Redeeming Mulatto - by Brian Bantum (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Bantum invites us into a new existence, an interstitial or in-between Christian life beyond race...this is an important book that makes a genuine breakthrough in discussions of theology and race. Bantum succeeds in taking us beyond the binary impasses of black theology and the racial (if not racist) indifference of white Christianity.

-- "The Christian Century"

Any preacher that is interested in reflecting on the racial construction of theology in her or his preaching would benefit from this intelligent work.

--Timothy Jones, Ph. D. student, Boston University School of Theology "Homiletic"

Bantum moves beyond [Milbank] by arguing that white racism is religious in outlook, leaving no place for mulattos. But Christ transgresses racial boundaries in assuming human nature. The Calcedonian definition defines Christ as uniquely mulatto...Seminary libraries should have [this book].

-- "Religious Studies Review"

About the Author

Brian Bantum is Associate Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University and Seminary. He lives in Seattle, Washington.