The New Testament is basically contradictory about the divine nature of Christ. On one hand Christ clearly talks to God as a separate being and identifies his will as being separate from God’s (Luke 22:42), but elsewhere he refers to himself as the Father in a very literal, I-am-physically-the-same sense (John 14:8-14). And then we have the issue with the fact that two divine beings (if we assume that Christ is both divine and a distinct person from God)=polytheism. So in the end your take on the Trinity or godhead comes down to which bullet you are going to bite. We bite the one that technically, in a sense, makes us polytheists which, for traditional Judeo-Christian faith that is heavily influenced by the post-Persian exilic period, is the ultimate heresy, but hey, maybe if you wear it long enough you’ll get used to it. 

However, I don’t begrudge other traditions or people coming to different conclusions and biting different bullets in an effort to essentially square the circle of all the different New Testament accounts of Christ. While I don’t subscribe to Nicaean Christology I don’t have a particular problem with it; you have to figure out some way to make it all fit. 

No, my problem with Trinity-talk deals with the meta-discourse surrounding it and the supposed implications of subscribing or not subscribing to it. 

First, one often hears that nearly everybody in Christendom believes in the Trinity because it is so clearly in the scriptures.  As to the first part, it is true that there is a fairly strong Nicaean consensus across different traditions now. (Of course, there are variations within Nicaean Christology, such as with the filioque phrase that the Catholics believe but the Orthodox do not, but the basics are indeed remarkably consistent across Christendom. 

However, the contentious theological battles pre-dating Nicaea on this question among very smart scripture scholars militates against the idea that the trinitarian reading is the patently obvious one, or that its widespread adoption is somehow evidence of its patent truth; that the text doesn’t allow other plausible interpretations.

What made the Nicaean model the consensus wasn’t the force of argument as much as the force of the Roman sword. That doesn’t make it wrong of course, but it problematizes the idea that that’s the obvious take for anybody who reads the Bible closely. Even in our own day (more or less) one of the smartest biblical exegetes of all time (as in, smartest person who happened to be a biblical exegete, not that his takes were the smartest necessarily), Isaac Newton, arrived at an essentially non-trinitarian, Arian view of God through his own bible study.  

Second. I understand and am fine with a highly esoteric, technical/philosophical distinction being made by a faith. I see where they are coming from. Even if you use the right name, how do you know that that’s the right God? What are God’s defining characteristics? There clearly have to be some parameters or else somebody could claim that their dog they worship is Yahweh and claim to be Jewish. For an example of this kind of deep dive see the Vatican’s official ruling on Latter-day Saint theology and, by extension, the validity of our baptisms, essentially ruling that, while we use the same names (Jesus, Baptism, etc.), that in terms of the essence of the thing we’re talking about very different things from the Catholics. I get that.  

However, my problem with the Trinity hinges on the premise that where if a true belief is considered necessary for salvation then you shouldn’t be required to exercise esoteric, highly technical and specialized reasoning and learning to access it, since not everybody can or has access to such an education. It should be understandable for the vast majority of unlearned human beings (and the ones for which it is not should be exempt, see our informal theology on disabled people under the mental age of 8 and salvation), and the sort of fine-grained Latin distinctions made in formal Trinity discourse that separate the heretics from the true disciples of Christ are way past that mark. 

In the case of Protestants it’s even worse since they are sola scriptura, the Catholics at least recognize another layer of authoritative interpretation that you can rely on even if the primary sources and analysis are beyond you, but in the Protestant case you are in principle being judged based on scripture alone, but on something that is not patently obvious from a surface reading of said scripture and was only resolved after centuries of highly technical theological debate and, again, imperial enforcement. If you are going to be judged for eternal damnation or eternal rest based on your understanding of what the scripture says, then to be fair the scripture better be pretty dang clear on that point, when with the Trinity it is not.