Exactly..CARM's claim is that UCG does not recognize the true divinity of Christ. That's not accurate. The official statement of belief of UCG about Christ is:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who is the Word and who has eternally existed. We believe that He is the Messiah, the Christ, the divine Son of the living God, conceived of the Holy Spirit, born in human flesh of the virgin Mary. We believe that it is by Him that God created all things, and that without Him was not anything made that was made.
This is an orthodox view of the divinity of Christ. How it can be honestly construed as anything less is a mystery to me.
Well, then it's a mystery to you. But not to me. No, I'm not saying I fully understand the Godhead. But I do understand how people develop genuinely different views of things and can never get on the same page because they reflexively think the other person should see it the way they do. It just doesn't advance the conversation.
Anyway, the point is, the Armstrong/ucog view of God and his nature is quite different from traditional Christianity. We can find nothing in Scripture which suggests the Godhead is an open set to which may be added new members. Other things, but related, like the belief that when Jesus died he temporarily ceased to exist, and the Godhead was briefly down to one member, suggest an altogether different and diminished kind of divinity. These things fly in the face of the Christian understanding of the structure and scope of God's being. It really does lend itself to a kind of polytheism.
Now you may complain that the statement of belief you gave doesn't contain any of that, but the theology of any given group may or may not be confined to a single confession. We know, for example, that the original denomination under Armstrong believed these things about the extensible Godhead (see here: http://www.cog-pkg.org/publications/truths.aspx), and we know the splinter group of which you are a part exists in part to retain the original Armstrongisms, in rejection of the effort of the original denomination to adopt real Trinitarianism.
So try to put yourself in our shoes for a minute. To us, this looks like massive confusion about what it means to even be God. That's a big deal, and it renders terms like "divinity" almost meaningless. Absolutely fundamental to both Biblical and patristic thought on the nature of God, is the idea that God is Creator and we are created and apart from Jesus Christ that divide is impassible. None of us will ever be true God, as Armstrong taught. To suggest that we will be creates an entirely false and alien meaning for the term "divinity." We cannot subscribe to it.
And this is what I was getting at way back at the beginning. One of the big problems communicating theology between two groups with divergent theologies but shared vocabularies, is what I call substance-shifting words. They look the same on paper to each of us, but when we process them, they convey wildly different meanings.
I know this happens, because I've lived a long time and I've seen it repeatedly. The difference is sincere, and very real, and warrants an effort to bridge the divide, not to blow the bridge up by maligning character right out of the gate. Which is why I have chosen not to go there. I've seen too much of this. It is a heartache and a grief to me. If it is the road you choose, you are welcome to it, but I will not join you on it.
But I will leave the light on for you, should you decide to carry this forward on a more purely analytical basis. I'd be fine with that. Just let me know.
Peace,
SR