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He noted that South Africa will hold elections this year. “Will people make use of their right to vote, which so many had struggled for and even lost their life for?” he asked. “Or will a general dissatisfaction about life 30 years after the introduction of democracy as a basis of South African political life keep people away from the polls?”
Democracy is not just an electoral process, he added. “Democracy is the expression of an image of the human being,” he said. “At the centre of democracy’s anthropological assumptions stands the conviction that every human being has the same inviolable human dignity.”
Bedford-Strohm emphasized that, if equal human dignity for all is the core of the democratic vision, it must show in how democracies act. “I believe the churches can play an important role in publicly demanding such credibility,” he said. “The ecumenical movement must be a counterforce to the forces of divisiveness in this world.”
He acknowledged that we are all shaped by our contexts. "Of course we bring with us the struggles of our peoples,” he said. “And sometimes we find ourselves on different sides in these struggles and yet are connected in our common faith in Jesus Christ.”
If we follow Jesus, empathy with human suffering is always unconditional, he said. “As churches we are all committed to overcoming violence,” he said. “There is probably no other institution in which being rooted in local communities and at the same time being connected in a common universal horizon is as much part of the DNA as it is in the church.”
One of the most important public tasks of the church today to open the eyes to the suffering of people far away, said Bedford-Strohm. “If the biblical-theological assumption that every human being is created in the image of God is true, then this is not a marginal issue,” he said. “It touches the core of the Christian tradition and the mission that arises from it.”
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