The Nicene Creed vs. the Doctrine of the Trinity

Kermit Zarley left the following comment on my 'Minecraft model of the Trinity’ post:
Instead of trying to understand the doctrine of the Trinity, how about trying to understand the Bible. In this post, you don't mention a single text in it.
That’s good advice, and I know what he means, and I have tried to adhere to that principle in the past (see this post, for example). The trouble is, one thing that seems to be a fundamental principle uniting all Christians around the world – and it’s been this way for over 1500 years – is adherence to the Nicene (really the Niceno-Constantinopolitan) creed. True, there are groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Christadelphians who reject the Nicene creed – and the doctrine of the Trinity altogether – but, although they would call themselves Christian, they are (rightly or wrongly) not generally considered to be true Christians by the rest of the Church. In many churches, the Nicene creed is recited weekly as a way for the congregation members to re-affirm their faith and to express their unity with other Christians around the world. I find it very hard to be part of a faith, one of the fundamental tenets of which I am unable to give my assent to. My refusal to give up once and for all on the doctrine of the Trinity has largely been motivated by this unwillingness to accept that the faith in which I first encountered God, and through which I have met many people – including family members - who have demonstrated and modeled the reality of God to me in the way they live their lives, could be so wrong in one of its most foundational beliefs.
But my problem with the doctrine of the Trinity is largely constituted by the fact that its premises are inherently self-contradictory and illogical. This means that much of the mental gymnastics involved in my many attempts to render it coherent and therefore believable tend to involve philosophical speculation as opposed to biblical exegesis.
One thing I’ve realised recently, though, is that while I do not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity in the sense of three, consubstantial divine Persons, each of whom is the one God – a doctrine which (as far as I can tell) not taught in the bible in any clear sense and which I doubt was believed by those who became Christians in the days of the first Apostles – that does not necessarily mean that I cannot assent to the Nicene creed.
The part of the Nicene creed that I have generally had a problem with is the bit that says of Jesus that He is, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” However, I am not certain that this has to be understood in an orthodox trinitarian way. I certainly believe that, in one sense, Jesus is what God is. I explained in a previous post that this is how I understand the sense of the opening sentence of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and what God was, the Word was. What I understand by this is that God always works through His Son, so that Jesus is imbued by God with all of God’s qualities (for the sake of the argument I’m not going to get into the notion of divine simplicity and its implications for the possibility of God having multiple qualities!) as well possessing the authority to act in God’s name. One way of describing this situation would be to say that Jesus is what God is, but not who God is. This is not to be confused with the very common argument put forward by trinitarians that God is ‘three Whos and one What’. As I have explained in previous posts, that argument is, in my opinion, pure sophistry, and in no way resolves the contradictory nature of the doctrine of the Trinity. Put simply, if each of the three ‘Whos’ is identical to the one ‘What’, then there can be no distinction between those three ‘Whos’. And if the three ‘Whos’ are thought of as being, in some sense, three distinct minds or consciousnesses, floating around inside the one ‘What’ like ghosts in the divine machine, then the Persons are not identical with the ‘What’ (which is, after all, the one God) but rather are inhabitants or, at best, parts or aspects of God.
But what I am arguing is that while Jesus is not who God is – only the Father is God, and Jesus is not the Father – Jesus is what God is in the sense that he is identical to God in every way except for the fact that He (the Son, ie. Jesus) is not the ultimate source of the divine power, authority, knowledge, wisdom, love etc. that he possesses (and surely many trinitarian Christians would agree with that last point, since many of them believe that the Son is eternally generated by the Father).
So if the phrase “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” can be understood as referring to the fact that Jesus is what God is (without it having to mean that Jesus is who God is), then I have no problem in reciting the Nicene creed.
As for the part of the creed which refers to the Holy Spirit, it does not call the Spirit God but describes the Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life” who is to be “worshiped and glorified”. I have never had a problem with this part of the creed. God’s Spirit is, by definition, divine (and therefore worthy of worship), just as the human spirit is human, and it is by His Spirit that God imparts life.
I have mentioned the Eastern Orthodox priest Father John Behr in a previous post, as someone whose ideas about the Trinity seem to me to make more sense that those of most (small ‘o’) orthodox Christians. The other day I came across this talk by Father John, and to my surprise he seems to be describing the Trinity in a way that is – possibly – compatible with the understanding of the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I have argued for in this post (although I don’t fully agree with stuff he's previously written on the Trinity, such as this post, so it's possible I am misunderstanding him). If it is the case that my views on the nature of God would be considered acceptable by such a prominent Orthodox priest and theologian then I have no further need to worry about whether or not those views are compatible with those of the wider Church. I consider the Orthodox Church to be a good guide to the theological views of the Church of the early centuries of Christianity, since (as far as I understand) it ceased to hold any councils after the split with Rome in 1054, whereas the Church in the West continued – and still does continue in both its catholic and protestant forms - to develop its doctrines and teachings. I have mentioned in a previous comment that the Orthodox understanding of the atonement – which is centred around the idea of Jesus triumphing over death on our behalf – makes much more sense to me than the western idea that God needs to punish someone – even someone completely innocent - before he is able to forgive.