THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND DENOMINATIONAL DIFFERENTIATION IN PROTESTANTISM
The paper sets out to explore the structural semiotics of Protestant discourse. Although the topic is familiar for the research agenda, the words habitually used for nomination in discourse are semantically vague. Such word as fundamentalism has a wide register of meanings from general nomination tinged with pejorative connotations to regular self-naming chosen by groups and trends. Moreover, Protestant affiliations of almost opposite views are often named identically, rendering nomination in Protestant discourse asymmetric. Modern systemic and structural approach gives rise to other complications when used for analysis of religious phenomena. Denominational affiliations integrate theology with its discourse characteristics as a subsystem within a given systemic framework. But it proves impossible to present varieties of theological discourse within the frameworks of traditional denominational divisions as symmetrically consistent. The descriptive fields defining different components of religious community (such as theology, services, and the like) are far from symmetric as the system itself does not operate in binary-symmetric domain traditional for classical religious studies. As a result, for each denomination an entire range of variants of theology should be described as typical for a chosen denomination.