Who You Are vs. What You Are

Epistemic status: provisional.

What is the difference between "who" you are and "what" you are? Who you are is your true preferences and identity and the expression of these through you. Ultimately you choose to be who you are. Maybe you start life with some innate preferences, and are given some identities by your parents or other older people. But by the end of your life (perhaps this process isn't finished until the end of the Millennium) you have thought through who you are a fair amount, have chosen new preferences and identities or chose the given ones for yourself, and have implicitly affirmed whatever innate preferences or early-given identities you didn't choose. Or you have done your best to reject them as far as you are able, this being your rejection of them.

God is omnipotent, two exceptions being the choices that other personal beings make to assert themselves (he can override their choices in the moment, but not the choices that express who they really are), and that he cannot do what is wrong. "What" a person is largely falls in the domain of God's omnipotence. That they have bodies, physical strengths, emotional tendencies, and so on is under his control. Except the choices that they make as themselves (as expressions of "who" they are) can sometimes override this.

God has partial control or influence over the "what" of being in a given social role. Social relationships could be completely engineered by God, but if they are to express the "who" of the people involved, that "who" limits God's power. God can orchestrate real social relationships (for instance, put people in positions to interact with each other, or override their unwise attempts to flee from each other) but not force them.

The bedrock of reality is, who personal beings are, and what they are emerges in how they relate to each other. God creates what a person is, but people modify the what of each other and are to some extent like creators as well.