I have not yet read Piper’s book Bloodlines. So I don’t have an opinion on that.
But Mulder’s review sets me to thinking.
He argues that Piper makes a mistake in arguing for a miracle approach to resolving racial injustices. That is, Piper says that what is needed to overcome racial injustices is for whites and blacks each to come to salvation and regeneration through Jesus. Mulder thinks this is wrong because it implies equal proportions of culpability for the current racial injustice on both blacks and whites. Clearly, whites are more culpable and have exercised more power-over than blacks in erecting structural inequalities.
Mulder then notes Piper’s application of the Wilberforce story, and criticizes it.
Mulder would have us follow Metaxas’ reading of Wilberforce more closely. “Wilberforce did not attack slavery through conversion efforts… Rather, he used a government apparatus to undermine an economicstructure.”
It was not even the use of the phrase “economic structure” when what is implied is clearly a state enforced institutional structure and not economic, or market-market based. But Mulder’s faith in the state to effectively address structural injustices seems completely ignorant of public choice theory.
I have criticized the Evangelical cannonization of Wilberforce already. But here is simply another example of this same lesson, employed by more liberal evangelicals rather than conservative evangelicals.
Wilberforce helped form a coalition which eventually wrought abolition of slavery in Great Britain and its Caribbean colonies. That this coalition ended an unjust condition is easy to notice. It is harder, infinitely harder, to recognize that this was done in an unjust way. That is, the slave owners were not compensated by the Christians. Instead the slave owners were only partially compensated, and that at the expense of the entire British taxpaying populace. My claim is that it is unjust to force someone to do what is just. The only route to justice is sacrifice.
I’ll have to write more later.