Paradise lost: person and salvation in the Seventh-day Adventist Church

• Grant number: 14/09956-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2014
• End date: July 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Pazzanese Duarte Lanna
• Grantee: Allan Wine Santos Barbosa
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims to study the process of construction of the person in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, focusing on analysis of individual salvation. I propose attendance of worships and biblical studies in a church of São Carlos, interior of São Paulo, as well as reflection on the adventist canon, in order to apprehend the movements that operate the transformation of the mundane individual being stained by sin in a justified person, able to accept God's grace. This goal makes necessary the reflection on classic themes of anthropological theory such as gift and sacrifice in the biblical context, as well as elements present in the recent discussion of the anthropology of Christianity. Furthermore, I seek to grasp how these processes of construction and justification relate to everyday living of the faithful in the church environment, as well as with the outside world, through the ethnographic method, following the activities of the church and the everyday of its goers. In this sense, to discuss these issues in Adventism, I seek to bring to the anthropological debate several particularities of this branch of historical Protestantism that, despite its cosmological wealth, has not been explored by studies of the area.