Ethics in Crisis, Ethics in Hope: Bonhoeffer's Unfinished Theological Ethics and the Future of Human Dignity

This incisive volume offers fresh historical and constructive engagements with the ever fascinating and perplexing theological ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Matthew Puffer examines the historical crises out of which Bonhoeffer composed the manuscripts that would become his posthumously published magnum opus, Ethics. He explores the ways in which Bonhoeffer understood his work as a response not only to the ecclesial, social, and political crises of Nazi Germany, but more specifically to a “crisis in ethics,” the failure of traditional forms of ethics to effectively respond to the state of emergency. Bonhoeffer famously wrestles with novel proposals for how Christians should think about responsibility, complicity, culpability, and guilt in ways that have left not only casual readers but also philosophers and Bonhoeffer scholars scratching their heads. In these chapters, Matthew Puffer argues for a critical reconsideration of the ethics supposed to have informed Bonhoeffer’s participation in German resistance, but also for an extension of Bonhoeffer’s thought to the global, ecological, and intergenerational crises of ethics that we face today. An ethics of hope proves to be an essential and ineliminable feature of Bonhoeffer’s thought, evident in his insistence that ethics is fundamentally about how coming generations will live. In Bonhoeffer we find fresh inspiration for contemporary debates regarding the meaning and political implications of human dignity, integrating the wellbeing of not-yet-existing future generations into the moral calculus regarding what it means to treat present day persons with dignity.

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