Why We will not be “God as God is God” – Part 1
Against the Armstrongist Doctrine of Becoming God
By Anton
“God then purposed to reproduce himself, through humans, made in his image and likeness…” - Herbert W. Armstrong, Mystery of the Ages, p. 94, 1985.
“It cannot be repeated too often: We were born for the express purpose of literally becoming equal with the creator of the universe — members in the same eternally ruling God Family-Kingdom. But what will we be like? Like God! Exactly! Exactly like God!” - Robert L. Kuhn, “What it Means to be – Equal with God”, Tomorrow’s World Magazine, April 1971.
“Thus said the Lord, The King of Israel, their Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts, I am the first and the last, and there is no God but me…” - Isaiah 44:6, Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition.
In orthodox Christianity, there are doctrines of Deification, Sanctification or Theosis. All refer to a process of humans partaking of the divine nature. None lead to the idea that humans will become “God as God is God” which is an expression that has been used by some Armstrongist leaders. Herbert W. Armstrong’s words, short and simple, capture the concept of God-as-God-is-God: “God is reproducing himself.” This language means that resurrected humans will not be just similar to God but will be of the same category as God – in a literal sense equal to God in every existential respect. In Armstrongist literature, this concept was further explained in some detail by Robert L. Kuhn, quoted above, who wrote on the topic of how man is destined to become equal with God.
To provide context, it is informative that Armstrongists are willing to assert human equality with God but describe Jesus, who is explicitly stated in scripture to be equal with God (Philippians 2:6), often in terms of being subordinate to God. This may be a leftover from the general Arianist view of 19th Century Adventism. Kuhn supports equality but qualifies it. Kuhn is careful to point out that though resurrected humans will become “qualitatively equal” to God, that is, they will have the same existential qualities as God such as being self-existent, resurrected humans will not be “quantitatively equal” to God, that is, God will always be greater in authority, power and intelligence. Qualitative equality, as Kuhn seems to define it, is arguably centered on ontology; whereas, quantitative equality centers on economy. Ontology refers to God’s unchanging existential nature while economy refers to roles, responsibilities, purposes and actions.
We can only assume that Kuhn’s view was also HWA’s view since Kuhn’s statement of the doctrine appeared in print in a leading magazine coming from the Armstrongist press. And what the doctrine states, in theological terminology, is that Armstrongists do not really believe in an unqualified version of the statement “God as God is God.” Rather, Armstrongists believe that resurrected humans will one day be equal to God in ontology but not economy. I believe that the Biblical view is at odds with the Armstrongist view – resurrected humans will be equal to God neither in ontology nor economy. Resurrected humans may participate to a degree in the divine economy through having God delegate activities to his children but resurrected humans will not be equal to God in ontology. This is the topic of this essay.
Note: This essay analyzes the doctrine of becoming God as presented in Classical Armstrongism. Kuhn published in the Seventies. I do not know how denominations derived from the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) now state this doctrine. Also, the commonly used Christian terms “ontology” and “economy”, in the theological sense, are nowhere used in Armstrongist literature that I can find.
Section I: Ontological Differences between God and Resurrected Humans
Ontology refers to God’s eternal existential nature and essence. I believe this roughly corresponds to Kuhn’s concept of being “qualitatively” like God (See reference to Kuhn article at end for a more detailed exposition of his ideas). The question we seek to resolve is whether resurrected humans are ontologically the same as God. If resurrected humans are different from God ontologically, then the God-as-is-God trope fails. Below are some points at issue:
God does not grow but resurrected humans will: Back years ago, a member of the WCG mentioned how amazing it would be to be resurrected and instantly have the mind of God and to know what God knows. I do not recall if it was a minister or lay member, but it is a mistaken notion that no doubt originated in the God-as-God-is-God idea. Isaiah 65:17-18 states, “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create…”. The scope of this passage is clearly prophetic and refers to the time after the resurrection. And God states that he will do the creating and we will rejoice. And this will be an eternal process. This means he will have the knowledge, capabilities and wisdom to create and we will not. God is absolute. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He says, “I am that I am.” This is the language of absoluteness. He will create and we will learn about his creation and how to rejoice in what he creates. He has no need to learn because he made everything, including humans. But resurrected human beings will continue to learn throughout eternity. He will not grow. Being absolute is a binary condition – either you are or you aren’t. There is no gradation. God does not become today twice as absolute as he was yesterday. God will not grow but resurrected humans will. And in this respect, we will be ontologically unlike God.
God alone creates: HWA many times used the analogy of unfinished furniture to illustrate a possible way in which resurrected humans might be given the responsibility of putting the finishing touches on the Cosmos. Terraforming planets, however, is not creation but fabrication – using existing materials and sources. God creates ex nihilo (Hebrews 11:3). There is no support for the idea that resurrected humans might create ex nihilo in scripture.
God states in Isaiah 65:17-18, "But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create”. God creates and we rejoice. Forever. If resurrected humans were going to be "God as God is God", would resurrected humans not be rejoicing in those things that they themselves would create? And if resurrected humans are not creators, they are lacking a fundamental ontological quality that identifies God and Godhood.
God does not have a bodily existence: God is spirit and is not restricted by form. If God had a form as a part his eternal essence, the form would have extension into multi-dimensional space or some equivalent to space. Without this extension, the concept of form does not exist. If God’s form were eternal, so would be the dimensions that his form would occupy. This means that the containing dimensions, phenomena external to God, were not created by God but are uncreated. Then God would not be the creator of all things and John 1:3 would be violated.
And a more subtle point is that if there were eternal uncreated dimensions, they would themselves be Divine and represent a kind of deity in addition to God.The most extensive treatment of the concept of an embodied existence is given in 1 Corinthians 15. If God had a body, the concept could be nicely incorporated into this text. Instead, in 1 Corinthians 15:49, Christians are told that they will bear the image (eikon) of the man of heaven, from context (vv. 45-47) a reference to Jesus who acquired a body as an aspect of his ontology in the Incarnation. We will be similar to Jesus who has a body, being fully man and fully God, not like God the Father who does not.
Humans will experience a bodily resurrection. I Corinthians 15 can be interpreted in no other way. This means that resurrected humans will have locality in space and must travel distance to be at another location. And the traveling of the distance will require time. It may be that resurrected humans will have a much different relationship with time than flesh and blood humans. Perhaps, resurrected humans can transit the cosmos in an instant, but the travel still requires an instant of time. Near the time of the first Pentecost after the resurrection of Jesus, the disciples saw Jesus ascend in his resurrection body. The language of Acts 1:6-11 expresses visibility, time and distance. If resurrected humans have bodies in the spacetime context and God has no body, resurrected humans will be ontologically different from God.
God does not experience time as we do: God created time. Time is a property of the physical universe. It responds to gravity, for instance. As gravity increases, time slows down. If you were in a starship and you approached a black hole, time would slow down because of the increase in gravity. As the starship approached the Schwarzschild radius, time would nearly stop. Time back on planet earth would continue to flow at the same rate. Since God created time, God in his essence is, therefore, timeless. This is not just an imaginary condition. Photons do not experience time as they travel through the cosmos. Further, a photon will experience all the locations along its path of travel through the cosmos at the same time. (Of course, photons are not beings that can experience. Pretend that you are an infinitesimally small, bodyless nano-being, riding on the photon racing along at the speed of light. That is the experience the nano-being version of you would have.)
We can only conjecture on God’s timeless state. Some believe that he does not experience a sequence of moments. There is some traction to this view. If God experiences time as a sequence of moments and has a past, present and future, then he has had an eternal past. This means that it doesn’t make sense that he would ever reach the present that we are experiencing. He would be eternally imprisoned in the infinite time that forms his past and is still passing through that infinite span of time to try to get to the present. That is the paradoxical way that an infinite series of consecutive moments works. And that is the weakness of the sequence of time argument – it leads to Reductio ad Absurdum. Others believe that God does have logical but not physical sequencing in his thoughts and activities. The logical antecedent must precede the logical consequent, for instance. Further, for us time is an organizing principle. The most I can say about that is to state the apophatic principle that God is not chaotic or confused. How he organizes without time, I don’t know.
Humans, on the other hand, now experience and will experience, in the resurrected life, time as a sequence of moments. At the Ascension in Acts 1:6-11, Jesus in his resurrection body experienced motion, time and distance as the disciples watched him ascend. This is data that must be used in the formation of our conclusions. And the conclusion is that God experiences time differently than we will even in our resurrected state, therefore, resurrected humans are ontologically different from God with regard to the fundamental relationship to time.
