40 Bicycles

I thought that I would post this quote from Wright on the subject of election in Ephesians 1, for those who would like to have more light on where he stands on this issue:—

Verses 4-6 celebrate the fact that God's people in the Messiah are chosen by grace. This is, perhaps, the most mysterious thing of all. God, the creator, 'chose us in him', that is, in the king, 'before the world was made'; and he 'foreordained us for himself'.

Many people, including many devout Christians, have found this shocking, or even unbelievable. How can God choose some and not others? How can being a follower of Jesus Christ be a matter of God's prior decision, overriding any decision or freedom of our own?

Various answers can be given to this. We have to be careful here. Paul emphasizes throughout this paragraph that everything we have in Christ is a gift of God's grace; and in the next chapter he will declare that before this grace reached down to us we were 'dead', and needing to be 'made alive' (2.5). We couldn't lift a finger to help ourselves; the rescue we needed had to come from God's side. That's one of the things this opening section is celebrating.

The second thing, which is so often missed in discussions of this point, is that our salvation in Christ is a vital stage, but only a stage, on the way to the much larger purpose of God. God's plan is for the whole cosmos, the entire universe; his choosing and calling of us, and his shaping and directing of us in the Messiah, are somehow connected with that larger intention. ....the point is that we aren't chosen for our own sake, but for the sake of what God wants to accomplish through us.

Wright has been accused of undermining divine monergism. This sounds like a sufficient declaration of it to me.