Actually, the trinity is an interesting subject. It could be argued that Jehovah's Witnesses believe in the trinity. The trinity is just man's clumsy way of trying to explain that in order to experience the fullness of God, one needs the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to explain the holy spirit without mentioning God. They are inseparable - one and the same, even. Christ is Jehovah's means of salvation. Don't even bother thinking about salvation if you don't accept the Christ, the Son of God. So, there you have it: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - the three necessary in the one faith.
If a JW was on a doorstep and received that as an answer when he asked, "I find not everybody means the same thing when they say 'trinity'. What do you think it means?" he would be forced to acceed that he, too, believed in the trinity.
This is exceptionally interesting. It comes very close to my own view.
I write from a background of a long life of belief in the Trinity, including theological study and training, and then coming to Jehovah's Witnesses, getting very near to baptism, and subsequently distancing myself from the Witnesses.
As I studied the Bible Teach book with Witnesses, impelled by a wish to understand why they believe what they do...you might call it insatiable curiosity likeKipling's Elephant's Child...I struggled very hard with their non-belief in the Trinity. I knew the Trinity as One God but three Persons, united in their hypostatic union by love, beyond which I understood there to be Mystery beyond our human understanding. I instinctively felt that the WT's presentation of Trinitarian belief as a regression to or reflection of ancient three-person Gods was a gross over-simplification, a caricature. However, over time, and particularly after reading some accounts of Catholic priests who had become Witnesses, I came to think that the JW interpretation was not in fact very far from the truth, and that it was something I could accept without altering my understanding of God too much.
I rather think that I still think much the same, namely, that both understandings of God are necessarily limited by the fact that the Divine Being is very much other than us, the Creator of the Universe being all-powerful and Almighty and so beyond our comprehension; yet this is a being who is our personal and collective Father in Heaven, to whom every small thing, even each one of us, even a hair on our head, even a sparrow, matters. The Son is the son of that great being, but also of him. One of the wisest JW's whom I have met, and someone whom I hold in considerable regard, discussed with me at length and in depth some time ago the difference between a son who is begotten and/or created. He asked me to consider the difference between begetting and creating, and the close link between the two. I am probably still contemplating that. And the Holy Spirt, or, as JW's more often say "holy spirit" or "God's spiirit" as the third person of the Trinity is so hard to visulaise and understand by the human mind as a person that to understand the spirit more as God's active force is not in any way counter-intuitive.
So, I came to a point where I could accept the JW interpretation of these deep truths, without in any way, really, altering my own understanding of God, whose name I had known for a very long time to be Jehovah.
I have far more difficullty now in accepting Almighty God, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise and the ultimate Love, as a being who would wipe away most people at Armageddon, or even as one who would send a flood to obliterate everything he had made except those beings in an ark. It just doesn't add up.
I also have difficulty in accepting that any one group of people on earth, or even any one religion, possess the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about God, but that's really another subject.
What I wanted to do here was express my surprised pleasure at reading Rory's words on the trinitarian (or not) understanding of God, the closest to my own that I have yet encountered among JW's.
It's a breath of fresh air.
