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It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.”[38]
Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chills of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us.
For Du Bois, true Christianity was defined by “the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and the Golden Rule.” The white church’s treatment of blacks was “sadly at variance with this doctrine.”
Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.
The cross,” writes Dorothy A. Lee-Pollard, “reveals where God’s kingdom is to be found—not among the powerful or even the religious, but in the midst of powerlessness, suffering and death.”[5]
Salvation through the cross is a mystery and can only be apprehended through faith, repentance, and humility.
One must suppose that in order to feel comfortable in the Christian faith, whites needed theologians to interpret the gospel in a way that would not require them to acknowledge white supremacy as America’s great sin.
Whether we speak of Jonathan Edwards, Walter Rauschenbusch, or Reinhold Niebuhr as America’s greatest theologian, none of them made the rejection of white supremacy central to their understanding of the gospel.
The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.
The church’s most vexing problem today is how to define itself by the gospel of Jesus’ cross. Where is the gospel of Jesus’ cross revealed today? The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight are in prisons, jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court.
“if racial healing is ever to come to our society, it will mean remembering and retelling our story of racial injustice and honoring the voices and the actions of those who stood against it.”[15]
No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.
