But just go ahead and believe what you’re going to believe.
I “just go ahead” and interpret Revelation 2:17 in the light of these two other Scripture statements:
1 John 3:2:
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
Revelation 22:4:
And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.
It seems plain to me that these three statements convey the following meaning:
The saints will be a multitude of ‘individual selves’, each of them carrying a single name, but after the last judgement the multitude of saints will become one person, the ‘subsistent relation’ of ‘divine filiation’ that is the person of God the Son.
And as said in previous posts, this identification and divinization will come to bear because the multitude of the saints will become one body and one spirit with Jesus Christ.
This interpretation is also strongly supported by Jesus’ claims in John 6:54-57:
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.
…you are engaging in repetitive non sequiturs. Drops in the ocean are indistinguishable from each other and all blend together. Each having a separate name would not work too well, would it. That is the picture you keep trying to paint of all Christians ‘becoming God’.
This discussion may find its resolution by discussing what we mean by “relationship” and “eternity”. For us, a relationship is between two distinct individuals, and occurs in time, growing and becoming, so to speak. With God and Christ, relationship is identical to God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. Thus there is no distinction as we would understand it, nor is there a dependence on time related events.
To be with God is the same as to be in Christ, and is the same as saying our Father who is in Heaven… and I live because of the Father… and so on.
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I am afraid but can’t help declaring that you continue engaging in repetitive wrong quoting and misinterpretation of what I write!
The correct quotation is:
I say nothing about “drops in the ocean”: Such is NOT at all the picture I keep trying to paint of all Christians ‘becoming God’!
The picture I convey on the basis of Scripture statements is rather the following:
After the last judgement each saint will have a single name (according to Revelation 2:17), but the multitude of saints will become embedded into the ‘subsistent relation’ of ‘divine filiation’, and thereby have the name of Jesus Christ (according to Revelation 22:4), become one with the person of God the Son: The saints will be many, but will be one!
Such a terrible misquote, so full of content in attempting to mislead the reader. 
The saints will be many, but will be one – one family and one country, heaven. We already are, but we will never be God. (We are already citizens of heaven, we’re just not home yet.)
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Yes!
For this discussion it is key realizing that the divine persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are “subsistent relations”.
A human person is an individual self, who is ordered to enter into relationship with other individuals, and build communities (families, countries, colleges, associations, companies) that sometimes are characterized as ‘legal persons’.
A divine person is more than an individual self. In particular, the person of the Son is the ‘individual’ we refer to as ‘Jesus Christ’, but is moreover identical to the relation of ‘divine filiation’ (as you very well suggest).
And this means that the Father through the action of the Holy Spirit can assume other individual selves (like we) into this relation of ‘divine filiation’, so that thereby these many individual selves become “one body and one spirit with Jesus Christ”, the person of God the Son.
I fully agree!
What we will be after the last judgement is far more than being simply like a ‘sibling’, ‘college fellow’, or ‘co-citizen’ of Jesus Christ.
Then, God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28), and this:
More like he will be my Brother and closest and best Friend. I will not be God. (I will be Godlike in a few respects – I will be pure and not tempted to sin, for instance.)
I get the feeling the distinction you both need to consider is that of the uncreated (trinity) and the created (all else including the saved).
I don’t think I am blurring that distinction.
I totally agree that before the last judgement, there is a clear distinction between “the uncreated (trinity) and the created (all else including the saved)”.
Nonetheless, after the last judgement, I think that to understand the status of the saints in heaven we need to consider John 1:12-13:
to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
In my view this amazing strong claim does not simply mean that Jesus Christ “will be my Brother and closest and best Friend”. It rather means that after the last judgement the saints in heaven will fully enter into the relationship of “divine filiation”, and as you rightly say:
I think this is the idea that St. Peter, St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas aim to convey when they state:
The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
“For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God .”(St. Irenaeus, Against heresies, 3, 19, 1).
“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 54, 3).
“God was made man, that man might be made God .”(St. Thomas Aquinas quoting St. Augustine in: Summa theologiae, III parth, question 1, article 2, I answer that).
By contrast, the ‘individual selves’ dwelling in hell will not have the right to become children of God, and will not become children born of God. They will remain created selves without name, nobodies unknown to God, individuals of no importance outside God’s knowledge.
I struggled to find any basis for the apparent disagreement between you and @Dale until your last line, "
If this is it, I think it is uneccessary to consider hell within the context… after the last judgement, we are told of a complete renewale of heaven and earth (the cosmos and the divine realm), something we cannot describe in detail at this point in time.
But we are also told:
Revelation 22:15
Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
How do you cope with this?
It seems that @Dale is reluctant to the teaching of deification (theosis), as proposed by the Eastern Fathers of the Church:
St. Athanasius (On the Incarnation of the Word, 54, 3):
“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God .”
“By His gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging His condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of His love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization. For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”
For me this teaching is key to understand what the “original sin” is all about:
It means wanting to become God by our own means and against God, rejecting God’s hominization after all.
More than reluctant. It takes a real stretch of the biblical references you have cited to justify the belief, a bridge too far.
I am already his child. Why would I want to become my Father?
I think I understand the disagreement between you and @Dale - you refer to theosis, as this is the Orthodox teaching on the salvation of humanity, in that through repentance and faith in Christ, we are saved from sin and death into life in and with God. The doctrine has been elaborated by the Church Fathers and includes the Palamas doctrine that deals with the the energies of God (in that we are converted into children of God, and also removes the distinction put forward as natural and supernatural as God sustains all, and is all in all).
If I understand @Dale, he seems to think that as children of God in the Kingdom, the distinction he refers to in God the Father, may be lost in your remarks regarding theosis. Yet we all pray to our Father in heaven… and we all believe in repentance, baptism and conversion into sons of God in Christ.
If I understand both of you, it seems to me that you are presenting a more elaborate treatment of the same thing that Dale is.
I do not see a whole lot of correspondence between what I believe and the pursuit of theosis in Eastern Orthodox monasteries.
I cannot see the relevance - meditative practices are just that. I take it you do not adopt such practices and that is fine.
You are NOT “already” God’s child: You are on the way to become God’s child and thereby get a name lasting forever. This will be the case if you enter eternal life after the last judgement, and the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, will be on your forehead (according to Revelation 22:4).
To become God’s child means to become child of God the Father.
To become child of God the Father means to become integrated in the relation of “divine filiation”.
Becoming integrated in the relation of “divine filiation” means to become the person of God the Son, since the relation of “divine filiation” is the person of God the Son. This is what Revelation 22:4 magnificently expresses by stating that the saints in heaven will see the face of the Lamb, and “his name will be on their foreheads” (I apologize for repeating).
If you become the person of God the Son you become God, as we are told by the Greek Fathers of the Church.
By contrast, by becoming God you do NOT become God the Father!
The claim “I become God” does not entail at all that “I become my Father”.
In my view, in thinking about God one has to avoid two mistakes:
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To think that God is a single “individual self”, and then conclude that the statement “I become God” means “I become God the Father”.
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To think that each divine Person reduces to a single “individual self”, and then conclude that in God there are three wills and three intellects.
To become God does NOT mean to become God the Father.
To become God means to become child of God the Father, through the union with God the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
And this is what we will become if we get to heaven after the last judgement.
And this is what we are told by St. John the Apostle, St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, St. Maximus the Confessor, among others.
I’m a little amused. You must be reading a different book than I.
Note the past and present* tenses.
I aspire to become more Christlike (not as much as I should, and I have a long way to go in my remaining time here), but I certainly do not aspire to become God, to pursue theosis. They are two definitely different things in my book.
*This too: