It should be acknowledged that any exercise of God's power towards the finite creature is going to be a limitation of His power. Hence the distinction between absolute and ordained power. That being the case, there is no difficulty with conceding that God does in fact limit His sovereignty whilst exercising full sovereign dominion over all things. When God is said to leave man to the freedom of his own will, we can grant a self-determining power to man in the moral scheme of things, whilst at the same time affirming that the individual man is but one among a multitude of secondary causes which are governed by God to bring to pass His eternal purpose. At every point man is consciously alive to the fact that his choices are his own, and yet he also feels that he is but a small speck on the canvas of life, and exists dependently upon One greater than himself as well as interdependently on other creatures.
Very good articulation here and worth keeping.
I find that the quote in the OP is pretty consistent with modern man's conception that his knowledge of reality is univocal with the Creator's (if he even conceives of one). That is, he starts with the idea that his knowledge of his will (and all facts for that matter) must be found within the limits of human reason. It needs to be formed philosophically and, to his mind, what the "good" is. Add to this the modern therapeutic mind where the greatest good is that man would feel good about himself and, consequently, that God would feel good about Him, all Scriptural Revelation must bow before the throne of man's esteem about himself.
Consider the fairly typical notion that God is some all-loving, all-powerful Being as they typical starting point. What it means to be "all-loving" is first philosophically conceived. If I can reason what love and freedom are then, by modern man's conviction that God thinks just like *me*, then God has the same view of what love and freedom are. I then construct how it all fits together and read back into the Scriptures things that don't directly contradict what I've arrived at philosophically. Notice the method, for instance of William Lane Craig, who finds Molinism "theologically fruitful" not because he's started with an theology that can be exegeted from the text but because he begins with the notion that "love demands x" and Molinism is a way to preserve that philosophical principle while being able to find verses that *seem* to support this conception.
I have to say that determinining, within the bounds of human reason, how free will "works" to be a fool's errand because I don't believe we can begin to understand God's Creation before we've bowed the knee to Him in dependence upon His Revelation. It's quite plain to me that the Scriptures teach human responsibility and culpability even as they are enslaved to their sin. I then see, in the Scriptures, that man's in-created happiness and true liberty can only be found in worship and service to the Creator. God is gracious to send the only Mediator between God and man in whom we are freed from sin's dominion and empowered, in Him, to obey and glorify God.
This is too simple, however, and will never satisfy those who believe that man has the right to determine, first, whether God is worthy of their worship before they'll decide to come up with some philosophical argument to let him off the hook for His transgression against their human right to be loved and accepted on their own terms.
