When theology stresses creaturehood and subordinates personhood, a hard-faced determinism surfaces and man is dehumanized. When personhood is stressed to the exclusion of creaturehood, man is deified and God's sovereignty is compromised. The Lord is left standing helplessly in the wings as if man had the power to veto the plans and purposes of God. If creaturehood alone is stressed in the matter of sin, God appears as if He planned that man should sin. This thought is intolerable-even though Luther may have once suggested it.
Sin is sin because man is a person.
He is solely responsible for it. Yet because man is a creature, he is dependent upon God even for the power to sin. We have to say, therefore, that sin is included in God's permissive will. 3 Sin proves that man, as God created him, is a creature of genuine option. Because man is a creature, salvation must be wholly of God.