Moreover, rather than being good, we are
sinful creatures who are forever getting confused and believing the universe revolves around us.
Conventional Christianity asserted that,
as sinful creatures in a fallen world ruled by an Almighty God, humans had no rights at all but were at the mercy of a gracious God.
Then John Hick's solution is incorrect: «We have... found it to be an inescapable conclusion that the ultimate responsibility for the existence
of sinful creatures and of the evils which they cause and suffer, rests upon God himself.
While a hypothetical stance allows us to perceive important aspects of the divine plan (e.g., the deificatio of man), it unfortunately requires a certain abstraction from the Jesus of history, from our own reality
as sinful creatures, and from the salvation won for us upon the Cross.
If
these sinful creature knew what was good for them, they would drop to the ground trembling and beg for His mercy and love!
He knew that when His goodness appeared in the midst of a fallen,
sinful creature, that there would be no other outcome than for Him to be staked to wood and left to die.
Perhaps especially in the time of the death of God, we must not lose sight of the fact that man does not cease to be a guilty or
sinful creature.
Part of the reason is that the Christian faith takes seriously what has been traditionally called the fallen nature of man, namely, that man is
a sinful creature, who does not find in himself the power to bring to fulfillment the ideals which attract him.
The church can never be free of sin — we are the church and we are
sinful creatures, are we not?
If we're
sinful creatures that means that we are separated from God.