As I've commented before, the Trinity initially arose as a response to
the Arians.  Certainly the Arians' view needed to be rejected.  In
that historical context, I believe the Trinity accomplished two
things:

1) It emphasized that in Christ we are encountering God himself, not
a demigod.

2) It interpreted the Logos as one mode of existence of God, rather
than a truly separate entity.  (Note that I'm using mode in a way
different than the modalists.)

However I believe the whole Arian problem was the result of theology
taking a wrong turn several hundred years previously.  The Logos
language as used in the NT was based on Jewish speculative views.
However I'm afraid Christian theology turned poetry into prose.  The
concept of God's word becoming flesh is a very powerful metaphor.  But
when it turns into dogma, we end up with his word becoming a separate
entity coeternal with God.  I'm pretty sure that's not what John had
in mind.

In a Christian context the Logos was used to express the fact that
Christ as Son represents something that was present with or as a part
of God from before creation.  I think this concept was fairly vague in
the beginning, and one can see the details change over the first few
centuries of Christian theology.  As theology came to be done in terms
of Greek theology, the Logos developed from an image which I think was
intended more or less as a metaphor in the original Jewish
speculation, until with the Arians it became a full-fledged separate
entity, existing alongside of God from eternity.

I think Christian theologians were moved in this direction largely
because of a desire to avoid saying that God died.  The West actually
did try to do theology in a more conventional monotheistic fashion.
It's variously called Monarchian and Patripassian.  The problem is
that if you treat God as one, and also believe in the Incarnation,
then you end up saying that God the Father died on the cross.  This is
not something anyone was willing to accept.  I think this problem
moved people to take the distinction between Father and Logos more
seriously, so that they could then have just the Logos incarnated.  Of
course if you go too far down this path, you have Arianism, which is
what they found out the hard way.

At any rate, I think there are other ways to avoid the problem of
having the Father die.  First, note that the Incarnation hadn't been
carefully formulated yet.  There wasn't a clear understanding of two
natures in one person, which creates a certain indirectness into God's
involvement in death (and birth).  Second, I believe there was a
certain Docetic tendency.  That is, I think they were more afraid than
they should have been of saying that God really participated in birth
and death.

I would suggest that it would have been better to read "the Word was
made flesh" as not implying a real separation within God.  The Word is
symbolic of God's will and his creative power, but it's really a
function of God, not a separate entity.  I see the passage as saying
that Jesus made God's will and plan for us visible, but I don't see it
as being intended to be a metaphysical definition of how that was
accomplished.  I would thus return to what is in effect Monarchianism,
i.e. to saying that Jesus incarnated God as a whole, not just the Son.
With a more sophisticated Christology I think this would not be a
problem.

I do believe that something good has come out of the Trinity.  But I
think the modern evangelical concept of God as personal is a more
natural way of explaining it.  For me the main point of the Trinity is
that God has enough complexity that the relationship of love is
intrinsic to him.  I do see some point in saying that Jesus incarnates
the Son, since Jesus certainly shows us the life of loving obedience,
and by our participation in him brings us into God's own love.
However I think in the long run Jesus shows us all of God, and it's a
mistake to confine the Incarnation to just the Logos, as classical
theology does.  I believe the implications of God as personal can be
explained without the metaphysical mysteries of the Trinity.

To me the big thing that came out of the Trinity is the idea that God
is not just a mathematical point, but that he has some analog of human
relationship within him.  This shows in two ways:

  - we say that God is love.  We believe that love is intrinsic to
	him.  It didn't have to wait until there was a world and
	humans to love.  But love is a relationship.  How can there
	be a relationship within God?  The Trinity says that God
	has enough "inner structure" that there can be a relationship
	among him.  But I'm not sure we need the Trinity to do this.

  - people are called to a life of loving obedience.  We are incapable
	of doing this alone.  It can only come as a gift from God,
	through Christ.  Only Christ was able to in himself live as
	a completely obedient servant.  But for Christians, Christ
	reveals God.  If we take this seriously, this means that Christ's
	loving obedience is something intrinsic to God.  So God "in himself"
	is not just creator, father, etc.  He is also son.  When God
	calls us to obedience, he is not asking us to do something he
	is incapable of doing himself.

Both of these considerations suggest that we need to think of God as
being from eternity Father and Son.  (And Holy Spirit.  The Holy
Spirit has always been an afterthought in Christian doctrine.  As far
as I can see, it is a characteristic of the relationship.  It is
probably best thought of as being the presence of the Father with the
Son, and to the extent that we are incorporated in Christ, with us.)
But I think we can do this in the context of talking about God as
love, and of what Christ shows us about God.

So in summary, I would prefer to leave the Logos language as
metaphorical, and base theology on the obvious Biblical concepts of
God as one but as one who is love.  The Biblical concept of
preexistence becomes particularly problematical here.  The point is
not that the human being Jesus existed before the creation.  I don't
see that this could make any sense.  Rather the point of preexistence
is that Jesus embodies all of God - including the power that was shown
in the creation.

Now, for the Incarnation.  I would rather start with language such as
Colossians and Hebrews: Jesus as the visible image of the invisible
God, the very imprint of his nature, and also statements that God was
in Christ reconciling us to him.  I see the Jesus as a human being,
whose integrity as a human must be preserved, but as also God's way of
being present in history.  But I believe this is a matter of God's
decision, not a metaphysical mystery.

My basic problem is that I think the Church had moved to a
neo-Platonic frame of reference.  And Greek philosophy in general had
trouble dealing with certain key concepts.  The Greeks were big on
substance and essense, etc.  If the incarnation was real, it had to be
expressed in this model of substances and essenses.  Greek philosophy
did not do very well with functions and relationships (even in
mathematics).  I believe that the unity between Jesus and his Father
was functional.  One of the Eastern theologians did in fact toy with
such a concept.  His view was considered acceptable at the time of
Chalcedon, though after his death he was ruled to be heretical because
some of his followers got caught on the wrong side of the politics of
the Eastern church.  To me the main Biblical points that need to be
emphasized are:

  - that when we look at Jesus, we see God
  - that in Christ, God died for us, i.e. that the incarnation
	means that God chose to experience Jesus' death as his own.

To me this is not a matter of metaphysics, but of God's choice.
Frankly I think we would have been better to start with Hebrew
concepts rather than Greek.  The OT tradition has a number of
relationships of functional unity.  The best known is the prophet.
The prophet speaks for God.  He represents God in a much closer
fashion than many modern readers realize.  The prophets created so
much opposition not just because they were the messengers of bad news,
but because their proclamations and their symbolic actions were
thought to actually cause the things they proclaimed.  But there are
other instances of identification.  Servants represented their masters
and sons their fathers in a very direct way.

To me it would be best to think of the incarnation as an
intensification of these Hebrew ideas.  Jesus was God present with us,
not because there was some metaphysical difference between him and any
other human, but because God chose to identify Himself with Jesus.
And also because God arranged it so that Jesus' character and life
revealed Him.  One problem I have with classicial theology is that it
leads us away from Jesus' life and teachings to his metaphysical
constitution.

It's common to talk of Jesus' human and divine natures as if they were
separate parts of him.  However I don't think that is wise.  The two
nature language adopted by Chalcedon certainly says that in Christ two
different things are going on -- a human being and God.  These things
must not be confused.  This is expressed by saying the Christ has two
"natures" -- human and divine.  The overall point is surely right.
However the two-nature terminology tends to separate Christ into human
and divine "parts", and partition his actions between them (though the
doctrine of "communication of attributes" is an attempt to prevent
this from going too far).  I think instead we have to see the same
human being and human actions as being on both the human level level
and the divine level.  Jesus is both a human being and God's presence
with us.  The same thing was both human and God.

This means that we are to see Jesus' actions in two ways.  On the one
hand, his teachings and actions are human.  They come from Jesus'
understanding of God, which presumably developed through a study of
the Hebrew Scriptures, and through a deep relationship with God.  Yet
we see them also as God's teachings and actions.  If we take seriously
the claim that Jesus is the "Word made flesh", then God is taking full
responsibility for everything Jesus is and does, so that we regard
them as *both* God's own actions in human history, and actions by a
human being.

A good test case is Jesus' death.  Our model of the unity of divine
and human in Christ has to be such as to continue even through his
death.  Otherwise we are all too close the early Christians who
believed that God left Christ right before his death, because God
couldn't die.

It is certainly clear that the eternal Logos did not cease living or
get buried, which is why I use the language "experienced death" above
to talk about how God was involved.  Yet I'm reluctant to leave it
there, and imply that death per se was only the act of the human in
Christ.  If we are serious about Jesus as the human form of God, we
have to see everything he did as at the same time the act of a human
being and the act of God.  If God completely identified himself with
Christ, then we have to say that death was actually something that God
did.  There is still some "indirection", since he did it through
Christ and not in his own person, as it were.  (Clearly Christ's death
didn't leave us without a God in "heaven", continuing to guide the
universe.)  But God's identification with Christ is such that I think
we still have to speak of death as something God actually did.

I'm particularly upset by the Athanasian model of Christology, which
seems to be the dominant one in the West.  And with the (posthumous)
anathematizing of Theodore, it's not clear that there's any real
alternative.  Athanasius said that the Logos took on humanity, but
without a real human being.  This seems completely opposed to the NT
portrait, which clearly emphasizes that Jesus is a human being, with
all the limitations that implies.  I'm afraid I see classical
Christology as being in effect a somewhat more sophisticated version
of the Arian position: despite talking about fully God and fully
human, the final result is not really a human being.  It's an entity
that combines two natures.  In my view he is finally neither really
God nor a human being.  I believe that rather than a single person
with two natures, what they want is two persons: God and the human
being Jesus, whose correspondence is so close that they are
functionally a single person.  This seems to me what is implied by the
image in Hebrews: the image is one of the impression of a seal in wax.
The result is that we have the same seal, but in two forms: the
original stone, and wax.