Whoa! Last Sunday this was read in many churches: A woman “will be saved through childbearing – if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control.” (1 Timothy 2:15) The ultimate in male chauvinism, “saved through childbearing”?
Dr. Philip Towner of the Nida Institute of the American Bible Society explains that this verse is part of a passage addressing a heresy in the first century church in Ephesus. Some wealthy wives and women were publically pushing a heretical view that marriage, sexual relations, and childbearing were not appropriate for a spiritually knowledgeable woman. “Willingness to become pregnant was apparently a very real concern. Bearing children will not be a means of earning salvation, and it is doubtful if ‘saving’ means simply physical safety through childbirth. Rather, Paul urges these Christian wives to re-engage fully in the respectable role of the mother, in rejection of heretical and secular trends, through which she may ‘work out her salvation.’” (“The Letters to Timothy and Titus” in the New International Commentary on the New Testament, 235)
God bless mothers, God bless wives, God bless traditional families…and God bless scholars who explain strange passages!
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