Letter to Philemon: the teology of prison

Abstract

This article has as its theme the study of the theological constituent discourse Letter to Philemon, written by Paul, during the period in which he was in prison. For the treatment of this theme, we mobilized the theoretical-methodological apparatus of French Discourse Analysis (AD), based on the enunciative-discursive perspective proposed by Dominique Maingueneau, in particular, the notion of constituent discourses. Constituent discourses give meaning to collective acts, guarantee several other discourses, authorize themselves, found and are not founded and, at the same time, are self-constituent and hetero-constituent. In the letter to Philemon, the enunciator organizes his own enunciation through an epistolary scenography, developed in a physical-prison and spiritual space and in a time (first century) associated with the figure of the co-enunciator. Thus, the presentation of oneself, the coenunciator and Christian principles, such as faith, love and freedom, are linguistically instrumentalized.