At the heart of the so-called doctrine of the Trinity is what many theologians and philosophers call a problem of logic! In The Journal of Religion American analytical philosopher Martinich conceded that:

“All [trini] theologians understand that the central problem involving the mystery of the Trinity is to explain the possibility that there is one God but three persons in God without falling into contradiction.” [“Identity and Trinity,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 169-181]

The contradiction created is an error of both logic and counting! This is something that has been admitted to by stalwarts of both Catholic & Protestant schools. The Anglican and later Catholic Cardinal J.H. Newman:

“The Trinity is a contradiction, indeed, and not merely a verbal contradiction, but an incompatibility in the human ideas conveyed. We can scarcely make a nearer approach to an exact enunciation of it, than of saying that one thing is two things” (Sadler’s Gloria Patri, p. 39).

The Evangelical Dr. Millard Erickson in his Introducing Christian Doctrine (2001, p 115) admits the Trinity “is so absurd from a human standpoint that no one would have invented it. We do not hold the doctrine of the Trinity because it is self-evident or logically cogent. We hold it because God has revealed that this is what he is like. As someone has said of this doctrine: Try to explain it, and you’ll lose your mind; But try to deny it, and you’ll lose your soul.”

Leonard Hodgson, Christian Faith and Practice, 1965, p. 78. “The Athanasian Creed is a very instructive document, for it shows that, when an attempt was made to state the Christian faith in terms of the metaphysic of the time, all that could be done was to set down a series of contradictions and say that you would be damned if you didn’t believe them.”

Dr. Martin Werner, Formation of Christian Dogma, p 241. “The means by which the Church sought to demonstrate the agreement of its dogma of the Deity of both Father and Son with monotheism, remained seriously uncertain and contradictory.”

Professor L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 1969, p. 89: “The Trinity is a mystery, not merely in the biblical sense that it is a truth, which was formerly hidden but it now revealed; but in the sense that man cannot comprehend it, and make it intelligible….The many efforts made to explain the mystery were speculative rather than theological. They invariably resulted in the development of tritheistic or modalistic conceptions of God… The church has never tried to explain the mystery of the Trinity, but only sought to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in such a manner that the errors which endangered it were warded off.”

Dr. Hey, Lectures in Divinity, 2, 235. “It might tend to moderation and in the end agreement, if we were industrious on all occasions to represent our own doctrine of the Trinity as wholly unintelligible.”