About Project Diktuon
Pulling the Fish Together
Paradigm and Discourse

On a more tangible level, we have our own conceptions about what the world is like, especially about what God and salvation are like. This is called doctrine. The doctrine is essentially a mere attempt to describe the reality. Differences in our doctrines reflect our failures to perceive, understand, describe and communicate it to each other.

Being a description, these thoughts are formulated in certain language – a discourse – and from a given point of view – a paradigm. Paradigm is our way of thinking and looking at things. We could say what we think about things before we start to look at them in more detail. In a way, our set of prejudices is contained in our paradigm. Discourse is the language we use to talk about things. It is more than just words, it is the meanings of those words, feelings and themes associated with them, the conventions used to express things. (Needs clarification.)

We should be aware that both our paradigms and our discourse differ. A farmer living in the countryside in Ireland has a world view different from that of a juvenile criminal in London – and even while they may use the same words, they speak different languages. Similarly, we should not expect that we understand each other simply because we understand what the other person is saying. There may be subtle meanings he does not communicate, because he thinks they are obvious but you have never even heard of them. Therefore, understanding is always an effort.

Similarly, both paradigms and discourses tend to change. Our individual paradigms evolve or shake as we grow, and the collective paradigms do the same. For example, for centuries the Newtonian mechanics were the paradigm of scientific community. That paradigm was abolished by quantum physics and the theory of relativity. If we now look at the texts people with that paradigm wrote, we need to adapt our own thinking into their paradigm. And to communicate the same things, to describe the same reality in the same way as they did, we need to restate it. Our thinking – paradigm and discourse – is different, therefore to say the same we need to say it again, in our languages, in our way, in our own discourse. The reality hasn’t changed, but our way of describing it has.

The same applies to our doctrine, our attempt to describe the spiritual reality. The creeds were written in another time and another place. They describe their issues well, in their respective historical contexts. But they may mean little to us. Therefore, we need to restate the same things, in a way we find relevant and understandable.

In this attempt, we need to study the reality, the Bible (which is the only reliable revelation of God), the old descriptions and each others’ conceptions about reality. We need to adapt to the different paradigms and interpret the their meanings in our own discourse to compare them with others. The aim is to describe reality better: both more accurately and more understandably.

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