How Was the Son of God Deified?

@medullah said
Christ was deified when the Roman Catholic Church came into being based upon Babylonian mythos (Hislop). The idea of a Father/Son/Mother trinity had already been established in other cultures centuries beforehand.

We now have four groups
1) those that believe this and can’t break out of their Babylonian conditioning
2) those that have researched and understand the the ...[text shortened]... and who can blame them when you look at the number of conflicts that have centred around religion ?)

@rajk999 said
No bible reading required.

@josephw said
6) The Rajk group.

@rajk999 said
Bible reading [ie reading the same thing over and over] and bible study is the pastime of the lost. They heard the word and they do nothing. Those that are destined for the Kingdom of God have heard and they are doing. No need to read the same thing over and over like a parrot.

@medullah

Christ was deified when the Roman Catholic Church came into being based upon Babylonian mythos (Hislop).

@sonship said
@medullah

Christ was deified when the Roman Catholic Church came into being based upon Babylonian mythos (Hislop).

Could you direct us to the page and paragraph in which chapter Alexander Hislop said this? I assume you are referring to The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop.

Mary has nothing to do with what I have been speaking abou ...[text shortened]... I no longer have a copy.
I think I do have a shorter volume based upon it by G.H. Pember.

Various quotations on using the word deification in Witness Lee's messages

Because we have the divine life and the divine nature, we can truly say that we are divine. However, this certainly does not mean that we are evolving into the Godhead or that we shall ever become God as an object of worship. Furthermore, this is not to teach pantheism or the deification of man. Nevertheless, we may be bold to declare that as sons of God with the divine life and nature we are divine. Hallelujah, we are children of God with the divine life and divine nature!

Deification
in the View of the Early Church
Perhaps what comes to mind most commonly when people hear the term deification is the practice among the ancient pagan religions of elevating mere men to the status of gods. Historically, this became most prominent in the Roman Empire, where reverence for the Caesars as gods united the multi-national and multi-religious empire. Such reverence was adamantly resisted by two groups alone, the Jews and the Christians (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 16:120h), no doubt because of their absolute insistence on a belief in the one true God. But reactions to deification also reflected particular views on what deity was. It was so much easier for the pagan religions to admit deification into their religious systems because for them the gods were little more than men. Pagan gods were made in the image and likeness of men, so to speak, somewhat fallen and given to the same vices we humans suffer. The ancient world was filled with the intrigue and drama of fleshly tales about the pagan gods. To become god, at the standard of these gods, was hardly an improvement over being mere man and hardly a great leap for humanity.

Various quotations on using the word deification in Witness Lee's messages

In the early church Christians opposed the deification of man in the widely held pagan sense, but they did not oppose a proper understanding of deification. But how could the early church believe in a God who is far above man in His being and essence and still hope in a salvation so complete that man is ultimately deified? The overwhelming concept among ancient Jews and modern Christians alike is that God is transcendent above all creation and that His transcendence prevents man from ever sharing in what He is. God is God and man is man, and there exists an insuperable distance between the two. Yet for the early teachers of the church there were obvious “contradictions” that could easily be found in the Scriptures. Paul says that God “alone has immortality” (1 Tim. 6:16), but elsewhere he declares that “this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:53). Immortality was viewed as a defining characteristic of God, an attribute that made God what He is. How then could the believers be said to put on immortality without becoming, in some sense, God themselves? Further, the Lord Jesus used Psalm 82:6 to show that the term gods could legitimately be applied to men.

Cont various quotea fromministry W. Lee on the word deification.

. Second Peter 1:4 also presented problems, since our partaking of the divine nature strongly implies that we too can be said to be divine. Once this kind of scrutiny is introduced, other “contradictions” can be found. Revelation 15:4 says, “Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For You alone are holy”; and yet Peter exhorts the believers: “But according to the Holy One who called you, you yourselves also be holy in all your manner of life; because it is written, ‘You shall be holy because I am holy'” (1 Pet. 1:15-16). In Revelation 21 the bride, the wife of the Lamb, that is, the consummation of God's elect, redeemed, and transformed people, is described as “having the glory of God. Her light was like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, as clear as crystal” (v. 11). Certainly these are God's people, yet having the glory of God, they appear to be God. Their aura is that of jasper, and likewise He who sits on the throne has the appearance of jasper (Rev. 4:3). These “contradictions” invite us, as they did the early church, to surmise that in some sense man can be said to be God in God's salvation. Far from ignoring these “contradictions” or dismissing them as mere metaphors, the early church made it her task, in reverence to the sacred text, to somehow see how man may become God in light of what the sacred text tells us about God and His salvation. As the centuries progressed, the church's teaching on deification was refined and by the fourth century reached a full, stable, and mature form. Contrary to what some scholars of the nineteenth century believed (e.g., cf. Harnack History of Dogma, vol. III, ch. 2), the teaching concerning deification was not a holdover from Hellenic religion but a conclusion drawn from the careful consideration of biblical truths. (On this, see, for example, Louis Bouyer, History of Christian Spirituality, pp. 416-420.)

Whine about some stuff.

Cont. various quotations from co-workers of Lee's ministry on the word deification.

In order to understand what the early church believed and taught concerning deification, it is useful to consider a distinction the writers of the early church utilized to advance this teaching. Perhaps the simplest way to present the distinction is to consider the term God as an answer to two questions: Who are you? and, What are you? If we were to ask God Himself, Who are You, O Lord? He would certainly answer, I am God. If we were to ask Him, Dear Lord, what are You? again, He would say, I am God. If, however, the believers were asked the same questions, the answers must differ. When asked, Who are you? we must say, We are Brother Paul, Brother Aquila, and Sister Priscilla, for example. But when asked, What are you? we, as redeemed and regenerated believers, can say and even we should say, We are God. The distinction respects God as a unique Person with His own unique, personal identity and God as a species to which the Triune God belongs as the source and the believers belong as the partakers. In the language of the early church, we should distinguish between God by nature, referring to God Himself, and God by grace, referring to the believers.

Whine.

Whine some more.

Continued co-workers of W. Lee deification. [my bolding]

The language of the New Testament certainly respects this distinction. Second Peter 1:4 calls us “partakers of the divine nature,” indicating that it is not our own nature that makes us divine but His. He is God by nature; we are God by virtue of partaking of His nature. John tells us that Christ is life (John 11:25; 14:6), but “he who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life” (1 John 5:12). He is the divine life in Himself, and being the divine life, He is the unique God; we have the divine life through regeneration and through our continued oneness with the Son, and thus we are God in life as well. Further, Paul calls the Body of Christ, Christ (1 Cor. 12:12); but the Lord Jesus is the Head, and we are the Body. He is uniquely Christ, God become flesh; we are Christ because we are His members. In this sense too, we can say that we are God. The Second of the Divine Trinity is the only begotten Son of God, and this admits no brothers; yet on the day of resurrection, the Lord said, “Go to My brothers and say to them, I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God” (John 20:17). Uniquely He is the only begotten Son, but in relation to His believers He is the Firstborn among many brothers (Rom. 8:29). Hence, we are sons of God by participation in Him, by partaking of His life and nature. And just as sons are in kind what their fathers are, we too are in kind what our Father is, God.

Our teaching concerning man becoming God in God's salvation must respect this distinction recognized by the church from its earliest centuries. And as the many quotations from Brother Lee's ministry indicate, this distinction is clearly and forcefully held by us.

" Because of this distinction, man will never take part in the Godhead; he will never be a fourth person in the Trinity; he will never be worshipped as God. Because man will never lose his attributes as a creature, he will never be the Creator. Man will forever possess the human form and the human nature; thus, he will never be omnipresent. Man will forever be endowed with the limited mental faculties he was given by creation; hence, he will never be omniscient. God is God both outside of creation and within creation; man can at best be joined to God and thereby become God within the confines of creation."

The Truth Concerning the Ultimate Goal of God's Economy [co-workers at Living Stream Ministry]
https://www.ministrybooks.org/SearchMinBooksDsp.cfm?id=17AB41D70E