When we take seriously the life of Christ and the lives of Christians of different races and ethnicities, we are led into the dangerous possibility that we will end up more like “them” than they will look like “us.” Such a possibility is encapsulated in Christ’s own life; Christ was one who (to quote a different reformed theologian, Karl Barth) “did not will to be God without us” (Church Dogmatics II.1, 274) and whose very life now bears the mark of ethnicity, of a particular body. For Christians concerned with the legacy of whiteness in the United States, it is no longer sufficient to simply begin with confession and hope to move quickly to Christ, past all the messy particularities of how we participate in this present state of unfaithfulness. What Piper fails to understand is that in preaching Christ, we open ourselves to a dangerous possibility: that we may have to change. To preach Christ means that some of our time-honored traditions, the beliefs that we had concerning who God was and who we are, will be challenged when we are confronted with the God who, in a patriarchal society and within a religious tradition that was convinced God was forever hidden, at once made a woman into a priestess and her womb the Holy of Holies. God does some surprising things. There is no reconciliation without this fact. And yet it is this reality of God-with-us that modernity so fervently refused when a conception of whiteness, under the guise of Christ, was hurled upon the world. It is this reality we have yet to come to grips with, a reality that perpetually reiterates notions of faithful community within sameness. If Piper is sincere in his desire for a diverse community, perhaps he would do well to begin with a different confession, that his Jesus is not the only Jesus, that we all must bring our own confessions and our own stories to the table. I fear that in this book Piper is telling me what to bring to the table, how it will be prepared, and what the meal will look like when all is said and done.
— Brian Bantum, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian – A Review
