Para além de uma questão de fé : trajetória e atividade missionária de Ashbel Green Simonton no Brasil Império (1852-1867)

Abstract

This research deals with the trajectory as a missionary of Ashbel Green Simonton, a young American who arrived in Brazil on August 12, 1859. He was entrusted with a specific "mission" by the Board of Missions that sent him: to observe the Brazilian imperial scenario and to do groundwork for Presbyterian missionary activities. These activities were part of a world-wide expansion of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). The thesis begins with an examination of the missionary culture of Calvinist inheritance that was forged, above all, at Princeton University throughout the 19th century . That culture was an important part of Ashbel Green Simonton’s coming of age and appears in his informal writings that outlined a worldview and were steeped in a context of promoting missions all over the world. The sources used here are Simonton's diary with entries dating from 1852 to December 1866, letters he sent to the Board of Missions in New Jersey from 1859 to 1867 and some articles appearing in the periodical Imprensa Evangélica [Evangelical Press], from 1864 to 1867. The fabric of the work intends to present the Princetonean missionary culture as a background, and, from it, to understand some of the concepts that compose it, such as Postmillennialism and the Great Awakening. Simonton shares this culture, and from it he presented values, interpretation of the world and the moral basis by which he behaved. Simonton's missionary activity in Brazil expressed this missionary culture in which he grew up and graduated, and from the records of letters, diaries, sermons and writings in the Imprensa Evangélica, we seek, through a "game of scales", to look for the missionary, and also through him, for the context and time as delineated in our historical research.