A few years ago I supervised the Master's dissertation of a Catholic priest. His research focused on how reconciliation was understood amongst the members of his large sprawling parish of six congregations located on the Cape Flats and composed of so-called ‘coloured’ people, a community to which he also belonged. He wanted to compare their understanding of reconciliation with that expressed in various documents produced by the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The way in which the bishops understood reconciliation was in keeping with traditional Christian teaching, though contextually related. But this was not the case amongst the members of my student's parish. For them reconciliation had to do with recovering their identity as ‘coloured’ people. Whenever their priest preached on the need for reconciliation in South Africa, exhorting them to become reconciled to other ethnic groups, they heard him say that they should recover their own self-respect. This understanding of reconciliation has, on reflection, a certain logic, for how can South Africans overcome the legacy of apartheid and create a genuinely just and sustainable society unless those who were previously oppressed and who still suffer from the indignities of the past regain respect for their own identity? By the same token, there can be little chance for reconciliation in South Africa unless those of us who were privileged by apartheid because of our skin colour renounce an immoral past and seek to develop a fresh identity as members of a new country in search of transformation.

Prior to 1963 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was largely known in the English-speaking world as a martyr of the Confessing Church struggle (Kirchenkampf)in Germany, and the author of The Cost of Discipleship. The publication of Honest to God in 1963 in which Bishop John Robinson interpreted Bonhoeffer on the basis of his fragmentary theological reflections in prison, significantly changed this perception. Bonhoeffer became the radical theologian of secular Christianity and was even held responsible for the 'theology of the death of God' which became the rage in some circles at the time. This confusion about the significance of Bonhoeffer's life and thought was compounded by the apparent contradiction between his pacifism during the mid 1930s and his later involvement in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was a riddle.

The controversy surrounding Honest to God none the less sparked off renewed interest in Bonhoeffer, especially in the English-speaking world. As his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge later put it, Robinson's 'fascinatingly one-sided' interpretation of Bonhoeffer 'introduced the most fruitful period for the study, translation and publication of all of Bonhoeffer's works in the Protestant, Roman Catholic and secular spheres'.

Future generations will look back on the events which occurred in eastern Europe in 1989 as a watershed in world history. My wife and I were at Union Theological Seminary in New York at the time. For a few days in September we hosted the Director of the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Rostock, Dr Giinther Hoffman. Hoffman was a member of a group of theologians and philosophers from the German Democratic Republic who were visiting the United States to experience life within a liberal democratic and capitalist society and compare it with their own. Together we watched the news on television each evening. It was the week during which many East Germans were fleeing across the border into Czechoslovakia and then to the West. On two occasions the television coverage of the events taking place in East Germany was juxtaposed with that of mass marches in Cape Town protesting against apartheid. These were the first such protests for many decades which were permitted by the authorities in South Africa.

As South Africans we found the marches no less remarkable than the events taking place in eastern Europe. As we watched their unfolding, we believed that this was the beginning of the end for apartheid; our guest, on the contrary, was confident that the German Democratic government would reform and survive. Yet, whatever our differences of perception, we sensed that the traumatic developments in eastern Europe were historically connected to what was happening in South Africa. This was, indeed, the case as it turned out.

Contemporary transitions to democracy are part of a long historical process which began, at least symbolically for the western world, in fifth century BGE Athens. Parallels to what occurred there can be found in other cultures outside the western tradition. What is important, however, is not so much the starting-point as the fact that democracy has evolved unevenly in fits and starts in a variety of different historical contexts, often with long gaps between one significant moment and the next. Many of the contributing factors and generating seams which have shaped its development, especially before the Enlightenment, were not labelled ‘democratic’ at the time. Some of them might be appropriately referred to as protodemocratic analogies and antecedents. But irrespective of how they are described they have been significant building-blocks in the erection of the edifice of modern democracy.

Since the eighteenth century the evolution of democracy has become exponential, as the present wave of democratic transformation indicates, but the democratic transitions of our time are not to be regarded as the final stage in the process of global democratization. For one thing, there is no inevitability about democratic transformation and, for another, the process of democratization varies considerably in character, scope, and speed from one country to another. The transition to democracy is, in fact, a permanent condition. Like all living traditions, democracy is a ‘narrative of an argument’ which is open to change and development, retrieval and renewal. Put differently, it is ‘the constantly changing, provisional result of historical processes which consist of conflicts and compromises and which depend on social, economic and cultural developments’.

Western democracy developed within the matrix of Christendom and the Enlightenment, and it can only be deciphered in relation to both. The relationship is, however, complex, multi-layered, and ambiguous. As Harold Berman reminds us: ‘Liberal democracy was the first great secular religion in Western history – the first ideology which became divorced from traditional Christianity.’ Yet a divorce implies partners who were previously married, shared much in common, and who, even in their separation, cannot fully break with their past relationship. So, Berman continues, democracy took over from Christianity ‘both its sense of the sacred and some of its major values’.

CHRISTENDOM: A NEW WORLD ORDER

The Edict of Milan in 313 was a turning-point in European history, ‘the great charter of the New Republic’, as Charles Norris Cochrane called it. In terms derived from the priestly legitimation of Israelite monarchy, it provided much needed vindication of imperial authority, and, while it did not make Christianity the Roman imperial religion immediately, it did give it the status and freedom for which earlier apologists had argued. The provisions of the Edict made possible, for the first time in antiquity, the separation of political and religious power, thus anticipating, though by no means achieving, the separation of powers and the distinction between political and civil society so fundamental to democracy.

Constantine was a transitional figure who initiated the ‘project of a Christian commonwealth’; towards the end of the same century, Emperor Theodosius transformed what Constantine began into an Orthodox empire.