Τῇ γὰρ χάριτί ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι διὰ πίστεως· καὶ τοῦτο οὐκ ἐξ ὑμῶν, θεοῦ τὸ δῶρον (Eph 2:8, NA28)
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; (Eph 2:8, NASB)
Commenting on this text, two Arminian scholars wrote in response to the common Reformed interpretation of this text:
[T]he terms (faith, this, it) that seem so clearly lined in English are not so neatly connected in Greek. The English ear depends largely on word order for making sense of language, and so automatically presumes that this (which “is not from yourselves”) must obviously refer back to faith, since faith immediately precedes this in the word order of the text. But Greek, being an inflected language, actually depends on “tags” that are attached to words for guiding the reader. If our writer had desired readers to connect faith directly to this, these two words should have matched each other as grammatically feminine. We find, however, that this, being neuter in gender, likely points us back several words earlier—to the idea of salvation expressed in the verb. Accordingly, we should read the text with a different line of connections as follows: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this [salvation is] not from yourselves, [this salvation] is the gift of God.” (Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I am Not A Calvinist [Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Books, 2004], 77, italics in original)
