Robert Morris, the pastor of Gateway Church in Dallas, TX, is a woke, charismatic blowhard who is well-known for his false teachings on first fruits tithing and his propensity toward the prosperity gospel.
Charismatics, in general, often make things up completely out of thin air and attribute them to God. For them, it’s often a way to explain something they do not understand or have no business understanding because God has not revealed it in Scripture. This often manifests in such things as aberrant angelology and demonology, false manifestations of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, the idea that over-emotionalized music will draw you closer to God, and, in many cases, extreme cult-like behavior such as grave sucking.
In a recent sermon, Robert Morris declared that he was, kind of like Jesus, fully human but partly divine. Morris goes on to bloviate about how he says things sometimes that only the Holy Spirit would say, so therefore, this is proof that he is partly divine.
So this summer, the Lord spoke this series to me called Divinely Human. Now, here’s what I mean by that, all right? I’m only going to use Jesus as an opening type, but we’re not going to be talking about Christ in this series as far as focusing on his life.
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But Jesus was fully divine. Fully divine and fully human. Okay, I am not fully divine. I know that surprises some of you, but I am fully human, but I am partially divine because I know Christ, because Christ lives in me.
Once you get saved that, I’m going to show you the scripture in just a moment. You are also partly divine, but fully human. In other words, I can be talking with someone sometimes, and I can say something and they say, I can’t believe you just said that, because that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit said to me in my quiet time this morning.
This is a popular heresy among charismatic false teachers called little-god theology, or the belief that we as humans carry within us the potential to become God, or divine like God. This is not only a heresy found among charismatics, however, but it is also the underlying teaching of Mormonism–that our future as believers are to partake in the divinity of God and become gods ourselves.
The Roman Catholic Church also teaches this, as it states in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC)
The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men godsCCC, Second Edition, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 3, Paragraph I, I:460)
What Morris states here, however, is complete and total blasphemy. As believers, we are not divine at all. The proof text that these Word of Faith charlatans always use is 2 Peter 1:4, which states “…by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”
The error is understanding what it means to become “partakers of the divine nature.” Some translations, including the NIV and render it “participants,” but most modern translations do render it “partakers.” The idea, though, is not that we ourselves become divine, but that we have a share in His divine nature. It is He who is divine, not us, and we, as Christians, are granted the right to partake in that. Further, partaking in his divine nature does not mean that we can do things that only God can do, rather, it points us to Christ’s accomplishments on our behalf which gives us the right to His inheritance, to become fellow heirs with Him in the kingdom and to receive the benefits of His work.
There is a lot more to it than is within the scope of this article. But this has ramifications for many of the errors of the Word of Faith movement, including the alleged ability to speak things into existence such as only God can do.