A Matriz Filosófica do Presbiterianismo no Brasil

• Autor(a) principal: Ladeia, Donizeti Rodrigues
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da METODISTA
• Texto Completo: http://tede.metodista.br/jspui/handle/tede/321
• topic: Thomas Reid; Senso Comum; Princeton; Missionários; Contra-reforma; Thomas Reid; Common sense; Princeton; Missionaries; Counter-Reformation; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS

Presbyterians protestant missionaries who came to Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century brought a Calvinist interpretation of the Bible, they remained faithful to princetoniana formation that effected a synthesis between Calvinist orthodoxy and pietism. These princetonian had epistemological basis as the philosophy of Thomas Reid, known as the Common Sense Realism. This philosophy is used as a reformed epistemology, or Calvinist. It is understood in its Scottish formation and consequently American, via Princeton, as Providential Epistemology. Thusly, when it is assimilated by Brazilians through preaching and theological education, it becomes part of the Brazilian Presbyterian profile as a philosophical doctrine. The Philosophy of Common Sense is gestated as critical to the empiricist philosophy of David Hume who, for Reid, converge to a possible annihilation of religion and a pessimistic view of science, affecting empiricism, therefore causing a new formulation nearest of skepticism. Therefore Reid formulated the philosophy that he is opposed to Locke and Berkeley and then to David Hume, claiming that reality is independent of our apprehension. In other words, in the perception of the outside world there is no interference of the cognocent subject on the object of knowledge. Our relationship with objects is straight and should not be undermined by intermediation. At implantation of Protestantism in Brazil, via Princeton missionaries, there was not an uncompromising defense of Calvinist principles by missionaries such as Fletcher and Simonton but a continuity of sacred scripture reading by Calvinistic bias, as was done at Princeton Seminary. There was not a marked emphasis on the defense of orthodoxy because the topic of theological liberalism, or the conflict between modernism and fundamentalism was not necessary in the local environment where the predominant concern for evangelization in practical terms. Moreover, the concepts of the Philosophy of Common Sense were close of empiricism mitigated by Silvestre Pinheiro and Victor Cousins eclecticism. Therefore, in Brazil, the place where one sees the use of the philosophy of Common Sense is in discussions among intellectuals in three interesting points: 1st) The Common Sense was restricted to academic space, training new pastors, and the works of Charles Hodge and A.A. Hodge are the main sources of implementing this ratifying mindset of religious experience and thus delineate the face of Protestantism among Presbyterians, one of the major protestant denominations in the late nineteenth century; 2nd) In the debates between Catholic Clergy and Protestant in theological polemics; 3rd) In the utilitarian use of foreign cultural assimilation by the national Protestant, not least, facilitated by the friendliness of the Brazilian liberal to Protestantism, while it maintained a philosophical line nearest mitigated empiricism and eclecticism. Hence, our hypothesis is intended to demonstrate that protestants brought with them the epistemological formulations that were given to a group of intellectuals who formed the framework of the first presbyterian pastors of the history of this denomination. They were converted and assimilated better the new doctrines through more than just preaching, but by his philosophical way of looking at the objects studied, and that such information comes through the epistemological basis of the Common Sense Realism, which finds space in Brazilian republicans ideals of the nineteenth century.