Herman Hoeksema on Sovereignty and Responsibility

"Let us put both truths in propositional form:
1. God is absolutely sovereign, even so that he determines the moral acts of man, both good and evil.
2. Man is responsible before God for all his moral acts.
It may well be that we cannot answer the question how God is able to determine man's deeds without destroying man's responsibility. That he is able to do so is asserted plainly by the two propositions stated above. But whether or not we can understand this operation of the... sovereign God upon man is not the question. The sole question is whether the two propositions concerning God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are contradictory. This we deny. In fact, they cannot possibly be, for the simple reason that they assert something about two wholly different subjects.
They would be contradictory if the first proposition denied what is affirmed in the second. But this is not true. The first proposition asserts something about God: He is absolutely sovereign and determines the acts of man. The second proposition predicates something about man: He is responsible for his moral acts. Does the first proposition deny that man is responsible? If it does you have here a contradiction. But it does not. Those who like to discover a contradiction here, usually the enemies of the truth of God's sovereignty, simply take for granted that to assert that God is sovereign even over man's acts is to say the same as that man is not responsible. It must be pointed out, however, that this is neither expressed nor implied in the first proposition. In the two propositions responsibility is not both affirmed and denied at the same time to man.
The two propositions would, of course, also be contradictory if the second proposition denied what is affirmed in the first. In that case, sovereignty even over the acts of man would be both affirmed and denied to God. But also this is neither expressed nor implied in the two propositions, unless it can first be shown conclusively that to say that man is responsible is the same as declaring that God is not sovereign over his moral acts. And this has never been demonstrated, nor is it self-evident.
If they were really contradictory they could not both be the object of the Christian's faith. We could only conclude that either the one or the other were not true." - Herman Hoeksema, The Clark Van Til Controversy