Harvard Divinity School

The Discussion Method produces significant student learning outcomes. In a time where we are only beginning to witness artificial intelligence's disruption of work and the economy, these learning outcomes are crucial to personal and professional success. This paper begins by tracing the role of the Discussion Method within the liberal arts tradition, and by extension the Confucian tradition. Second, this paper examines how the Discussion Method lost its value in higher education as a consequence of the employability problem. In this section, the employability problem is defined as a twofold misunderstanding among students and parents regarding the purpose of education and how to prepare for the workplace. Third, this paper reframes the purpose of the Discussion Method in an integrated curriculum for preparing students to achieve personal and professional success. Also, in the third section, student generated data serve as evidence to support the argument that (1) discussion-based classes are an important missing element in undergraduate management education and (2) discussion-based classes are superior to large lectures. This paper concludes that a discussion-based business pedagogy anchored by the liberal arts and sciences leads to eight major learning outcomes: (1) how to reconcile opposing arguments; (2) how to think on one's own two feet; (3) how to formulate cohesive arguments to reach a consensus; (4) how to mitigate fear of sharing individual opinions by building relationship among classmates; (5) how to allow students to learn better by motivating them to prepare more for class; (6) how to enable students to remain engaged during and after class; (7) how to embraces nuance; and (8) how to integrate new ideas from disparate perspectives and disciplines.

The Discussion Method produces significant student learning outcomes. In a time where we are only beginning to witness artificial intelligence’s disruption of work and the economy, these learning outcomes are crucial to personal and professional success. This paper begins by tracing the role of the Discussion Method within the liberal arts tradition, and by extension the Confucian tradition. Second, this paper examines how the Discussion Method lost its value in higher education as a consequence of the employability problem. In this section, the employability problem is defined as a two-fold misunderstanding among students and parents regarding the purpose of education and how to prepare for the workplace. Third, this paper reframes the purpose of the Discussion Method in an integrated curriculum for preparing students to achieve personal and professional success. Also, in the third section, student generated data serve as evidence to support the argument that (1) discussion-based c...

Transnational bioscience entrepreneurs (TBEs) accelerate not only the economic, but also the cultural, political, and social development of their host and sending countries. Today, the ease with which TBEs shuttle between American, Chinese, and Taiwanese cultures and resolve intractable workplace norms such as haphazard research, inadequate quality control, insular attitudes, and misguided regulations throws into sharp relief the significance of the TBEs' global sensibility. This paper uses grounded theory building to understand how intellectual engagement and rootedness are precursors to global sensibility. Analyzing the experiences and motivations of TBEs advances our understanding of why they return to their country of origin to upgrade its bioscience infrastructure.

This article argues that common ground may be found between Dionysius and Luther if one goes beyond the customary "mystical" framework for analyzing Dionysius' work and views Luther (despite his dismissal of Dionysius as an impostor) as standing in a long line of interpreters who had sought to give Dionysian ideas a more explicitly Christological focus. Specifically, I argue, the similarities lie in Luther's conceptualization of God's hidden presence and the reformer's strongly ontological doctrine of justification. The latter has a procession-return structure within which the status of the justified person, qua justified, is expressed in terms reminiscent of the Dionysian analogia.

This article seeks to uphold a consistently legal reading of Luther’s conception of temporal authority. Far from a premature dismissal or milieu-motivated relativization of the reformer’s precepts, it shows that such an analysis need degenerate neither into casuistry nor naïve pre-Enlightenment authoritarianism. Rather, I argue that what drives Luther’s esteem for temporal authority—which he views primarily in light of its social and vocational expression in civil law—is the ancient legal maxim that no one be judge in one’s own case, nemo iudex in causa sua. On this basis Luther proposes a noncasuistic theory of the law and, in so doing, destabilizes the relation between the Christian and temporal authority while at the same time keeping at bay the threat of self-serving individualism and anarchy. I argue, moreover, that the maxim underlies Luther’s conception not only of the political use of the law but also, by exposing its shortcomings, of the law’s theological, accusatory, function. As such, to push the argument further still, I also propose that the maxim may be viewed as the very foundation of Luther’s mature understanding of justification and Christian life. God reveals that he is a righteous judge by consistently not being judge in his own case and so being free to justify humanity. In keeping with the maxim, this in turn makes the believer, as a justified sinner, uniquely able to uphold civil law with a view to according the neighbor justice. In doing so, the believer actually justifies God, who has first justified the believer.

It is frequently alleged that Martin Luther's doctrine of justification by grace through faith posits absolute human passivity vis-à-vis God and, on account of the past completion of Christ's sacrifice, disconnects Christians from the cross. This article takes issue with this view. Specifically, it disputes the claim that, through his doctrine of justification, Luther became an unwitting advocate of the conceptual juxtaposition of gift and exchange and thus also an ideologue of the shift from an organic to a contractual view of society. Instead, I argue, Luther's eucharistic theology anticipates the concerns of Radical Orthodoxy's critique of gift and sacrifice. It does so, however, in a more forceful manner, in that for Luther gift and exchange are so bound together in his doctrine of justification that the eucharist, instead of being a mere paradigm for social relationships (as Radical Orthodoxy would have it), radically restructures those relationships in the all-embracing unfolding of its participatory gratuity. An additional merit of Luther's vision lies in its systematic description of the eucharist's gift-character in terms of socially and vocationally construed delay and non-identical repetition, actively involving both God and humans – a description not afforded by Radical Orthodoxy's critique.

This article seeks to demonstrate that Barth radically misunderstands the Lutheran doctrine of the communication of attributes, with its centerpiece the genus maiestaticum. However, misdirected as Barth's criticism is, the doctrine is not without its own problems and, instead of giving expression to the integrity of Christ's person and the co-presence of his natures, is in danger of subverting itself. After showing that Barth's Christology actually employs what for all practical purposes is the majestic genus of the Lutherans, I propose that the Swiss theologian's thought may offer ways of resolving the tensions inherent in the Lutheran tenet, and that by means of resources that the Lutherans already possess.

"By critically engaging Eberhard Jüngel's doctrine of the Trinity, this volume makes a broader, constructive contribution to contemporary trinitarian thought.The argument centers on the question - posed by the inconsistencies uncovered in Jüngel's doctrine of God - of how one can assert both divine freedom and the inter-subjectivity of God's trinitarian self-determination. Can one maintain God's freedom in the interest of divine spontaneity and creativity, while remaining committed to inter-subjective vulnerability which the Cross entails as an event of divine love?

Malysz suggests that a resolution to this problem lies in a logic of divine freedom, which, next to the trinitarian logic of love, constitutes a different and simultaneous mode of trinitarian relationality. To develop this logic, Malysz draws on Jüngel's understanding of human freedom as rooted in the "elemental interruption" of the self-securing subject. Malysz thus not only brings Jüngel's view of divine freedom into correspondence with the anthropological effects that Jüngel ascribes to it, but, above all, offers an imaginative, new way of closely integrating the doctrine of God and theological anthropology.

REVIEWS:

‘In this highly challenging work Eberhard Jüngel's theology is subjected to a searching and substantial analysis. Ambiguities in his doctrine of the Trinity are not only pin-pointed but also creatively resolved. Much light is cast in the process on his difficult and distinctive ideas of freedom and love. Piotr J. Maylsz's work will be a standard point of reference for all those interested in these questions.’ – George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA


‘Eberhard Jüngel has been one of the most creative and complex theologians working in the wake of Karl Barth. In this ambitious and carefully argued work, Malysz offers a skilful and illuminating analysis of the core concern of Jüngel's project: to rethink the interplay of love and freedom as definitive both for theological anthropology and for the doctrine of the Trinity. In so doing Malysz provides not only an interpretation of Jüngel, but something rarer: a constructive proposal which joins the trajectory from Barth to Jüngel, and then boldly carries it further.’ - Paul DeHart, Vanderbilt University, USA


'In this exacting new study of Jüngel's trinitarian thought as it relates to the problem of human freedom, Malysz balances immaculately courteous exposition of Jüngel's position with a penetrating critique of its final coherence. Malysz's own suggested repair of Jüngel's proposal requires that he acknowledge two distinct manners of trinitarian relationality - one grounded in love, the other in freedom. This is a timely reassessment of Jüngel's trinitarianism from a young theologian of notable originality and flair.' - Sarah Coakley, Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge


‘Jüngel is one of the deepest, most gripping and least appreciated among leading contemporary Christian theologians. Malysz expounds him clearly, analyses him (and his commentators) acutely and combines this with sensitive critique and constructive response. He thinks through Jüngel's great themes, such as freedom, love, crucifixion, Trinity, possibility, necessity and interruption, and helps us to think afresh with them for the sake of future theology.’ – David F. Ford, University of Cambridge, UK"

Luther puts forth a Trinitarian hermeneutic of human willing and the will’s freedom. Luther’s thought in this area is best seen as a response to a problem that medieval theology inherited from Augustine. The puzzle concerns the conceptualization of divine and human agencies. Medieval theology, despite its commitment to emphasizing divine grace, articulated the reality of the two agencies in a way that practically, and then also conceptually, privileged human initiative instead. Luther, in contrast, returns to Augustine’s intuition, though not quite his language, and proposes that nothing short of a Trinitarian conception of freedom will do for the affirmation of human choice that, nonetheless, presupposes and defers consistently to divine initiative and support.

As might be expected with a distance of five hundred years, there is much about Martin Luther and his theology that seems strange to the modern world. Yet these strange elements should not blind late modern people to the fact that Luther has a powerful message about God and humanity that can speak to even our jaded age.

The paper pursues the question of what it is, in how we construe the cross, that has stood in the way of seeing all perversions and miscarriages of justice in its light, especially on the part of self-confessed Christians? As it zeros in on several signal figures—representative of our thinking about the cross as such, the pitfalls and the promise that emerge from the Christian tradition itself, its internal and ever-continuing dialogue—the article lays the blame on a subtle and lingering kind of Nestorianism that creeps into even the best of our atonement thinking and in practice evacuates the cross from the face of the earth.