MaxPC wrote:Neto wrote:
And (at least in my understanding, and experience) God's plan is not static. He sometimes moves people around, to a new place, and a new vocation. In many such cases, a well-rounded education sure comes in handy.
I agree. Well rounded education is good for humility too.
The one danger I see around me is society’s “caste system” view of “status” infiltrating educational perceptions. A degree or even a skill is not something to elevate personal status. It should instead be viewed as a gift from God and therefore to be put in service to the Will of God. I think the Apostle Paul emphasizes that point well [in I Cor 13].
As you will probably remember from my previous comments here on the forum, our missionary/Bible translation training & work involved both field linguist and field anthropologist duties and responsibilities. (In addition to medical work, for which neither of us had received any formal training whatsoever.) But your point regarding "status" of degreed persons is something we experienced, especially in linguistics. (I did have linguistics education both on the under=grad & graduate levels, although I did not complete a Masters degree.) A world-renowned linguist came to do research in the language family in which we worked. I could show you the spot along the road on the mission center where I told him how I was describing the two verb classes in the language, and he said "Oh, don't use labels like that - just call it Class A & Class B." Then later he published his own work, using my labels (and without any credit). Also, because the passive construction in that language is used somewhat differently than it is in other languages, he also came up with a completely novel (read as here-to-fore unknown & uncited) grammatical description to handle what are actually passive & active constructions. I spoke with another missionary who also worked in the same language family (and who DOES have a doctorate degree in linguistics) about this, and he agreed that if a linguist who (like myself) had no doctorate, such a description would be laughed out of the room.
Because this is just written text here, I may sound bitter about this, but I'm not. Our priorities were (and are) in giving the Scriptures to the people. Linguistic research and descriptive articles are just a by-product of that work. But it IS an illustration of what you said.
[A linguistic side note, in case you or anyone else is interested: In regards to the Banawa passive, it is used differently than in English (which basically defines the classical description of the passive). In English we use the passive to either avoid mentioning who the Agent of the verbal action is (or you might simply say, the Actor), or to report an event where the Actor is unknown. Or, the Agent is 'demoted' in focus by putting such mention into a prepositional phrase, such as "The dog was brutally kicked
by the man."
In contrast to this, Banawa uses the passive in order to keep the main character of the narrative as the topic - IN focus. The main character is known, so it is not necessary to continually name him or her, even by means of a pronoun in an active construction. An example from Luke will demonstrate this, in addition to the linguistic device of using a body part to denote the topic participant. Where English says that "They (the soldiers) beat him (Jesus) on the head and spit in his face" the Banawa construction communicates this w/o moving Jesus from the Subject slot by use of the passive. "Head was hit by them; face was spit on by them." (These are not prepositional phrases in Banawa, but it cannot be represented in English exactly as it is conveyed in Banawa.) Even though this use of the Banawa passive construction does have this marked difference in purpose, it is still the best description of the grammar. But our description of this is rejected, even though we, unlike the linguist with the doctorate, are speakers of the language, and have many years of interaction with the people, hearing their stories, and understanding their use of these different constructions in live situations, not just on paper. One further comment, regarding this use of body parts as representing the whole person. Linguistically, these words are described as "inalienably possessed nouns", something else we do not have in English, and are also marked for gender. So for example a male's face is 'noko', and a female's face is 'noki'. Then when you get to things like "the palm of his hand" there is a complex grammatical rule for gender assignment within the larger phrase. But even things like a 'trail' or 'water drops' can be communicated as inalienably possessed nouns - like the trail that a person travels regularly, or the drops of water on a person's skin after a bath. I'm getting carried away here, because it is a rich and beautiful language....
Edit: Back to add this little bit. So we "walk Jesus' trail". But this 'trail' is so closely tied to Jesus that it is as if it is a part of him, an actual body part.]