Does Ephesians 1:4–5 teach limited atonement?

o, Alt,” you say. “I’ve read your three pat lit­tle posts, you know, deny­ing God’s eter­nal decree before the foun­da­tion of the world [one / two / three] but you can’t deny the plain lan­guage of Eph­esians 1. Go ahead, quote it for the read­er, if you dare!” Very well. St. Paul says:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spir­i­tu­al bless­ings in heav­en­ly places in Christ: Accord­ing as he hath cho­sen us in him before the foun­da­tion of the world, that we should be holy and with­out blame before him in love: Hav­ing pre­des­ti­nat­ed us unto the adop­tion of chil­dren by Jesus Christ to him­self, accord­ing to the good plea­sure of his will.

“What could be plain­er, Alt?” you cry. “Paul address­es these words to “us”—the wery elect. So God, ‘before the foun­da­tion of the world,’ chose an elect!”

Well, God cer­tain­ly choos­es that a par­tic­u­lar peo­ple (in the cor­po­rate sense) will be “holy and with­out blame.” But that does not imply that God choos­es who, specif­i­cal­ly, will be among those peo­ple. Paul does not say, “He chose each of you before the foun­da­tion of the world; he says God chose “us in Christ”—i.e.,whoever would coop­er­ate with him—to be “holy and blame­less.”

This may sound like split­ting hairs, but it’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion. The the­olo­gian Greg Boyd, in spite of his weak­ness­es (he is an Anabap­tist and open the­ist), puts the point well:

In keep­ing with the Jew­ish prac­tice of his day,” Boyd says, “I think Paul was speak­ing of a cor­po­rate elec­tion in this pas­sage. When Jews thought of elec­tion or pre­des­ti­na­tion, they thought pri­mar­i­ly of the nation of Israel. Israel as a nation was elect­ed (not for sal­va­tion, but for ser­vice). But this didn’t mean that every indi­vid­ual born into Israel was part of God’s cho­sen peo­ple. Only those who kept covenant with God were con­sid­ered “true Israelites.”

In oth­er words, God choos­es from before the foun­da­tion of the world that who­ev­er comes to him would be “holy and blame­less.” The “us” Paul writes to are those who had already made the deci­sion to come to Christ.” They are not just “us” but “us in him.”

It strikes me as odd that, if we are essen­tial­ly God’s mar­i­onettes, doing what God has script­ed us to do, our actions appear to us so much like choic­es. I think you have to engage in a par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­fane act of self-decep­tion to con­vince your­self that the words you speak, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the things you do, are not your own choic­es but were cho­sen for you before­hand: to con­vince your­self that God threw a rope around you rather than you choos­ing him because you were drawn and fell in love. If you can tell your­self these things, it’s not too big a stretch to under­stand how you can imag­ine the Bible says all sorts of strange things. God woos us; he does not kid­nap us.

R.C. Sproul (who has called the Mass “ghast­ly”) is par­tic­u­lar­ly crude about it. God, Sproul says, “chose some indi­vid­u­als to be saved unto ever­last­ing blessed­ness in heav­en and oth­ers He chose to pass over, to allow them to fol­low the con­se­quences of their sins into eter­nal tor­ment in hell.”

Now that is “ghast­ly.” And it’s not in the text. Let’s look at the gram­mar of verse 4 for a sec­ond and flesh this out. Eph­esians 1:4 begins, “Accord­ing as he hath cho­sen us in him.” The object of the verb is not “us”; the object is “us in him.” Here’s a clear­er ren­der­ing, with­out the implied eli­sions: “Accord­ing as he hath cho­sen us [who are] in him.” That lim­its the object of God’s choos­ing beyond what Calvin­ism des­per­ate­ly wants the text to say.

In oth­er words, the mean­ing of the text is not: Before the foun­da­tion of the world, God chose par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­u­als to be in Christ, and passed oth­ers by.

What the text does say is this: Before the foun­da­tion of the world, God chose that those who are in Christ (i.e., because they have respond­ed to him) would be made holy and with­out blame.

Of course, nowhere in the Bible do we read that God pre­des­ti­nat­ed any­one to good read­ing com­pre­hen­sion.