I ran across another case of somebody saying, "how can 3 be 1, and 1 be three; who knows, mystery etc." I don't think people do this on purpose, but notice the moves they have to make: reduce the doctrine to math by subtracting the actual nouns involved.
The nouns are "being" & "persons," & they're kinda important. But never mind that for now: If you'd like to perform a reduction to math, you should at least be consistent in your translation, & represent different nouns by different algebraic signifiers. It's not 3x = 1x...
It'd have to be 3x=1y, right? If you just cancel the nouns, you're treating them as "like terms," since that's what we are allowed to cancel when simplifying equations or rational expressions.
I'm omitting lots of things here, but I just want to make the point: 3=1 is not an algebraic simplification of the doctrine; it's an algebraic oversimplification because it fails to translate necessary data. Simplification can be good; oversimplification is by definition false.
One application: Christians should only say or sing things like "our God is 3 in 1" in contexts where they can be confident that the rest of the information is readily available to listeners. Without it, listeners will try to engage in sense-making in an algebraic vacuum.
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