If divinity be "God-stuff", like matter is "human-stuff", then of course, the Son is "God".
I appreciate your open-mindedness on that. I, for one, would have no problem at all simply going along with what you said here. The Son is God-stuff, the Spirit is God-stuff, the Father is God... who obviously would also be whatever God-stuff is.
But then, when I put my thinking cap on, I wonder if "God-stuff" is something that would be in any way lesser than the original God. We can talk in a way like "we all have a spark of divinity within us" as the highest created physical order. Does that make us "God-stuff" in the same way that the Son is? Aye, there's the rub for me. For the NT may very well say we become partakers of the divine nature, but only by virtue of Christ in us, that is, Christ can literally be inside us in some way, and therefore we share in his "God-stuff." But is Christ only sharing the "God-stuff" by somehow being in the Father, such that Christ could be removed from the Father and his "God-stuff" would go *poof*? Or was the God-stuff in Christ actually who he was inherently, and thus truly sharing the essence of whatever God is essentially and not dependently. Yet Christ is consistently described as a headspring of Life, and not an dependent branch of it.
We know Christ as man expressed dependence and admitted limitations, however whatever those statements were it would seem presumption to then backtrack them to his pre-existent state. They seem intimately connected with the humiliation in his role as "Son of Man." Christ is described as the Author of Life and the Lord of Glory, things which, it is said, would not be deduced from his appearance as a mere man making himself out to be God. In fact Scripture makes quite a point of saying his physical appearance was not all that impressive, and that he experienced the sorrow of loneliness and rejection from his peers. He lived a real human life, in other words, not jumping off temples or calling fire down whenever anyone said to him "Who do you think you are?"
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
So you say, despite the fact that the Son had no beauty or majesty in his appearance, and was despised and held in low esteem, he "of course" had "God stuff." Now the question that arises naturally to me is, how is this God-stuff so incredibly well-hidden? I mean if you think this incredible paradox is simply obvious ("of course the Son is God[-stuff]"), then why do other seeming paradoxes seem to trouble you simply by virtue of them being paradoxical? We are going to have to go to the old saying of not judging a book by its cover. Oh, wait, didn't Christ say something like that?
Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment
And Paul seems to passionately share this same view expressed by Christ, and even specifically applies it
to Christ:
Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer.
So could we say that Paul now knew Christ according to his God-stuff? Most of the objections against Christ's divinity or his pre-existence seem related to the fact that Christ functioned as real human being. If we come with the a prior insistence that a real human being automatically rules out that human being, being another more than a human being, we've won the argument with a priori assumptions before we've even begun any debate. It's as obvious as a cat being unable to also be a dog, as a man to also be God... unless of course we water the meaning of God-stuff to something very unlike God in any way, something created and dependent. Yet how can God-stuff be stuff of God himself if it is created and dependent, the very things God
is not. Thus I think if we take the stuff of God, and generate or divide from it, we also have all the attributes of God. God-stuff, by definition, must be uncreated and independent, for that is the essence of God.
And, in fact, since we see in Scripture a consistent terminology applying the official title God only to the Father, and the Spirit and the Son being mostly called God-stuff or Lord, we may come off genuinely puzzled that two other persons could have God-stuff, but not the official title of God. However, we see a closer unity among them, then among believers and Christ, since they all share divine attributes independently, and a unity so close that they feel free to express themselves as One and the pronoun "I". No Christian would say "I created the world, I'm the Alpha and Omega, I'm the Vine and Door of Salvation, I shared glory with the Father before the world began and Abraham was born, I'm the exact representation of the invisible God." So ergo, no Christian could really say, "Hey, I've got God-stuff too."
