been saved by grace through faith,” he writes in Ephesians. “This doesn’t happen on your own initiative; it’s God’s gift. It isn’t on the basis of works, so no one is able to boast.”4 As it stands, that statement can easily be fitted into the going-to-heaven scheme of thought, but a glance at the wider context will show that Paul has very different ideas. In the first chapter of Ephesians he insists that the entire divine plan “was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king—yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him.”
