I'll never understand how this is called monotheism...
With regarding to understanding the doctrine of the Trinity, make monotheism your *starting point*, and then it will be easier.
-A8
Your body is a machine that supports the functions of a sentient rational being in this world. The spirit is non-physical. It is all those things your mind holds, it's knowledge, understanding, values, wisdom, ect... Your person is the spirit. Your physical body is just a physical machine that supports and enables it. The spirit all by itself is what you identify as your self. Your self can't exist w/o the mechanics the physical machine provides for in this world.
The soul is the machine that supports the functions and holdings of spirit elsewhere, as in Heaven. The spirit in both places is the same. Just as God is a trinity, so too is man, because he was made in the image and likeness of God.
Whith man, his Earthly body came first. With God it was the other way around and Jesus had to develope the identical Spirit on His own. He was taught the knowledge by the Father, but not all knowledge, as some just wasn't given. Only the important stuff. With that He developed wisdom, understanding, made decisions to aquire values. All identical with the Fathers, so that the Spirits were the same.
In that way, there are 3 persons in one individual. The same spirit, or self is common to all 3. Only the physical differs. The individual self is eternal.
It would probably save a lot of time if we left behind the pretense of discussion and just started hurling veiled insults at each other. It's not that I've got a problem with what you said and what I quoted above. (If I said I understood ANY of this, the angels would laugh at me.) It's just that these conversations on FR so often start as gratuitously adversarial and end up as simply gratuitous. I'm as guilty as any and worse than many.
I think nibbling at the edges of Trinitarian theology has to take place while one also tries to take bites out of Christology (One person? Two natures? Can I take "huh?" for $500 Alec?). If, as seems almost impossible here, one stipulates, for the sake of polite conversation and broadening of the intellect, that the "Fathers" were sincere, pious, thoughtful guys trying to find a way to articulate the mystery which they thought was worth dying for, one appreciates the problem and their efforts, at least a little.
I find it helpful to look at what one has to say if one does NOT say "Trinity". If Jesus is God, somehow, but He is NOT the Father, and the Father is God, then does God come in chunks, is He crunchy, not smooth? Was the Creation without a helmsman on Holy Saturday, and the angels looking at their watches and wondering when He was coming back? Was the Father crucified? Like that. Amd, incomprehensible as it is, they concluded (and I agree, as if that mattered) that you get in worse trouble if you don't say "Trinity".
And if a Non-Christian says,"You silly (catholic) Christians: look at the contortions you put yourselves in because of your bizarre religion," I think we have to smile ruefully and say, "Well, yeah, but I still believe what I do not understand. I never expected to understand God anyway." I don't understand my wife, and will I think I'm going to understand God? I may be stupid, most certainly AM stupid, but I'm not totally wacked out, not yet.
As I failed to say before, the first thing to say, I think, is that God is WAY more unlike anything else than He is Like it. Consequently every proposition one makes about Him is wronger than it is right. This is not a linguistic proposition. Whatever language - Adoshem ehad or Unum Deum makes no difference.
What this means to me is that if I say, as would seem uncontroverial, "God is Love", I have to say immediately, "Of course, I have only the tiniest clue what Love is, and even then, MY human, creaturely experience of Love is so limited and provisional, (and besides, my wife says I don't understand it anyway, and she's the expert ...) that I only dare make the proposition because St. John made it first."
So, as I say, if one can say, "God is One," I think we can expect that He's not going to be "one" like anything else that we ever called "one" was "one", and even so seemingly simple a propostiion will be full of surprises.
What does "one" mean anyway? Ever read Euclid's definition? If you understand it, get back to me, okay?