Quotes about Paradigm

Our normal is so subnormal that normal seems radical. To the first-century disciples, normal and radical were synonyms. We've turned them into antonyms.

Our normal is so subnormal that normal seems radical.

if it is true that Jesus ultimately fits no known pattern within the first century,51 it is more or less bound to be true that he fits none within the twentieth.

No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out.

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.

A worldview can be replaced only by another worldview.

Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.

reality isn't what it used to be.

Andrew Perriman at "P.OST" (postnost.net).

Like a frail plant that needs careful tending and constant protection from sun and wind, perhaps the real problem wasn't me but the fragile, unsustainable version of Christianity I had been told was my only option.

Science, according to Kuhn, has not actually followed the classic myth of steady evolution of accumulating theories based on deeper and deeper probing of the evidence. Rather, science has sometimes made huge transitions as one paradigm, which may have stood for centuries, is found to be inadequate and crashes to the ground, to be replaced by another.

This means we do not ignore the particularity of biblical commands (and apply them to our own day as if they were timeless universals). Nor are we paralysed by their particularity (and thus unable to apply them to our day at all). We rejoice in their particularity because it shows us how the will of God was expressed in their context, and we take them as our paradigm for our own ethical construction.21