Corpo, Alma e espírito: Uma etnografia sobre a autoridade espiritual e social do batismo com Espírito Santo

Abstract

The central objective of this work is to describe, according to the Assembleia de Deus church of Cícero Mendes community believers' conception, how the tricotomy of the human person (body, soul and spirit) is related to the Holy Trinity and to the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which through this relation provides a change in the subject, conferring him or her an authority by the obtaining of a spiritual power coating. Avoiding to treat baptism and manifestations of the Holly Spirit as a "trance" or a "collective hysteria", I used the idea of becoming from Deleuze and Guattari (1997) allow us to look throughout the ethnography at the event and the effects of fire baptism as an action that transforms the Christian's life completely, not only in the moments he or she is in the church. The subjects studied work voluntarily in the church motivated by two reasons: when he or she has experienced some difficulty and has somehow managed to get out of it and attributes it to a gift from God, the person is led by the feeling of gratitude; when it is not the case and one does have a certain fear of being punished if he or she refuses to work in God's work, then he or she is guided by fear. Theese facts refer to the divine agency, to God's will that shows itself above the life of the Christian.