It seems to me, on reflection, that the Eastern Orthodox formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity as explicated by Fr John Behr, Fr Thomas Hopko, Dr Beau Branson and others, which I described in the previous post, while it doesn't suffer from the logical problems that other versions of the DOT do, still suffers from the semantic problem that the term "is God" is used in a way that makes no sense in modern English (I alluded to this in the previous post itself). We do not use the term God as an adjective but only as a noun (or a proper noun). Thus, for the Orthodox at any rate, the trinity doctrine would be more correctly formulated in English as follows:
The Father is divine
The Son is divine
The Sprit is divine
There is only one God (namely, the Father)
Also, the part of the Nicene creed describing the relation of the Son to the Father would be more correctly translated by the admittedly cumbersome phrase "divine Person of God, light of light, true divine Person of true God".
While a semantic problem is not as serious as a logical one, I am also not convinced that the above formulations represent what the average Orthodox Christian actually believes. If asked "is Christ actually God, or merely a divine Person", I can't help thinking that most Orthodox believers would affirm Christ's deity rather than just His divinity.
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