Talk:Micah 4:1-5:15

Uncontrollability (vv. 5:7-8)

Joe, I like your shift in emphasis here from violence to uncontrollability. I've been wondering a bit about what "fear of God" means in various sciptures, and I think it's a related notion. Jim F. discusses this in a FARMS talk I listened to recently ("How to Study the Book of Mormon," available here) in the context of King Benjamin's speech. I liked Jim's point that we often have a tendency to soften the frightening connotation of the word "fear" thinking of it more in terms with softer connotations like reverence and respect. But I think this uncontrollable aspect of God is important to remember, related of course to many things we've already discussed (e.g. Isaiah's conversion and theology that isn't idolotrous). --RobertC 04:27, 9 Jan 2007 (UTC)

The insight was actually my wife's. I thought it important enough to post it. But I like it for the same reasons you mention. I'll have to take a look at the link you provided here. I think I've run across that before, but not taken the time to listen to it yet. But as to uncontrollability, I suppose that it is precisely this theme that drives my continued interest in a thinker so pragmatic as C.S. Lewis. More than any other author, I think he has captured the uncontrollability of God. Due to our discussions of theological possibilities in art lately, I've been spending a lot of time reading what I would call theological fiction over the past few months. Lewis' Till We Have Faces captures this uncontrollability in a far more profound fashion than LDS writers, such as Orson Scott Card (whose work I thoroughly enjoy, but on other grounds). Are we too quick, as Latter-day Saints, to domesticate God because He was once a man or because we might one day become like Him? We tend to tremble and to fear before some kind of absolute "law of nature" to which even God bows, but in the end, it is rather difficult to feel to bow to any "law of nature," because modernism has so tamed nature that its inexorable way is already so predictable. I confess that I enjoy thinking the uncontrollability implied in verses like these. --Joe Spencer 15:02, 9 Jan 2007 (UTC)