How do you convince a layman that the Trinity is one God?

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You can tell them, first, that dividing a deity into three parts isn’t even remotely an old idea, societies all over the world have done this, and second, the reason why it is done.

Humans cannot handle full divinity. In the same way it’s really really hard to grasp the sheer scale of Jeff Bezos’ wealth, God is that times infinity. You have to knock God down to size in order to get anywhere near something individuals can see and interact with and relate to.

Trinitarian thought was greatly influenced by Greco-Roman, the word we use for that these days is “Hellenistic,” thought and philosophy. Plato taught the world about abstract reasoning, how to think about things that don’t have physical counterparts. In the world of the physical, if you break apart a chair into seat, legs and back, you no longer have a chair, you have chair parts.

But in the world of the abstract, ideas can be broken down into their constituent parts without losing themselves. We’ve broken the United States up into 50 states, plus territories and the District of Columbia. Does this mean we don’t have a United States anymore, but rather fifty different states?

What about a government office? There’s “The Office of the President of the United States” and then there’s the buffoon currently residing in that office. The office won’t go away when the buffoon does.

This is how you reason about the abstract and wrap constructs of ideas around physical things. Jesus spoke of a “kingdom” with God at its head. Political organizations are inherently abstract, they’re supposed to survive people. But God never dies. But God is all-powerful and omni-benevolent. So God divides His “office” into multiple parts, He can be all things to all people, so He can be the father to some, the son to others, and then as the Holy Spirit to still others, depending on their needs.

Ancient peoples cut their deities way down to size. They had an individual deity for each tribe. And when tribes joined together to make bigger tribes, their gods got together and poets told more stories. Eventually once the tribes got big enough to be called nations, and all the poets, now living cush lives at court, started coming up with bigger ideas about God, forming Godheads, cutting a monotheistic, some might call this henotheistic, deity into parts because a big singular God is just hard to approach for most people.

It doesn’t matter to God how you slice Him up, He exists to serve us, and we exist best by serving the Lord’s plan. So God gets sliced up according to human psychology. Some need God’s love, some need His discipline. Some just need to witness God’s almighty spirit.