Anthony Bradley: We’re going to ask some questions here. I have some questions that people have sent in previously that I like to ask my friends to discuss. Also, questions are coming in via Twitter, so continue to send those in. We’ll get as many of those in as possible. The first question — and you guys can do rock, paper, scissors and decide who’s going to answer this one first — is that it’s something of a strange thing to host an event on race where the two main people doing the talking are white men. But they’re nice white men. I just want to say that for the record.

What limitations do you feel most acutely as a white male when talking about race? And secondly, what unique perspective do you feel you can bring to the conversation on race?

John Piper: Well, I’ll start with the last part. You can maybe explain why we’re here. It’s easy for me to talk about my limitations. The first third of my book talks about my history of being embedded in white, southern, racist culture. So I bring that to bear everywhere I go, knowing I came out of that and knowing what it was, what it did to people, what it did to me, and I hope what it bears witness to in that I’m beginning to see some things. I feel like I bring witness to the power of the gospel to liberate a racist white kid from Greenville, South Carolina.

I bring the weakness of an urban pastor who doesn’t have an ideal church, and thus I witness to the incredible difficulty of lining up more than one speaker out of 20. It’s incredibly difficult, whether it’s in your church looking for elders, whether it’s in the city looking for friends, whether it’s in a conference. In other words, I’m 32 years in and I’m just about finished. It isn’t going to get any better at my church under me. It’s over. There’s the testimony and it’s imperfect. I witness to that limitation. I knew I would be criticized for writing the book as a jerk and as a failure. Someone might say, “What are you writing a book on race for? You can’t even do it.” And the answer is, “So what? You don’t write it because you’re a failure? Why would that stop you from writing it?”

I love the gospel. If I didn’t have the gospel, I wouldn’t be able to make it through the day. So, that book is designed to recruit us and you to just get on the train and just do the best you can. If you’re bent towards individualism, be the best Christian individualist you can. If you’re bent towards whatever, then do the best you can. Here’s one more limitation. I bring a wintry, easily depressed, moody, somewhat self-pitying, often emotionally stuck personality to everything.

Tim Keller: Why did you move to Minneapolis?

Piper: Very simple. You go where the jobs are. When I bring that to every situation, I am prone to be quick. It’s clear that Anthony has some critiques of the book and of the conferences and of the things we’ve read and whatnot. So, there was a day when I’d be sitting here and I’d say, “I think I’m going to go home. I don’t think I want to talk to this guy. He didn’t find the book helpful.” Well, I’ve been there so often that I just decided about 16 years ago, I’m going to get on this train and if I don’t do any good, I just think it’s the one going in the right direction — meaning efforts at racial diversity, efforts at racial harmony.

I guess the lesson out of this little gut-spilling is, don’t take your ball and go home. When you make a little effort — you write a little paper, you give a little devotion, you make a little effort in the structural area, or the covenantal area, or the individual area, you make a little effort — and somebody pushes back a little bit on you, you didn’t get it right, don’t quit. Don’t quit. Just come back and keep talking. So, that’s a little bit of what I bring. Now, why are we here? Why are these two white guys sitting here in New York?

Keller: Well, the two parts of the question. The first is, don’t forget every event has a history. So, if Redeemer, all by himself sat there and said, “Let’s have a discussion about race in New York City”, you’d probably have five or six different people representing different racial groups in the city. But the way this began was that John wrote a very important book for us to read. We began talking about him coming and talking about the book. In other words, the event grew out of that and that’s the history. So, it started with a white guy, and I’m the pastor and I’m a white guy, so it’s white-

Bradley: I’m not.

Keller: That’s right. It’s white heavy. It just grew that way. But I think the other part of the question was about limitations as a white man. When I tried to counsel people who were having problems with their children before I had children, I had limitations. When I tried to talk to people who were married before I was married, I had limitations. And if I try to talk to people who are struggling with systemic racism when I’m a white person, and therefore, I’m generally part of the systems that inflict it, I have limitations there too. I’ve had lots of limitations over the years.

I think most Catholic priests, for example, who have never been married and don’t have any children, still can probably spend a fair amount of time listening to people well enough to help folks. I do think it’s my job as a white person to try to listen, just like Anthony already said. But by the way, the reason why I’m here is that over the years I’ve had plenty of non-white Christian friends say, “If non-white people are always talking to white people about racism, that’s not good enough. You have to have some white pastors talking to white people about racism.” So I’m just doing what I was asked by non-white people.

Bradley: There’s another question here as it relates to power. Talk a little bit about power as it pertains to race and society and also the church. To set this up, sometimes in these discussions about race, we confuse race and power or even we confuse race and class. So what you have sometimes is you have a group of middle-class whites with a lot of social capital and power engaging in discussions on race with African-Americans who have very little social capital and power. And oftentimes what that means is that the discussions of race often end up on white terms where Blacks are asked to move toward whites in ways that challenge them, but whites are often freed up to not be challenged and really stretched to move toward Blacks in some profound ways.

There’s a power dynamic that actually sometimes makes this discussion even more difficult. The both of you, although we’re all sitting here together, represent a different level of power than I do. You could tweet my books out of existence. If I make a negative comment about your book, I get attacked. There’s a power differential that often happens in these conversations. How do we talk about cultural power and how that connects to the gospel, society, and the church?

Keller: That’s a very hard question. I’m going back to what I was trying to say about systems. This isn’t quite the same, but the evangelical world is based on raising your own support. The missions program is all based on the idea you go out and you raise support amongst your friends. This, of course, excludes and marginalizes people who aren’t white. White people who don’t think of themselves as very well off can do it. They can raise their support. And not just Black, but Hispanic and Asian people have trouble raising support. For various cultural reasons, that whole model privileges white people.

It doesn’t privilege cultures in which that kind of volunteerism works. It certainly doesn’t privilege Black and Hispanic people who don’t have lots of well-off friends. And yet, the system assumes that everybody who goes out there would have equal social power, and they don’t. Now, I would call that a systemic problem, a big systemic problem that basically keeps parachurch organizations inaccessible to some. You have to raise your support and you come up in the power structure having raised your support, then you go on staff and you move on your way up. Now, I know plenty of places understand this, and they’re trying to do everything they can to recognize the fact that people don’t start with the same amount of social power.

Therefore we say, “It’s a level playing field. We’re meritocratic. We’re individualistic.” That is to say, “Everybody has an equal chance. We’re not giving anybody an extra leg up in any way.” And of course, what that immediately does is destroy the people who already don’t have a leg up. Maybe somebody is offended by what I just said. It doesn’t mean, for example, that everybody in a ministry in which everybody has to raise their support is deliberately, intentionally trying to marginalize people. But nevertheless, the system is worse than the individuals in the system. And just by being part of it, you’re participating in this. White people have to learn how to have those kinds of spectacles. That’s what I was trying to say. They have to be thinking about that.

The same thing happens inside churches. Very often what it means to say “we want to have a multiracial church” is “we want everybody to become white” — culturally white, acting white, thinking white, and making decisions like white people. And without knowing we’re saying, “Why are you always protesting? Why are you always having a problem? We’re open to everybody.” I think that’s the sort of thing you’re talking about. And it does help. One of the reasons I’m glad to be a white person in an urban setting is even though white people are not the majority, they’re still the dominant minority. They have vast amounts of social power. And yet here over the years, 23 years here, I’ve just been forced to see over and over and over again that I’m being insensitive and I’m being blind. As time goes on, the only reason I know anything about my car is that things have gone wrong over the years. So after being 61 years old, I understand cars pretty well, because practically everything in any car I’ve ever owned is broken down at some point.

It’s the same thing with race. It’s only by offending people, having arguments, and realizing I’ve blown it that over the years I start to get it. And a couple of people have said, “All I want from you as a white man is not to be anything else. I just want you to be surprising me.” In other words, “I want you as a Christian, white leader, to surprise me a little bit more about what it’s like not to be white, because most white people have no idea.” So actually that’s a little bit like what John was trying to say. All I’m struggling for is to surprise non-white people a little bit so that I would even notice that kind of thing. That’s how bad it is.

Piper: Let me take the question about power just as an occasion to express the difficulty of just talking biblically in view of those kinds of social realities. I think a bold, Black, White, Asian, or Hispanic pastor, when he wants to talk about power should begin with the Bible and probably go to Luke 22 and talk about the disciple’s desire for power and desire to be at the right hand and the left hand, and hear Jesus say, “I don’t want you to be like that. I want you to be humble. I want you to be broken and meek.” The Son of man came not to be served. Now, as soon as a white guy especially starts preaching like this, this will be perceived very likely by some as the manipulation of Scripture to keep minorities in their place. The pastor could say, “What are you getting so uppity about power for when in fact the Bible calls all of us not to care about power? So stop caring about power.”

What I’m saying is, that ought to be preached. That ought to be preached, and then there ought to be this perceptive turn and awareness to say, “Whether you want it or not, if you’re a majority culture person, you carry it. You don’t know that you carry it. To be aware that you carry it might give you opportunities to do what Jesus said that would in fact lift others up.” It is a very complex thing to take biblical truths that summon servanthood and not caring about power grabbing, and not turn that immediately into a defense of the status quo where everybody is lined up in their classes and everybody is lined up in their races. Therefore, you’ve blinded yourself and others to the fact that love, back to your call to love, has other things it does besides not take power. It might, for somebody else, take some power for them and use some power for them. So that’s just an occasion of the complexity of trying to say what the Bible says, fearlessly knowing you’re going to be criticized and then trying to come at the complexities from the side.

Bradley: That’s fantastic. What you’ve both actually been talking about is white privilege. For those who wonder what the definition of white privilege is, we have a question here from Twitter directly related to that. That’s what they’ve both been talking about. This idea that the whites have the privilege of actually being free from the burdens of being a racial minority. That is, whites have the freedom, the privilege, of not actually thinking about the types of things that I have to think about every day when I go to work, for example.

There were a series of studies that came out in several education journals over the last few years that described that when a Black male professor stands in front of a room of predominantly white students — this has been scientifically studied for over a decade — he has a five to 10 minute window on the first day of class to dispel the notions of what my students assume Black men are like. I have five to 10 minutes. If I fail in the five to 10 minute window, my evaluations will be lower. I had to spend a lot of money to re-wardrobe myself and wear bow ties (although I do like bow ties) to stand in front of my students and basically act like Mr. Rogers on the first day of class, because that affects the entire way in which they see me. Now, my white colleagues are free from that. They don’t even have to worry about those things.

Keller: If somebody walks into a church and sees a Black pastor, an Asian pastor, or a Hispanic man up front, they assume that this is either Black or Asian or Hispanic church. I don’t have to work that hard to get diverse people in my congregation. They’re used to white people being in charge. In other words, people of ethnic minorities are used to white people being in charge and they’re fine. White people are not used to non-white people being in charge. So when they walk in and they see a non-white person up front, it’s going to be hard for the non-white pastor to keep them there.

What I think Anthony’s trying to say is that there’s a million examples of it. The reason I mentioned raising your own support is that it shocked me. It took me a long time to see that even not very well off white people have way more social power, way more. They can raise their support and Black people can’t and Hispanic people can’t. Very often, as you know, non-white people who’ve gone to Ivy league schools and supposedly have all these credentials and all that go out and try to raise their support and they can’t do it. That immediately tells me that it takes generations. In other words, the white privilege that comes to me has accrued over generations and it won’t go away very fast. And there’s a million examples of it. We could keep going, but we probably shouldn’t.

Bradley: Right. One more question here from Twitter. Both of you pastor churches where there’s a number of interracial marriages and there’s some Christians who still wrestle with God creational design for particular races. Now, this isn’t just a white problem, right? It’s not just whites who think this. I’ve had several family members warn me, “Whatever you do, don’t ever marry a white girl, ever.” So this is not just whites objecting, there are blacks that object and multiple races. How do we think biblically about this? How do we think about the gospel as it relates to this? How do we think about the kingdom and all that God has in creation as it relates to those to object to interracial marriage is something unnatural that God did not design?

Piper: Well, my guess is that most of those cultural objections are not based on that depth perception. I just read the book, Is Marriage Just for White People. Have you seen it? It’s really amazing. I was nodding my head up and down. This is not just a white issue here. It’s written by Black Stanford professor. The issues there are not biblical, they’re not theological, they’re loyalty. And she’s saying to you, “What about us? What about us? What about the family? Does it matter?” Maybe I’m reading into it. But anyway, if you want me to answer that deeper question, my answer is, creation number one in God’s image is 10 million times more important than the color of skin differences.

Number two, there are instances of interracial marriage in the Bible. I think the story of Moses marrying a Cushite is not only there but is there intentionally. I think probably that Miriam’s hand turning white as snow is God saying, “You want white for this man? I’ll give you white.” And then in Jesus there’s neither Jew nor Greek.

And then fourthly, the meaning of marriage as a husband loving a wife as Christ loves the church gives an occasion in an interracial marriage for something beautiful for God to triumph over — the male female divide, the personality divide, the culture divide, and now the racial divide of that. I find it very difficult to find warrant in the scripture for a principled opposition to interracial marriage.

Keller: I think it’s idolatry to insist you should only marry within your race. Now, I’m talking to Christians now for a minute. I used to say this and Kathy encouraged me to do it. We used to tweak our older white people in the south in the 1970s and 1980s. I would look at them and say, “Be honest. Would you rather have your child marry a non-Christian white person than a Christian Black person?” And they got very quiet. And I said, “In other words, race is more important than grace. Race is more important than God. Your identity is not in the gospel, it is in your race, and you have a huge problem.” And some of the people out here know I don’t like to confront, but I just think the text insists that that’s the case.

Bradley: You don’t like to confront? You do that every Sunday.

Keller: Oh, but I don’t like it.

Piper: You have to be the unhappiest man on the planet, right?

Keller: Why did I become a preacher?

Bradley: Here are a couple of questions about your churches. I’ll ask them both and then you can answer accordingly. The first for you. John, as a white man leading a more diverse church, what have you discovered is the most important thing for you as a majority culture leader when thinking, leading, and talking in a multiracial and multi-ethnic context? Then for you, Tim, as a white man leading a largely biracial white and Asian church, what have you discovered is the most important thing for you as a majority culture leader in thinking, leading, and talking in a multiracial and multi-ethnic context?

Piper: “Most important” is a very difficult question. I think most important is my own personal brokenness before God and the gospel and a sense of desperate neediness for grace. So that I don’t, as much as God enables me, operate out of a position of self-righteousness. I would start there. The second thing I would say is, the testimony that has come to me over the years is, “The fact that you care and that you try means a lot.” That’s what they said. And then I can remember back in the days when we just were so bad at trying to do ethnic music. We tried to do diversity and I sat there thinking, “This is bad.” And ethnic friends would come up and say, “Thanks for trying.” And they meant it. They really did. They meant it, because they knew.

Bradley: That’s so special. Bless your heart, y’all try.

Piper: Now that would not sound encouraging. There’s a way to say it and a way to say it. And the third thing is, just give yourself to people that you know are different from you and give yourself to the word. Grow in relationships and grow in what the Bible has to say.

Keller: I’m glad you went first, because I think I just have to just echo that. The thing I’ll especially echo is, if you are a pastor now and you say, “We really want to stretch to be as diverse a church as we possibly can to show Ephesians 2 is true and that the gospel brings down barriers,” you’ll always be having problems. You’ll always be falling short. You’ll always be getting some criticism. There will always be conflicts. And it’s typical for white people that white people can turn the race subject on and off anytime we want. In other words, if you’re white, you came here because now you’re subjecting yourself to the subject for a while, you can go back and essentially escape it as long as you want. And non-white people, every single day they look in the mirror and they’re having a race seminar.

What that means then is, as a white person, we white leaders can say, “I don’t need this. I just want to preach the word. I don’t want to have to do this.” If trying to become diverse means I’m starting all these arguments and people saying, “You don’t understand,” I’ve just had it. And you just can never do that. That’s the price you pay to try as much as possible to get your church as far into Ephesians 2, even if it just gets the nose and the tent, get your church as far into Ephesians 2 as you can. And that is a price you pay and you’re willing to do it. You’re just willing, this is fine. To some degree as a white person, I’m a big part of the problem and therefore it’s the least I can do. So that idea of trying and always falling short and always feeling like you’re falling short and always being told you’re falling short is just something that you just say, “I’m not going to feel sorry for myself,” because that is a very white thing to do.

Piper: Let me say one more thing. If you’re a leader of any kind in a majority culture situation, you shouldn’t be intimidated that you can’t go as far as Tim, or I, or Anthony said you should go. I’m sitting here listening to Anthony and saying, “Okay, we’ve done this, now we need to go deeper.” Now, you might be sitting there saying, “I didn’t even get to there.” Or I might be saying that, and I just want to make sure we all know that the average person in our church isn’t at first base on this. Anything you say that pushes towards diversity, anything you say that pushes towards racial harmony, anything that raises the issue, at least I’m talking about church now, you’ve made a little progress. When you’re operating at a scholarly level and should be at a scholarly level, you can say, “Go further. Go further.” But don’t fret that any effort you make in waiving Ephesians 2, or Revelation 5:9, or Genesis 1:27, or the gospel for the sake of loving across lines is in vain. That’s helpful.

Bradley: Fantastic. There’s one more question and we’re almost out of time, so we’ll have to give a quick answer to this. We recognize now that the heartbeat of Christianity in the world is not Europe and it is not the United States. It’s in the East, it’s in Africa, it’s in the Global South. How does the reality of the fact that the center of Christianity has nothing to do with North America and Europe affect the way in which we begin to think about race here in our context as well? Especially as immigrants from all over the world are coming to this country and even to our churches? I mean, how do we think about that and the fact that we are in fact more globally aware because of all sorts of media opportunities as well?

Piper: Well, we certainly should expose the idolatry that fears the browning of America; that fears the fact that white will be a minority by 2042 or so. If whites start to get, “What will happen to my America?” Where is your treasure? Who are you? Are you a Christian? So exposing that fear is important. Then I think it’s about humbling ourselves and pointing to the magnificent things God is doing in Africa, South America, Asia, and celebrate that and continually hold up the final picture of the new heavens and the new earth with all of its racial diversity and celebrate that so that people don’t feel threatened by diversity. Saying that it’s coming here increasingly because of who’s coming and who’s here, and the fact that the power shifts and the intensity and effective fruitful mission shifts have gone from London to Colorado Springs to Buenos Aires is a glorious thing of what God is doing.

But now here’s the last thing I want to say. I also don’t buy the fact that our day is over, missiologically or influence-wise in the world. I want to say to the young people in my church, if you hear that all the power is shifting and all the dynamic is shifting, and all the energy is shifting, and all the growth is shifting to the Global South, what are you going to do with that? They might say, “Well, I guess I’ll just become a businessman and not care since we can’t have an influence.” I say, “No, that’s not what you’re going to do. You’re going to dream of new partnerships and new ways and maybe a revival so that we can join the South Koreans in their missionary influence and the Argentinians in their missionary influence.”

That’s the way I want to think. I really have a sense that all the Global South talk in the last couple of decades has produced for some a kind of defeatist attitude that says, “The Spirit has passed us by. The day is over in America. So, you might as well just get a good job and go to the suburbs after all.” And I just want to work against that with all of my might.

Keller: It’s such a big subject. It’s a huge subject. So first, it’s very good for the West, because what’s happening is that western cities right now in Europe and to some degree in America are being evangelized by people from the Eastern and Southern Hemisphere. It actually happens in New York. Starting in the 1970s, the number of churches planted by people from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean in Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens is astounding by the way. It’s really changed. I don’t think anybody’s quite come to grips with it. It used to be Eastern and Southern Europe, which means it was all Jewish and Catholic, and now it’s because it’s people from Eastern and Southern Hemisphere, it’s just changed the face of New York City, and it’s happening elsewhere. Even from that point of view, God’s providentially using the Eastern and Southern Hemisphere to evangelize the West, and that’s wonderful.

Then everything he said I agree with. And then lastly, we still have enormous resources. It’s going to be a long time. We have such resources. We have to put ourselves into servant mode. That’s it. We have to recognize that we’re the tail, we’re not the dog anymore. But we have huge amounts of resources and we also have all the theological educational institutions. And generally it means that we have to go into a servant mode and a listening mode and use our resources and not think all the power’s gone. Well, the demographic power is gone, but the social and economic power we still have a lot of, and we have to get into a servant mode. That’s it.

Bradley: Thank you very much, John Piper and Tim Keller. Thank you.