Bloodlines
Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian
By: John Piper
Honestly, the racial tensions between whites and minorities is a topic I tend to avoid thinking or talking about because it feels too overwhelming and there is no clear solution. It always leaves me feeling guilty, helpless, frustrated, and torn.
But after hearing a sermon about racial reconciliation, I felt challenged to stop avoiding thinking about it. So I read a book recommended to me called “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America” by Michael O. Emerson. Although I approached it with an open mind and willingness to recognize my own faults, it felt like just condemnation and blame rather than an honest quest for reconciliation, and I came away unsatisfied and still lost.
Then this book, Bloodlines, was recommended to me. While both books offer important perspectives and information, this one differed from the sociologically crafted Emerson book in that it was gospel focused.
This book is so necessary.
John Piper is transparent about why he wrote this book. He is open about his own racism as a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s in South Carolina. He says, “I am not writing this book as a successful multiethnic leader. I am not successful. I am not an expert in diversity. If you came looking for the pragmatic silver bullet for the multiethnic congregation, I may as well bid you farewell. I don’t have it. I write because of truth I see in the Scriptures, convictions I have in my mind, and longings I feel in my heart.”
Part passion for the cross and diverse, biblical unity, part bearing witness to the freedom he experienced from racism, and part responsibility to shepherd God’s church, Piper lays out in his book the ways the gospel is essential to racial reconciliation and seeing the church look more like the diverse church reflected in Scripture.
Piper is careful to cite influencers on both sides of the issue and helpfully defines the buzzwords that mean different things for different people.
I will admit, upon reading this book I was still naïvely looking for a pat answer to the problem or a step-by-step process to racial reconciliation that would fix the world’s problems and obviously I didn’t get it.
But I did not come away from Bloodlines disappointed. Where Emerson’s book condemned and criticized Christians for evangelism, minimizing it as a “just make friends with people from other races” solution, Piper reminds us that the gospel is not an ideology to be brought in and “make its contribution” -- it is a “supernatural power.”
He says, “The gospel was meant to explode with saving power in the lives of politicians and social activists, not help them decorate their social agenda. Jesus did not come into the world to endorse anybody’s platform… The impact of the gospel in race relations is unpredictable. It has potentials that no one can conceive. And, to our shame, there have been many contradictions between what the gospel is and what professing Christians have done… But the answer to those inconsistencies is not to domesticate the gospel into another ideological mule to help pull the wagon of social progress.”
Exploding with power! I love that!
Piper articulated what I came away from Emerson’s book needing. Emerson downplays what is at the core of Christianity, not hiding his bias. But the gospel is not an idea. It’s the supernatural power of the Creator God who is not bound by human thinking or social structures- good or bad.
Who can say what the power of the gospel can do in this world? It’s not naïve and it’s nothing to be flippant about. And that’s the hope of Piper’s book. We may not know how to begin structuring a society to remove racialization, though that doesn’t mean we stop trying, but that’s not our ultimate end game. As Christians, our endgame is eternity with our Savior. His power changes lives and if we do nothing else but introduce people to that power, is that not enough?
Piper describes nine destructive forces at the root of racial strife—Satan, guilt, hopelessness, feelings of inferiority and self-doubt, greed, hate, fear, and apathy—and then details how the gospel overcomes every single one of them.
Really Satan lurks behind all the other forces, but Piper says, “What hope does a message of personal responsibility or structural intervention have against [the Devil’s] supernatural power? None… The Devil is stronger than all humans, all armies, all politics, and all human morality put together. We have no charge against him except by one means, the power of Jesus Christ operating through us because he dwells within us.”
He asks us to imagine a world where people resist the devil, are free from guilt, dead to pride, fervent and humbled before God, filled with hope, courage, and a desire to serve others, and resting in God’s promise to make all things right. How can racism survive that?
This book won’t let us sit back and blame—on either side of the issue—but is meant to challenge us to pursue racial reconciliation and diversity in our lives and our churches every day, not giving up when it’s hard and overwhelming, or when we are misunderstood, but to constantly strive for it because God’s elect is the poster-child for diversity.
“We were not made to make much of blackness. We were not made to make much of whiteness. We were not made to make much of self or humanity in general. We were made to make much of God. And when God pursues this, he pursues what is best for us—what will satisfy us forever. And therefore God’s self-exaltation is the essence of his love. He loves us not ultimately by making much of us but by freeing us from the bondage of self to enjoy making much of him forever.”
I still don’t know how racial reconciliation fits into every aspect of my life (i.e. politics, social justice, my mostly white church), and I don’t necessarily feel confident about my ability to bring about change, but I am no longer directionless and hopeless because it’s not about me and my ability—it’s about the truth and the ultimate power of God and His gospel.
And if that’s not a good enough solution, then I don’t know what is.