The Trinity: A historical perspective

While reading Shelley's  Church History in plain language and came across this piece on the Trinity.

But if God is eternally one; and God is eternally three persons, how are we to understand this? Since God is personal, any example we use to think or speak of God ought to be personal.

When we search for personal analogies, we find that there are only two options. We may think of God as three persons or we may think of God as one person.

If we think of God as three persons, then God’s threeness is clear, and we have to account for God’s unity. Theologians usually point out that three persons can become so close they may be said to share a common life. They may be bound together so closely that it is actually a distortion to speak of them separately.

Because this analogy rests on a society of three persons, theologians call it the social analogy. Its strength lies in its clarity regarding the threeness of God. Its problem is to account clearly for God’s unity.

If we think of God as one person, we have to try to account for his threeness. One way of doing this is to say that a person may have several distinct functions such as mind, emotions, and will.

Because this analogy draws on psychological functions, theologians call it the psychological analogy. Its strength is its clarity about God’s unity: He is one person. Its problem is its vagueness about God’s threeness.

Both of these analogies were used in the early church, just as modern theologians like Leonard Hodgson and Karl Barth use them.

As the decades passed between 325 and 381, when the second general council of the church met, leaders in the Arian debate slowly clarified their use of “person.” Three so-called Cappadocian Fathers—Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great—led in this achievement. The Cappadocians used the social analogy, but they saw that the distinctions between the three divine “persons” were solely in their inner divine relations. There are not three gods. God is one divine Being with three carriers: one Godhead in three “persons.”

The word “person,” however, did not mean to the early Christians what it means today. To us, a person means someone like Tom, Dick, or Harry. But the Latin word persona originally meant a mask worn by an actor on the stage. In Trinitarian thought the “mask” is not worn by God to hide but to reveal his true character. It is clear that when we think of the Trinity, we should not try to think of three persons in our sense of the term, but three personal disclosures of God that correspond to what he is really like.

Source: Shelley, BL. (1995). Church history in plain language. (Updated 2nd ed.)) lo5-106).Dallas, Texas: Word Pub.

 Now doesn't that throw some insight on what the Nicene Creed means?  It's also a way better analogy than any we used in Sunday School. It's also a possible defence against Jewish and Muslim accusations of Polytheism..