I didn't suggest that doctrine is in conflict with Christ, my FRiend, but rather that man's doctrine is. The Lord's doctrine is inseparable from the Lord Himself - despite the author's claims to the contrary:
The relationship between doctrine and God is the same relationship of Gray's Anatomy to the human body. It is a description of a reality. It is not the reality itself.
Man's doctrines spring from his opinions, elevated and esteemed beyond their worth. The hubristic act of replacing God's words with one's opinions renders one's worship empty and pointless. (Matt. 15:1-9) But it's done every Lord's Day. One might as well stay home and watch the football game as engage in the pointless worship in many churches.
(If you don't believe it, visit around and ask people why they do the things they do in the assembly. Where are the instructions from God? Did God command it? Or do they just think it's a good idea?)
The author's confusion arises not from the Bible's description of God, but from his resistance to that description, as he clings to his own opinions and doctrines rather than yield in meekness to the Lord's.
As if that weren't enough, he seems to take pride in his resulting confusion. But not content to stop there, he holds up his ignorance and confusion as qualities authenticating him as a trustworthy teacher. Anyone with knowledge and understanding of God as revealed in the Scriptures is denigrated as "probably worshiping an idol."
Follow men like him at your peril.
I don't think the author is saying anything too controversial. It reminds me a great deal of something CS Lewis once said, to the effect that if God was exactly as we expected Him to be, we might have reason to suspect we had invented Him. Put another way, His ability to surprise us is exactly what we should find unsurprising.
However, I agree that the author's choice of "confusion" as the vehicle for expressing this lends itself, well, to confusion. It's not just true that God is not confused. It is also true that His work among believers tends to love and righteousness and an orderly mind, not alienation and disorder.
But you say something I don't understand. The author makes an analogy between the Scriptures and Grey's Anatomy. There are problems with that analogy. Grey's anatomy was man in his own power trying to understand human anatomy, and while a magnificent effort, not infallible. The Scriptures were God-breathed, written in effect by the very Person they describe, and so a form of autobiography. And as a divine autobiography, infallible.
And even more than that, unlike anything Grey could write, the Holy Spirit and the divine purpose of God accompany His word and assure that it accomplishes His purpose. And so the word of God is a living thing, with a divine power unlike anything a man by himself could ever write.
But the written words of God are not the very being of God. An expression is not the thing expressed. If I tell someone I love, "I love you," the words I say are not me. They are an expression of what is in me, a representation in the symbols of language. They convey a meaning, and they may well establish a relationship, but in themselves they are patterns of symbols, used to transport meaning from one person to another.
So at the end of all this, I do not see what is wrong with making a distinction. We do not worship words, but we do honor the meaning of the words because we do worship the one who spoke them. This is the sense in which they are inseparable, in that we cannot draw away from the words and the plain meaning of them without also drawing away from the One who spoke them. Anyone who truly honors God will necessarily honor His word, and will not back away from it, no matter what the cost.
You also raise the question of human opinion. You say, for example:
Man's doctrines spring from his opinions
I don't understand how it is possible to interact with the word of God without forming an opinion. Do you believe in the Ten Commandment? Then you are of the opinion they are true. Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead? Then that is your opinion of the truthfulness of that proposition. I don't see anything wrong with that, and indeed I see no way to escape it. Opinion is just another word for belief. I suspect the problem most folks have with it is it probably carries an additional nuance of
unfounded belief, or belief arrived at without enough of a factual basis to call it objective truth.
But if that is the objection to "opinion," it is easily remedied by looking at the supporting facts. If I believe there are things about God that are hard to understand, and I can back that up with a statement from God Himself that says the same thing, then no matter how well or poorly I frame it, my belief has some real foundation, and I am not just spouting a self-made opinion. Likewise with any doctrine, if I can back it up with teaching from the word of God, then it isn't a man-made opinion. It's just me expressing my belief in what God has said. Nothing wrong with that:
But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
(Romans 10:8-10)
Peace,
SR