Once again, the Trinity is not something to comprehend. It is a mystery. The Trinity are three persons in one God. How that works, no one has ever been able to explain completely to me. They are the same being, but three persons. They are not three aspects of one being, as that is modalism.
LDS believe in a social Trinity - where the 3 persons are physically separate, but the same in all other aspects in the Godhead. Some, but still few, traditional Christian scholars are beginning to accept this concept of the Trinity.
But the traditional view of the Trinity does become an issue in trying to explain the ancient view of Jews and Christians towards the Trinity. They believed in an anthropomorphic God. That is very clear from the early writings in the Bible and external books. The Divine Council is an early Hebrew/Semitic belief that comes into play here. El Elyon has 70 sons, each of them a divine being. Each is given a kingdom to rule over as god. Yahweh/Jehovah is given Israel as his kingdom, being the favorite kingdom and favorite son of El. Over time, due to political intrigue and sloppiness, many of the gods fall, until Yahweh rules all the kingdoms. Sons of Yahweh are the mortals that he has created. With Dale, we LDS agree that Christ/Yahweh created mortal man in conjunction with Elohim, but the divine spirits are El Elyon's creation.
We see this divine council in Isaiah 6 and Abraham 3. We see Satan and other divine sons of El go to challenge Yahweh for his preeminence in Job 1. Representative of the divine council, Moses and the 70 elders of Israel go to the mountain top and eat, with Yahweh present.
Margaret Barker, Methodist preacher and OT scholar, stated that early Christians saw Jesus as the fulfillment of Yahweh, the Angel of the Lord's Presence. In his resurrection, he showed the way for perfected and divine beings.
After the Nicene Council in 325 AD, the Trinity slowly gained strength. However, there were still issues on the Trinity. Some insisted that Jesus only was fully divine, and not mortal. This view was finally ended over a century later, in the Council at Chalcedon, where he was proclaimed fully divine and fully mortal, the duality of Christ. But while this was proclaimed, it adds yet another layer of mystery on the Trinity. How can God, who is of a holy and different substance than man, be resurrected with a physical body of imperfect matter AND still be a pure Spirit?
The LDS view that God and Jesus are two physically separate beings of Spirit embodied in physical bodies, and that spirit is of matter, just like we are, denotes that no duality or mystery need occur to understand God. There is a natural transition for the sons of El and of Yahweh, from spirit being to mortal being to resurrected being. Of course, this brings up the issue of creatio ex nihilo, but that's another thread....
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