Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

Baylor University Press
2010-10-01
260 pages
9in x 6in
Hardback ISBN: 9781602582934

Brian Bantum, Neil F. and Ila A. Professor of Theology
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois

How mulatto identity challenges racial religiosity and existence

The theological attempts to understand Christ’s body have either focused on “philosophical” claims about Jesus’ identity or on “contextual” rebuttals—on a culturally transcendent, disembodied Jesus of the creeds or on a Jesus of color who rescues and saves a particular people because of embodied particularity.

But neither of these two attempts has accounted for the world as it is, a world of mixed race, of hybridity, of cultural and racial intermixing. By not understanding the true theological problem, that we live in a mulatto world, the right question has not been posed: How can Christ save this mixed world? The answer, Brian Bantum shows, is in the mulattoness of Jesus’ own body, which is simultaneously fully God and fully human.

In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum reconciles the particular with the transcendent to account for the world as it is: mixed. He constructs a remarkable new Christological vision of Christ as tragic mulatto—one who confronts the contrived delusions of racial purity and the violence of self-assertion and emerges from a “hybridity” of flesh and spirit, human and divine, calling humanity to a mulattic rebirth. Bantum offers a theology that challenges people to imagine themselves inside their bodies, changed and something new, but also not without remnants of the old. His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Part I: Renunciation: Racial Discipleship and the Religiosity of Race
    • 1. I Am Your Son, White Man! The Mulatto/a and the Tragic
    • 2. Neither Fish nor Fowl: Presence as Politics
  • Part II: Confession: Christ, the Tragic Mulatto
    • 3. Unto Us a Child Is Born or “How can this be?” The Mulatto Christ
    • 4. I Am the Way: Mulatto/a Redemption and the Politics of Identification
  • Part III: Immersion: Christian Discipleship or the New Discipline of the Body
    • 5. You Must Be Reborn: Baptism and Mulatto/a ReBirth
    • 6. The Politics of Presence: Prayer and Discipleship
  • Benediction
  • Notes

Redeeming Mulatto: Race, Culture, and Ethnic Plurality from Quest Church on Vimeo.

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