> Well, the goal of those theologians should of course be to interpret
> the Bible not just any old way, but *correctly*. It's an unfortunate
> reality that interpretation of both types ("correctly" and
> "however it suits me") has been done in the past, and the waters
> are somewhat muddied as a result, as it were. But I'm convinced that
> the doctrine of the Trinity arises naturally (if not explicitly) from
> the Biblical testimony, rather than being forced onto it. And there is
> this to consider, too, although it takes faith to accept: the early
> believers who worshipped God as Father, Son and Spirit were not merely
> trying to work through the doctrine intellectually. The
> spirit of God worked in them and guided them in the truth, just as
> Christ promised the Holy Spirit would do. That's not a thing
> that I expect everyone to believe, but it explains in part why
> orthodox Christians accept the Trinity even though it is not spelled
> out clearly in any one Scriptural text. God confirms its truth
> personally, through His Spirit.

I mean no disrespect to your beliefs, but allow me to state that this is a damned silly reason to believe anything. The functional difference between 'The Holy Spirit told me this' and 'I hit my head on a rock and hallucinated about the Holy Spirit telling me this' is negligible from the point of view of some other observer. If you believe that the Bible is literal truth (a belief which I do not personally share), you must allow the text to stand on its own merits, and not rely on a mystical force to guide the understanding of its previous interpreters to the 'correct' truth.

In fact, this is a very dangerous belief. It's the sort of thing that the Inquisition said: If suspicion has been placed in my mind, the Holy Spirit must have put it there, and it must therefore be correct.

I like the concept of the Trinity, but that's mainly because I'm aware of the number of religions that espouse it (IE: everything from Wicca to Hindu). The Bible itself does not make much of a differentiation (the stuff about the spirit of God descending on whatever could as easily be metaphorical flowery speech as an implicit differentiation between flavors of God).