While not claiming any personal convictions in regard to the Trinity doctrine (nor advocating the following as "truth" or encouraging religion), I do recall being shocked to learn about something I as a Jehovah's Witnesses used to tease Trinitarians about.
Does anybody remember how Watchtower publications would attempt to explain the Trinity, then say it was a confusing doctrine, laugh at it being called a "mystery," and then mock how Christians would claim it was "the central doctrine" of their churches?
Actually, when getting my education and studying history, I was shocked to learn that Christianity doesn't believe like the Witnesses in regards to Christ's death. I was always taught at the Kingdom Hall that God demanded the death of another human being in order to set the scales of justice in balance before all the angels who were watching how Jehovah would settle the issue of sovereignity raised by Satan the Devil. But this is not what the churches of Christendom believe in. They don't really even use the expression "ransom sacrifice."
Their teaching is that God became human to teach humanity that we are, in reality, more like God than we realize. We needed no law or standards or even religious teaching to become like God because every human is innately created in the image of God, or so the lesson goes.
The central doctrine of the Trinity is the Incarnation, God becoming human, a "son of man" or even a "son" of himself (the ancients called incarnations of deities "sons"). According to the doctrine, God wanted to share the suffering of humanity and give that suffering redeeming value. The doctrine states that through what happened at the Cross, God changed the outcome of current realities: the sin of many in killing Jesus became the way for humankind's forgiveness, the dead wood of the Cross became the Tree of Life, the death of Jesus became life for the world, etc. According to Christendom the Sacrifice of the Cross (capitalized because it is an actual dogma) is not the offering of God a human sacrifice to appease the Creator due to Adam's sin. Instead it is God's offering to humanity the life of God so they can participate in what 2 Peter 1:4 calls a "sharing in the divine nature."
In other words, the Watchtower teaching is oddly the opposite of nominal Christianity's teaching. The JWs claim that God can only forgive us if a human is slaughtered and his blood is spilled. In Watchtower theology, God sends an angel to materialize and offer a blood sacrifice to the blood-demanding God "Jehovah." But the traditional Christian teaching is that God becomes like us to give us His life: we don't go up a mountain to see and receive instruction from God as did Moses, instead God comes down to instruct humanity as well as share His own life.
I thought this made the Watchtower view pretty shabby by comparison and made their "Jehovah" a really different God than what the rest of Christians believe in.
