“God as God is God”:
The Armstrongist Concept of Human Destiny
By Neo
We are to be in His same IMAGE - as He is, NOW! We are to be put on HIS SAME PLANE…
-- Herbert W. Armstrong, “Just What Do You Mean ... BORN AGAIN?” pp. 42-43, 1972
God then purposed to reproduce himself, through humans made in his image and likeness…
-- Herbert W. Armstrong, “Mystery of the Ages” p. 94, 1985
“God as God is God” is a phrase that I first heard back in the Seventies in the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). I don’t know its origin or history. The only person I ever recall using the phrase was Ron Kelly. I never heard Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA) use it. But it seemed to be a theologically vetted phrase within the WCG and is equivalent to the published statements made by HWA cited above. Nobody ever tried, that I know of, to interdict Kelly’s use of the phrase as if it were heresy. Its meaning is clear. It means having precisely the same attributes that God has – no shortfalls anywhere. And Ron Dart stated on an audio tape that used to be in the Roy Hammer Library on the Big Sandy campus that we might all one day get to create a planet, populate it with humans and then die for them. (I listened to this statement and now cite it from memory so it will not be verbatim.) So it was quite clear what was intended by this phrase. Armstrongist doctrine asserted that the saved had the destiny of becoming God just like the Creator of the Cosmos – no less.
How HWA exegeted this alarming concept can be found in online archives of WCG publications. The purpose of this brief article is to demonstrate that this Armstrongist dogma is illogical and not supported by scripture. It is recognized in the Christian movement that man has a divine destiny. This goes by different names: Divinization, Sanctification or Theosis. But nowhere is it claimed that man will be ‘God as God is God.’ The reasons why are straightforward.
HWA made a category error in formulating his doctrine pertaining to the ultimate human destiny. He did not recognize that God is of a different category than resurrected and glorified human beings. Instead he argued that human beings are of the God “kind” – a term he appropriated from biological statements made in Genesis. There is a God “kind,” if that term has appeal, and it contains one essential being and will never contain any more such beings. It is likely that his unorthodox apotheosis of man seemed plausible to him because of his background interpretation of the anthropomorphisms of the Bible as literal. He posited a god who is very much like a human at the outset.1. God is uncreated. He was not created by some yet greater being. God is, therefore, uncaused. Nobody caused him to come into existence. This sets him apart from all of his creatures who are contingent on him. God is a necessary being and all of his creatures are contingent beings. God cannot create a being that is uncaused or uncreated like himself. That is illogical. To believe that God is “reproducing himself” or creating creatures that can exist at “his same plane” is a violation of logic at the a priori level.
2. God has donated existence to all he has created. He alone is self-existent. HWA recognized self-existence as an attribute of God. Were God to cease to exist, all contingent creations would cease to exist. Paul stated, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” This clearly identifies our contingent relationship with the necessary God. This also means that God alone is really eternal. Though this is merely hypothetical, a Christian in the resurrected state would have only conditional immortality because we all have our being within God and are contingent on his existence.
3. But what if we cast inviolable logic aside and hypothesize that God can somehow “reproduce” himself by creating beings that exist at the same ontological “plane” as himself. The outcome would be that God would just be one God among many Gods. Each created God would be God as God is God – co-equal with the original God. There is no known pathway in scripture to this outcome. Instead in the Old Testament, God states, “Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. (Isaiah 44:6)’” And in the New Testament we have, “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Corinthians 8:6)” This does not sound like a God who intends to immerse himself in a crowd of co-equal peers.
I do not assert that HWA developed this doctrine with intentional heresy in mind. I believe he just did not give the necessary consideration to the nature of God. I searched a large archive of Plain Truth magazines online and found the term “uncreated” in reference to God used one time and it was in a quotation of a statement made by a Catholic bishop. The issue just did not fall with HWA’s scope of theological inquiry. The outcome is that Armstrongism now clings to an error that Christianity dispositioned centuries ago.
