Letter from Tim Hartman
This Letter to the Future is an excerpt from Dr. Tim Hartman and his recent post on the “God Here and Now” substack about his trip to Rwanda with Auburn. Dr. Hartman was selected to join Auburn’s delegation of scholars and religious leaders to the Listening and Leading conference in Kigali, Rwanda. The conference was held last month to remember and learn from the Genocide against the Tutsi that took place 30 years ago. What is powerful about Dr. Hartman’s account is a theme Auburn’s Center for Storytelling and Narrative Change will continue to return to: the theological justifications for violence, and the church’s role in committing those atrocities._
Auburn friends and supporters,
What can be learned from the Rwandan experience? In his book, Mirror to the Church, Emmanuel Katongole persuasively claims that “the crisis of Western Christianity is reflected back to the church in the broken bodies of Rwanda.” What happened in Rwanda in 1994 was a failure of social, political, and cultural ideologies given more power than the gospel of Jesus Christ. This was the same failure that Karl Barth and his co-authors named in The Barmen Declaration in theses 3 and 6:
3. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.
6. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.
The willful blindness of the Deutsche Christen (German Christians) in 1930s Germany and the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide is a tragic “failure of imagination,” in Katongole’s words. All types of tribalisms—both real and fabricated—can lead to violent outcomes, especially when the divisions are justified theologically. Social, political, and cultural ideologies cannot be given more power than the gospel of Jesus Christ. This confusion currently lies at the heart of Christian nationalism in the United States as Nazi flags were present at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, and the so-called Christian flag and “Jesus Saves” posters joined the attempted insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
None of us can claim that we are chosen and others are not without deadly consequences. Instead of believing in God’s selective favoritism, the gospel offers another way. In the words of Margit Ernst-Habib: “Through God’s gracious election in Christ, boundaries are broken up, definitions of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ are fundamentally challenged; the ‘chosen race’ can only mean the ‘human race.’”
Tim Hartman is an Associate Professor of Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. He is the author of two books: Theology after Colonization: Kwame Bediako, Karl Barth, and the Future of Theological Reflection, and Kwame Bediako: African Theology for a World Christianity. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). His scholarly interests include contemporary Christian theologies worldwide, Christology, Lived Theology, Election/Predestination, antiracist theologies, ecclesiology, postcolonial mission, and the work of Karl Barth, Kwame Bediako, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and James Cone.