Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

by Brian Bantum

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 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 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.

Genres: Theology, Race

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Daniel Kleven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Willie James Jennings taught at Duke Divinity School from 1990–2015 before moving to Yale. During that time there coalesced around him a number of scholars and students whose body of work became distinct enough to earn an identifier, called “the new Black theology,” “the Duke African-American Nouvelle Théologie of Race,” or just simply “the Duke school.”

Key texts include Jennings, The Christian Imagination (2010), and fellow Duke professor (2001–2018) J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (2008), though those who interact with “the Duke school” will often engage with students who studied at Duke with Jennings & Carter, including Brian Bantam’s Redeeming Mulatto (2010) (see also Duke graduate Andrew T. Draper, A Theology of Race and Place: Liberation and Reconciliation int he Works of Carter and Jennings).

The “project” (if it can be called that) has been reviewed and interacted with in the decades since these books were published, including an entire issue of Pneuma (26.3) in 2014 devoted to essays interacting with J&C including a response from Jennings. More recently (2023) Nathaniel Jung-Chul Lee, who studied at Duke with Stanley Hauwerwas, has tried to adjust Bantam’s racial focus on “mulatto” to a linguistic frame, in his “Toward a Creole Christ: A Theology of Language & Christian Hybridity.”

“The Duke School,” can be characterized as a rigorous attempt to think *theologically* about race and the history of race, particularly in the transatlantic world. It includes deep soundings in Jewish and Christian scripture, early church “fathers” like Athanasius and Augustine, enlightenment philosophers like Kant, and modern Black theologians like James Cone. One can observe a common thread in all of their works, namely, the theological focus particularly on Christology, the error of bypassing Jesus’s Jewish flesh, and the “supercessionism” that results.

Bantum also brings to Redeeming Mulatto a foray into into the English department and a close reading of three works of fiction: Nella Larsen's Passing, Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. He then moves into his more theological and historical analysis of Christology and racial identity, seeing in Christ an example of mulattic “mixture” of the divine and human a model for identity and discipleship.

With Jennings and Carter’s moves (to Yale and the University of Indiana, respectively), “the Duke school” has dispersed, and I’m not sure about the status of any coherent larger “project” might be. Their work is still incredibly valuable and stimulating for those interested in theology and race, but I’m curious about where things stand in 2024 and beyond.

[M Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Redeeming Mulatto" is a book of interesting, even important ideas, which should be praised for Brian Bantum's imagination as a theologian even as it is critiqued for the author's opaque writing style.

The basic premises of Bantum's inquiry into a Christology that reflects and transforms the modern conceit of race, proven by others to be sociological rather than biological, are well laid out in the back cover synopsis which is reproduced on the Goodreads page for the book. Bantum himself asks the key question in his introduction: "Does Jesus' presence among us as God, as a Jew, as oppressed, but also divine and human, born of Spirit and flesh, make possible not only a wider set of allegiances, but require it of our lives as disciples?"

Bantum then moves to the question of the mixed-race person in society. He uses the often discredited term "mulatto/a" throughout for his description of such persons. For Bantum, part of the "tragedy" of the "mulatto/a" is how they are caught in the modern emphasis on "purity." He writes, "Although the United States is no longer explicit in its 'calculus of color,' the nation (and the Western world in general) nonetheless maintains a certain myth of purity." The mulatto/a is a constant offense against this myth; a reminder that purity has not, indeed cannot, be maintained.

Although racial purity is an obsession of the modern world, religious purity was an obsession for the world of Jesus, both Jewish and Gentile. Jesus, of course, was often seen as standing against notions of such "purity," calling all persons to repent and acknowledge their dependence upon God. As Bantum writes, "The possibility of imagining discipleship in a racial world must begin with Jesus... the church must be confronted again with the mystery of the incarnation... In Jesus we are confronted with God enfleshed who encounters us with a humanity we can neither classify nor ignore... To claim Christ is mulatto is to interpret humanity christologically."

To support his understanding of Jesus as mulatto, Bantum turns to the creed of the Council of Chalcedon. "Chalcedon's formula and Christ's confession of himself displays a fundamentally mulatto character. That is, it displays Jesus' nature as 'neither/nor--but' and in doing so we see the tragic nature of mulatto/a existence prefigured, but now interpretable not as a theoretical or social challenge, but itself echoing a profound (though distorted) christological moment. The neither/nor that gives birth to and inheres within the interracial body in the modern West is but an iteration of the deeply 'inter' character of all human lives. These lives are established in creation and reinscribed upon humanity through the incarnation, yet become distorted in a racial telos that leads only to the tragic in its ever failing attempt to negotiate the claims of racial purity and cultured essentialism."

For Bantum, it is Jesus mulattic nature that makes him truly the Savior of the world. "We must look to Jesus again and be confronted with his own impossibility and the possibilities he creates out of our lives and for our lives. We must see this mulatto Jesus as not only for a particular people, but we must begin to see how the mulatto Jesus stands before us to remake all people."

Bantum's understanding of the work of Christ and Christ's Church is rooted in the ancient tradition of baptism. "Baptism is entrance into the work of Christ's person. It is the initiation into his body and his people. As such, this entrance marks the renunciation of the world's claims upon the baptized as well as the renewal, or rebirth, of the person. It is an entrance that requires a departure from the racial economy of the West and its children." The working out of the life begun in baptism is then accomplished primarily in prayer. "Out of the womb of Christ, the Christian is reborn of flesh and Spirit. After emerging from these holy waters, these enspirited children are confronted not with the world of their blessed birth but with the world of their death. Infants in Christ, we must begin the life of discipleship... The life of discipleship is the life of prayer."

Bantum sums up the work with a "Benediction." "To follow Christ, to become like Christ, is to become something new, to enter into an eschatological identity that presses God into the crevices of the everyday, even as we are stretched in to the lives of one another... And so this mulatto child, Jesus, the holy mixed one before us requires us to ask, 'Why not?' Why are these people not our brothers or our sisters? Why are we better when certain people are not among us? Why is their pain not our pain? Why is their oppression not our oppression? The mulatto/a child does not bridge these divides but stands in their midst, and through the mulatto/a's desire for both/and, through the mulatto/a's refusal of the neither/nor, the mulatto/a Christian opens up a possibility for all to enter into the transformative and liberating work of Christ's mulattic body."

Bantum's work on the place of the mulatto/a in modern society and the redemption of the mulattic identity in the mulattic identity of Christ offers a great deal for a society continually riven by the conceit of race. Simply his insistence on seeing the human/divine, "neither/nor--but" nature of Christ as defined in Chalcedon opens up new possibilities for a reimagining of Paul's clarion call that we are "neither Jew nor Greek... but one in Christ." As important as his thought is, however, it is badly served by his often ungrammatical writing, his baroque word choice and usage, and his often simply impenetrable style. In reading "Redeeming Mulatto," I found myself going over sentences several times and often abandoning paragraphs hoping I'd not missed an important point. Baylor Press has ill served this possibly important work through sloppy, disinterested, or indulgent editing. I look forward to more from Dr. Bantum in the future but with either a "redeemed" writing style or tighter editing.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can not tell you how much this book has taught me. But I thank Dr. James K.A. Smith for his suggestion to read this book.