My Church on the Nature of Jesus

The priest at the Catholic church that I attend spoke about the nature of Jesus in his last two sermons. There are two issues that I want to discuss:

1. Last Sunday, the priest said that Jesus did not become God; rather, he always was God, is God, and ever shall be God. According to the priest, no one can become God--either one has that specific identity or one does not. For him (and, presumably, for the Catholic Church), divinity is not something that one can earn or obtain through maturity.

I'm not going to get into diverse ideas about Christology, but I do have a question about the priest's claim that people cannot become God. When I was at DePauw, I took a class about Christianity, and we discussed the Arian controversy. My professor said that one of the slogans of the "orthodox" camp went like this: "God became as we are, that we might become as God is." What exactly did orthodox Christians mean when they said that humans can become like God? Do they mean looking like God, or resembling God in goodness, or being like God in immortality, or what exactly?

Indeed, I John 3:1-3 also says that Christians have the hope of becoming like God. It says, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure" (NRSV). What does this passage mean?

Another point: As my readers may know, I grew up in an offshoot of the Worldwide Church of God, which taught that Christians will become divine beings as part of the "God family." In The Journal, a newspaper that publishes articles by people in the Church of God movement, someone argued that there are similarities between the Worldwide Church of God's traditional positions and those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. One example he presented was that both believe humans can become God (or God-like). Is this statement an accurate characterization of the Eastern Orthodox Church?

2. On New Year's Day, the Feast of the Circumcision, the priest said that Jesus was all-knowing at the time of his circumcision. He disputed the claim that Jesus' circumcision was meaningless because he did not remember it as an adult. For him, Jesus assumed pain throughout his life, from his birth to his circumcision, and he was fully aware of his pain during that time. The priest contended that Jesus' awareness even as an infant was due to his divine nature, which is aware and knowledgeable.

What the priest said reminded me of the Infancy gospels, in which baby Jesus actually talks in complete sentences (and child Jesus can get rather vicious!). I'm not sure if I'd go as far as the priest did, since Philippians 2 seems to present Jesus as laying aside several divine prerogatives in becoming a man. There are Christians who believe as I do, but those who say they cling to the "orthodox" position assert that Jesus had all of the divine attributes throughout his life. For them, he even had omnipresence, but he chose not to use it (I think that's their contention). It's interesting how creeds these days are as much a test of orthodoxy as the Bible in conservative Christian circles.