Theolinguistic understanding of the biblical concepts of “Humility”, “Love” and “Kingdom of God”
- Authors: Postovalova V.I.1
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Affiliations:
- Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
- Issue: Vol 23, No 3 (2025): THE HERITAGE OF THE BIBLE IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE
- Pages: 499-517
- Section: Cultural Linguistics: Theoretical and Applied Aspects
- URL: https://journals.rcsi.science/2618-8163/article/view/348873
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-8163-2025-23-3-499-517
- EDN: https://elibrary.ru/YDDTGI
- ID: 348873
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Abstract
The study examines biblical units from the New Testament and old Testament in the Russian orthodox picture of the world based on the historical and genetic processes of structuring the most important Christian concepts of “Humility”, “Love” and “Kingdom of God”. The foundations of the orthodox worldview are presented through deep semantic principles, basic biblical concepts. The biblical text is considered in its communicative perspective, and the Bible itself is shown as a factor in the living communication between God and man. This approach is relevant in modern theolinguistics. The aim of the study is to establish the features of the semantic and speech explication of the biblical concepts of “Humility”, “Love” and “Kingdom of God” from theolinguistic positions and to structure their content in the Russian orthodox picture of the world based on confessional texts in the Russian literary language. The author used general scientific (systematization, description), specific (semasiological, theological) and integrative methods (theolinguistic, linguistic-cognitive, linguistic-axiological, linguistic-cultural). The study established that the biblical concept is a multidimensional, valuable and indivisible semantic formation in different areas (confessional, cultural-historical, linguistic-semiotic and individual). The study of Russian confessional texts showed the ambiguity and variability of the content of the biblical concepts of “Humility”, “Love” and “Kingdom of God”. The concept of “Humility” has seven levels of semantic explication of biblical concepts, from the supra-linguistic, supra-national and supracultural significance of the nuclear meaning to individual-personal semantic shades within the author’s style. The analysis of the concept “Love” showed the semantic modification of biblical concepts in the old Testament and New Testament texts, from love for God in the old Testament to love for one’s neighbor in the New Testament. This expanded the content of the concept in terms of understanding love as the transformation of man. The analysis of the concept “Kingdom of God” showed a dual interpretation of biblical concepts in the Bible and in theological texts, from the biblical understanding of the Kingdom of God as the end of time to the theological understanding of it as an eschatological mystery hidden in the soul of man. The prospect of the study is to describe the entire biblical conceptual sphere of Russian language and Russian orthodox linguistic culture.
About the authors
Valentina I. Postovalova
Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
Author for correspondence.
Email: postovalova@iling-ran.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0201-8285
SPIN-code: 8525-0535
Doctor of Philology, Professor, Chief Researcher of the Yu.S. Stepanov Department of Theories and Practices of Communication Institute of Linguistics
1 Bolshoi Kislovsky pereulok, bldg. 1, Moscow, 125009, Russian FederationReferences
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