuit of justice because both require a gathered community of like-minded people committed to making our world better. While the journey of endurance is a highly individual one, we gain strength in community where we face odds and obstacles together, envision the possibility for transformation, and then set about putting our efforts onto a hope that does not disappoint by actively working for that transformation in ourselves and in our communities.

Albert Raboteau asserts that along with actually laying seeds for rebellion against enslavement, that Christianity accepted and lived by slaves helped them build a sense of personal value and ultimate worth.4 Such a sense of worth could only be grounded in a faith strong enough to live through a suffering anchored in Jesus Christ. What the African-American ancestors who loved Jesus gave to Christianity is a legacy of a faith that endures. Having set their eyes on the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus and having set their shoulders to the wheel of surviving in a hostile world intent on stripping them of their humanity5 (most especially that part of themselves that reflected God), they did not swerve from their deliberate purpose. They endured suffering as active resistance to slavery and segregation, affirming their humanity.6 So, I end where I started, in a tribute to my ancestors. They did not know me, but they hoped for me. They did not know me, but they prayed for me. They did not know me, but they loved me. They did not know me, but they dreamed and endured for me.

Notes

1. Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Zurich: John Knox Press, English translation 1960), 48-49.

2. Ibid., 45.

3. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, revised edition, 1997), 169.

4. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 318.

5. Ibid.

6. Cone, Ibid, 178.

About the author

Reginald Brantley wrote 3 articles for this publication.

Reginald Brantley is an ordained minister of the Gospel in the United Church of Christ (UCC) and currently serves as Designated Pastor of the Corona Congregational Church, UCC, in Queens, New York. Rev. Brantley also currently serves as President of the New York Metropolitan Association, New York Conference of the United Church of Christ, a group of more than 50 UCC churches ministering the grace of God in the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the New York City metropolitan region. He is a retired Administrative Law Judge with the New York State Office of Children and Family Services. Rev. Brantley received the Master of Divinity degree from the New York Theological Seminary (NYTS) in May 2012 and has served for several years as a Teaching Assistant at NYTS for several Bible courses and as an Adjunct Teacher in NYTS’ Certificate Program in Christian Ministry. He has been a contributor to The Living Pulpit.

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