Santidade, arrependimento e fé: um olhar retórico-discursivo sobre sermões de John Wesley (1703-1791)

Abstract

This thesis is part of the research line Text and discourse in oral and written modalities and deals with religious discourse. To do so, it selects sermons by the Englishman John Wesley (1703-1791), preacher, reformer and founder of Methodism, who used practical theology to persuade his audiences to follow a path towards Christian perfection, the holiness. His long life and his sermonising sparked an interest in getting to know him in this missionary trajectory, made up of the early, middle and late phases, in which an important milestone occurred, his conversion in 1738 in Aldergaste, which led to a change in his discursive preferences. For this investigation, the main theoretical foundations were found in Aristotle, Classical Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, the New Rhetoric, and Quintilian; complemented by re-readings of Reboul, Meyer, Ferreira, among others. In addition, Fairclough contributed Textually Oriented Discourse Analysis, a branch of Critical Discourse Analysis, to consolidate the articulation between rhetorical and argumentative principles in the investigation of Wesleyan discourse. Homiletics and Religious Discourse were based on the presuppositions of Broadus, Ruiz de la Cierva and Orlandi. All these theoretical contributions were used to extract the categories of analysis, which were submitted to three sermons, one from each of Wesley's phases: The Circumcision of the Heart (1733); The Repentance of Believers (1767); and On Faith (1791). The analysis showed that, in his homiletics, the orator used a variety of means of persuasion to deal with Holiness, Repentance and Faith, the doctrines of the sermons selected, and maintained, in his phases, a preference, to a certain extent linear, regarding argumentative strategies, such as a focus on deliberative/epideictic rhetoric, pathos and dialectical reasoning, always used at convenience to make people know, make people believe and make people do do. The most noticeable changes were in the emphasis that the speaker gave to the themes, especially after the conversion experience, with a strong appeal to rhetorical devices