Editorial

Trundling along as we do in the mundane business of life, caught up with things that expect attention, sighing with relief or longing for respite whenever there is a pause, it is easy to lose track of time. It seems to pass us by, or rather to pass through us without notice as though it would leave us behind. Even when there seems nothing to do that merits effort, the cares of the everyday rise up to grab our thoughts till we become distracted and perhaps a bit lost. So it comes as both a gift and a task—that double-edged Latin word, munus—when we are given time without our reckoning of it, when we allow ourselves to be interrupted, to listen, and then to take up what is being given to us in a new way, as possibility and in hope.

The papers in this issue of the journal are the result of a symposium in May 2011 organised by Professor Sarah Coakley and Dr Joshua Hordern, hosted by the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge, and with the generous support of the McDonald Agape Foundation. In the best tradition of scholarly symposia, this one provided leisure to think deeply about its theme—the future of theological ethics—and to enjoy the conviviality of professional colleagues enriched by musical interludes and a congenial environment. It gave time for participants to assume their duty of care for this discipline with great seriousness and in friendship.

Future thinking has taken hold of the western imagination for longer than a century, being at times fantastical and at times oddly prescient, sometimes taken up with giddy abandon if recent accounts of stock market antics are to be believed, sometimes with the desperate urgency of survival. Concentration on the future, on what it holds and on the ways of its realisation, arises at least in one sense from out of this recent history, when it has become normal to think about what is coming next, to work out how to get there or how to avoid it and how to assess our progress, and to be swept along in moods of optimism or despair. To wonder about the future of a discipline of thinking is shaped, however, also in a more specific context that both reflects and challenges this general inheritance. As one such discipline, questions about the future of theological ethics arise at the interface of religious and scholarly communities, where people who bear a tradition of faith are engaged in the pursuit of knowledge through academic enquiry and research, and through encounter with other disciplines.

In this place, and at least since the conclusion of World War II, the West has been home to an unprecedented flourishing of higher educational institutions that have sought most especially to nurture scientific achievement and technological advance as a matter of national pride and competition, as a means for the promotion of distinctive or global cultures, and more recently as a commodity of some considerable value. Theological ethics most commonly has inherited a place in these academies, being a willing, or at least not wholly innocent, participant in these developments. Yet there is a lingering sense of loss, of ‘the dying of the light’ as James Burtchaell puts it, of something abandoned or perhaps misplaced that leaves its mark as a deep ambivalence within the discipline. In its own university context, theological ethics is not always welcomed or understood, now having to compete with other disciplines for market share, often made the scapegoat of culture wars and moral disputes that render it marginal to either its host or its founding communities, or both.

For along with its sister discipline of philosophy, theology finds itself sitting awkwardly within a situation that in our time is overwhelmingly determined by technology and driven by the need to produce results measurable by a commonly agreed standard of value. Disciplines that are by their very nature and to a great extent useless, serving no earthly purpose, and that collapse into artifice when made only to serve an existing political agenda, are most endangered here as the heart of their endeavour is emptied of its lifeblood. No matter which way these circumstances are carved up, the outcome is to commodify ways of thinking and practices of study and reflection the very purpose of which is to question these very same cultural processes and their provenance, and to open paths of understanding not yet revealed or charted. In this task is the human mind realising its own capacity for transcendence and so is it being directed towards its own fully coming alive in the presence of the divine. Is the future of theological ethics at risk here too? What are the challenges to the essence of its own task in the midst of these expectations? In what way lies its authentic work?

The series of conversations that follows in these pages gives the lie to anyone who thinks these things may easily be discerned. For the search for self-understanding involves struggle: to see how a discipline is placed as a form of public reasoning and to grasp the nature of this responsibility, to understand how theological ethics bears different strands of tradition—political, intellectual and religious—and to articulate their contemporary needs, to discover as though for the first time what is most precious to and therefore most precarious within these traditions that is now to be handed on. Such struggles are costly. They are the exercises of this discipline as it learns how to live fully into its own time, to become real if you like, and by which it takes its proper place in history. It then becomes obvious that the future cannot merely be the application of what is presently known and available to us for manipulation to our perceived needs and wishes. This is the way technology proceeds in making its five-year plans and striving after its predetermined aims and objectives. Rather is the future what comes to be in the persons of those who enquire into it. So that it is no longer a topic of dispassionate conversation, but is being embodied as futural in the ones who ask after it.

And not only them. For if the question of the future cannot merely be, ‘what next?’, but rather, ‘to what end?’, then those who are to follow indicate the direction of the work to be done. It was crucial that students were present as auditors for this symposium for they seek to be disciples and to learn a subject, not as one option among many others that attract, but most especially as a way of life. How their minds and hearts are to be led in truth, how they are taught to grapple with perplexities that arise in this path, how they are to be prepared for the apologetic task of speaking truth in and to a troubled world, and often at risk to themselves—these are things that teaching for the future requires of us. One group of serious scholars exemplified these things in the papers published here. So we owe them a debt of gratitude for their efforts on behalf of what is yet to come and assure them of our prayers.