God Became Man to Make Man God? Why Witness Lee’s Argument Fails

Witness Lee taught that God became man so that man might become God, and he argued for it from ordinary birth. Man begets man and a dog begets a dog, so “in regeneration God begets gods” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). The analogy is memorable. It is also where the teaching goes wrong.

Believers really are “born… of God” (John 1:13) and “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Regeneration gives real life, not merely a new legal status. The question is whether that new life makes a creature God.

Lee’s argument in his own words

Lee could not decide what his own analogy proved. Read his statements side by side: first he refuses the conclusion, then he states it, then he states it more strongly and suggests a softer word “for utterance” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). The wording changed to avoid offense. The belief did not.

The analogy proves too much

Lee’s formula was that believers are God “in nature and in life, but not in the Godhead” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). Apply that to his own analogy. Nobody says a puppy is a dog in nature, but not in dog-hood. A puppy is simply a dog. If the analogy holds, a child of God shares everything that makes God God: uncreated, eternal, and worthy of worship.

Lee knew that was false. Right after “we are God,” he adds that believers “cannot be worshipped by others,” and he calls claiming God’s deity and worship “a top blasphemy” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). So he abandons his analogy at the one point that matters. An argument that has to be abandoned at the decisive point proves nothing.

He explained the Godhead as God’s “position or rank” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). But being God is not a rank God holds. It is what He is: “Before Me there was no God formed, nor shall there be after Me” (Isaiah 43:10). A God who begets gods would be forming gods after Him.

Sons by nature, sons by grace

There are two ways to be a son. A son by nature is the same kind of being as his father, as a puppy is a dog. An adopted son is a son by grace: he truly receives the name, the love, and the inheritance, but all of it is given.

Scripture keeps the two apart. Jesus is “the only begotten Son” (John 1:18). Believers are given “the right to become children of God” (John 1:12) and “receive the adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:5). Birth means the life is real. Adoption means it is not ours by nature. We are “joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17): heirs with the Son by nature, never in His place. Think of iron in a fire. It truly glows with the fire’s heat, yet it remains iron, and the glow belongs to the fire.

The word Paul chose matters. It is huiothesia, from huios, “son,” and thesis, “placing”: the placing of someone as a son. The standard Greek lexicons define it as adoption. Liddell and Scott give “adoption as a son,” and Abbott-Smith gives “adoption of a son (or daughter)” (υἱοθεσία (huiothesia) in the Greek lexicons ↗), notes that the word is frequent in inscriptions, and applies it to God’s relation with Christians in Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:5, and Ephesians 1:5. W. E. Vine ↗, whose dictionary Lee himself quoted, says it “signifies the place and condition of a son given to one to whom it does not naturally belong,” and on Galatians 4:5 calls it “sonship bestowed in distinction from a relationship consequent merely upon birth” (Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, “Adoption” ↗). J. N. Darby, whose translation Lee often cited, renders it “adoption” in Romans 8:15 and Ephesians 1:5. Even Living Stream Ministry’s own journal concedes that before the New Testament the word “does have the meaning of adoption,” and that most English versions translate it “adoption as sons.”

Lee’s Recovery Version sets all of this aside. In the four places Paul uses the word of believers, it reads “sonship” instead (Galatians 4:5; Romans 8:15, 23; Ephesians 1:5). Yet by Lee’s own account, “We did not study Greek, yet we had dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances to help us” (Elders’ Training, Book 4, ch. 11 ↗). Those lexicons say adoption. His commentary on Ephesians 1:5 shows why he departed from them: “We are neither God’s sons-in-law nor His adopted sons” (Life-Study of Ephesians, msg. 19 ↗). This was not a slip in translation. Adoption is the one thing his analogy cannot allow, so Lee took it out of Paul’s word.

So when John draws the conclusion from being born of God, he does not say “we are God.” He says, “now we are children of God… we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2). At his most careful, Lee said the same: “if you say that you are like God in your being (1 John 3:2), having His life and nature, this is the truth according to the divine revelation” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). Like God is scriptural. God is not. Lee’s analogy keeps the birth and drops the adoption.

What Athanasius meant

Lee’s defenders cite Athanasius: “He was made man that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation of the Word, Section 54 ↗). The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes the same line (paragraph 460). Both explain it as grace. The Catechism says that man becomes a son of God “by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 460 ↗). Athanasius says that believers “become sons, not as He in nature and truth, but according to the grace of Him that calls” (Discourse III Against the Arians, Section 19 ↗).

Lee says the opposite: “we are God in nature,” and “except for the Godhead, we are exactly the same as God” (A Defense of Seventeen Quotations ↗). Athanasius drew a line between nature and grace, and Lee crossed it. Nothing in a litter of puppies is a dog by grace.

The fruit of the teaching

Under grace there is nothing to boast about, because everything is received. Lee presented the God-man as something else: a peak his ministry had reached and other Christians had missed. “Since we have released the high peak of God’s divine revelation,” he said (High Peak, ch. 1 ↗). In Christianity, he wrote, “there is no concept that God wants us to be God-men” (A Deeper Study of the Divine Dispensing, Chapter 3 ↗), and its gospel is “a low gospel,” set against “the high gospel that we preach” (A Deeper Study of the Divine Dispensing, Chapter 2 ↗).

He even ranked following Jesus’ meekness beneath it. Taught in his youth to follow Jesus “in meekness and in patience,” he called that teaching “absolutely off” (High Peak, ch. 2 ↗). Jesus said, “learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). A doctrine that ranks the plain call to be meek like Jesus below its own high peak is not fostering humility.

This is the oldest temptation in Scripture. The serpent did not ask Eve to abandon God. He offered an upgrade: “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). The prince of Tyre had the same heart: “Because your heart is lifted up, and you say, ‘I am a god’… yet you are a man, and not a god” (Ezekiel 28:2). The Recovery speaks often about rejecting the flesh, and Paul names what the flesh looks like in a church: “when one says, ‘I am of Paul,’ and another, ‘I am of Apollos,’ are you not carnal?” (1 Corinthians 3:4). A movement that rallies around one minister and regards other Christians as having a low gospel is showing exactly that. “Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies” (1 Corinthians 8:1). And he gives the answer: “What do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

The mind of Christ goes down

Adam, a man, reached up to be like God. Christ, “being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant” (Philippians 2:6–7). The one who was God by nature went down, and Paul tells believers to share that mind: “in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself” (Philippians 2:3).

Jesus taught the same. He told His disciples to take the lowest place (Luke 14:10). He said that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45). And when they asked who was greatest, He set a child in front of them: “whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4). The children of God are marked by a child’s humility, not by rank. “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).

Like begets like

Lee was right that birth produces a family likeness. John says what it looks like: “In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest: Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10). The mark of God’s children is righteousness and love, not the height of their revelation.

A teaching that tells believers they are God in nature, that their ministry released the high peak, and that other Christians preach a low gospel does not produce that likeness. It produces pride, and a group formed around it is not spiritually healthy. Lee’s “God begets God” is not a deeper truth than the historic faith. It is a departure from it.

Scripture considered in this post