Living for the Future: Theological Ethics for Coming Generations

Description

Our relationship to future generations raises fundamental issues for ethical thought, to which a Christian theological response is both possible and significant. A relationship to future generations is implicitly central to many of today's most public controversies - over environmental protection, genetic research, and the purpose of education, to name but a few; but it has received little explicit or extended consideration. In Living for the Future Rachel Muers argues and seeks to demonstrate that to consider future generations as ethically significant is not simply to extend an existing ethical framework, but to rethink how ethics is done. Doing intergenerationally responsible theology and ethics means paying attention to how people are formed as theological and ethical reasoners (reasoners about the good), how social practices of deliberation about the good are maintained and developed, and how all of this relates to an understanding of the world as the sphere of God's transforming action. In other words, an intergenerationally responsible theological ethics will pay attention to the ethics, and the spirituality, of "ethics" itself. Her account of the ethical relation to future generations centres on three key concepts: "choosing life" (see Deut 30:19); "keeping the sources open"; and "sustaining fruitful contexts". These concepts are developed theologically and in engagement with extra-theological conversations on intergenerational responsibility. She shows how they take up and move beyond concerns expressed in those conversations - for "survival", for the right distribution of resources, and for the maintenance of human values.

Dr Rachel Muers is Lecturer in Theology in the University of Leeds, UK. She is author of Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Blackwell, 2004).She also edited The Modern Theologians (Blackwells) together with David Ford.

"Rachel Muers has initiated a new subfield of theological ethics: "the Ethics of Intergenerational Responsibility." Muers renews the Enlightenment's call for us to reason for the sake of future generations. Then she reminds us that the Enlightenment is indebted to previous as well as future generations. The result is a much more radical call: back to the scriptural as well as philosophic sources of modern ethics and forward to a vision of how "God constitutes intergenerational communities." It is at once a maternal, theocentric, and eco-centric vision. A thoroughly refreshing approach. Living for the Future should become a primary source for future work on intergenerational matters." - Peter Ochs, Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies, University of Virginia, USA -- Peter Ochs "Living for the Future is a timely and compelling inquiry into the subject of intergenerational responsibility that calls Christian people to practices of hope "for the third and fourth generation". By developing maternal ways of thinking sensitive to asymmetrical relations with future generations, Rachel Muers offers a deeply considered exploration of moral issues entailed in safeguarding the future. This book is insightful, biblically-informed, and fully engaged with the realities of today's world. Muers writes the best kind of systematic theology - exegetical, provocative, and clear." - Esther D. Reed, University of Exeter -- Esther D. Reed Mention -Book News, February 2009 "Creative and timely insights."Baptist Times, 25th June 2010