The argument in my last post goes deeper than I made it there. Let me try to say it more fully.
There is an absolute gap between God and everything that is not God. The Creator-creature distinction is not a spectrum. It is a divide. God is infinite; creation is finite. Everything on our side of that line, including us, is creaturely.
Scripture is on our side of that line.
That is not a liberal thing to say. It is what the tradition has always said. Calvin called it accommodation. God stoops to us like a nurse lisping to a child. He uses human language, human categories, human forms to communicate across that gap. Not because those forms are untrustworthy, but because there is no other way to reach creatures like us. The infinite cannot be received unmediated by the finite.
So Scripture is genuinely divine and genuinely creaturely at the same time. Inspired, authoritative, sufficient, and still a creaturely form. Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch Reformed theologian, put it plainly: God does not give us himself directly. He gives us a witness to himself, accommodated to our capacity.
Doctrine is our further systematization of that witness. Which means doctrine is at least two steps removed from God himself.
None of this makes Scripture less authoritative. But it should make us humble about what we think doctrine is.
Here is what I keep coming back to. The whole movement of revelation runs in one direction: from abstraction toward flesh. God speaks through prophets. He gives Torah. He sends wisdom and psalms and prophecy. And then, at the end of all that, he does something different.
He shows up.
Hebrews opens with this. "In the past God spoke through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son." The movement is not from less information to more information. It is from communication to presence. From word to person.
The Word became flesh. Not flesh became more words.
That direction is not accidental. It tells us something about what God was always after. His goal was never to give us a correct set of propositions about himself. His goal was himself. The Incarnation is not just the best revelation. It is the revelation that reveals what all revelation was always for.
And here is the point I can't get past: a doctrine cannot love you back.
Love requires a subject. You cannot be reconciled to a statement. You cannot be held by a creed. You cannot eat with a confession. Justification, adoption, union with Christ, the indwelling Spirit. The whole apparatus of the gospel is relational through and through. It presupposes persons in relationship. God's goal was never to give us accurate information about himself. His goal was himself.
This is why Alexander Schmemann said the tragedy of modern Christianity is that we took the instruments of encounter with God and made them ends in themselves. The signs began to obscure the thing they pointed to. We built elaborate systems to describe the fire and stopped noticing the fire had gone out.
Dallas Willard said it differently. There is a difference between information about God and knowledge of God. The Pharisees had more information about God than almost anyone. They did not know him. Information without encounter produces exactly what I described in my last post: people defending positions, low-grade anxiety, doctrinal structures maintained at the cost of actual life.
The Incarnation is the answer to that temptation before it ever arises. God does not send more information. He sends his Son. He comes in a body because only a person can love you back. Only a person can sit with you, eat with you, call you by name. Only a person can say, come to me.
Doctrine serves that. It points toward that. When it stops pointing and starts demanding to be the destination, it has become an idol. An elaborate, well-defended, theologically sophisticated idol.
The goal has always been life with the living God. The creeds and confessions, rightly used, get you to the door. But there is a living person on the other side of it.