The argument in my last post goes deeper than I made it there, so 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's a divide. God is infinite and creation is finite, and everything on our side of that line, including us, is creaturely.
Scripture is on our side of that line.
That's not a liberal thing to say, it's what the tradition has always said. Calvin called it accommodation. God stoops to us like a nurse lisping to a child, using human language and human categories and human forms to communicate across that gap. He does that not because those forms are untrustworthy, but because there is no other way to reach creatures like us. The infinite can't be received unmediated by the finite.
So Scripture is genuinely divine and genuinely creaturely at the same time. It's inspired, authoritative, and sufficient, and it is still a creaturely form. Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch Reformed theologian, put it plainly: God doesn't 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's 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 isn't from less information to more information. It's from communication to presence, from word to person. The Word became flesh, and flesh didn't become more words.
That direction is not accidental. It tells us 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's the revelation that shows what all revelation was for.
And here's the point I can't get past: a doctrine can't love you back. Love requires a subject. You can't be reconciled to a statement, you can't be held by a creed, and you can't eat with a confession. Justification, adoption, union with Christ, the indwelling Spirit, the whole apparatus of the gospel is relational through and through, and it assumes persons in relationship.
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 hide the thing they pointed to. We built elaborate systems to describe the fire and stopped noticing that the fire had gone out.
Dallas Willard said it a little differently. There is a difference between information about God and knowledge of God. The Pharisees had more information about God than almost anyone, and they didn't know him. Information without encounter produces exactly what I described in my last post, people defending positions with a low-grade anxiety, holding up doctrinal structures at the cost of actual life.
The Incarnation is the answer to that temptation before it ever comes up. God doesn't 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 and eat with you and call you by name, and only a person can say, come to me.
Doctrine serves that and 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.