Re: [asa] On Job

What about Brits who go to Florida?

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "gordon brown" <gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu>
To: "Don Winterstein" <dfwinterstein@msn.com>
Cc: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 4:17 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] On Job

> On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Don Winterstein wrote:
>
>> "My experience overseas has been just the opposite. People tend to
>> react better to a foreigner with perceived greater knowledge than a
>> local for much the same reason Christ faced rejection in his home town."
>>
>> How much of this is attributable to the foreign missionary's coming from
>> a technologically superior (e.g., medicinally, etc.) culture? I often
>> wonder whether Christian missionaries from the West in foreign lands are
>> promoting Western civilization as much as Christianity. Without the
>> boost from the reputation of having a more advanced civilization, the
>> impact would likely not be the same. In any case, making conversions in
>> foreign lands is often a painfully slow process, not one in which a whole
>> large city all of a sudden repents in sackcloth.
>>
>> It's the "perceived greater knowledge," very likely, that has the impact.
>> That's what I referred to when I wrote, "If [foreigners are] known in
>> advance for their accomplishments, they're often given sometimes
>> undeserved special respect." On what grounds would the Ninevites have
>> perceived Jonah to have had such "greater knowledge"?
>>
>> You're right in inferring that too much familiarity breeds disrespect.
>> But being too different in the absence of a special reputation also
>> breeds disrespect. That's normal human prejudice at work. People of
>> Nazareth had a hard time accepting Jesus for who he was, but his most
>> successful ministry was in nearby portions of Galilee, and his closest
>> disciples as a rule came from there as well. They all spoke with the
>> same accent (Matt. 26:73). And Jesus worked miracles to support his
>> teaching, just as missionaries today use modern medicine to work
>> miracles. Jonah apparently didn't do any such thing.
>>
>> Don
>
> When I was a child, foreign travel was much less affordable than it is
> now, and the vast majority of foreigners that I met in the US were highly
> educated people, and this probably accounted in part for my image of their
> countrymen in general. Perhaps this sort of phenomenon could take place in
> the ancient world as well.
>
> Gordon Brown
> Department of Mathematics
> University of Colorado
> Boulder, CO 80309-0395
>
>
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Received on Thu Oct 12 12:22:56 2006