This Bible verse doesn't mean what I think it does...does it?

[prolifewife]

I can’t get over this bible verse:

1 Timothy: chapter 2, verse 15

“Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.”

Certainly this doesn’t mean that women who can’t bear children won’t be saved?

Help me out here folks.

 

[flyingfish]

I can’t get over this bible verse:

1 Timothy: chapter 2, verse 15

“Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.”

Certainly this doesn’t mean that women who can’t bear children won’t be saved?

Help me out here folks.

Of course it doesn’t, or else all those female saints who were nuns and childless are in hell.

 

[MomaMary8]

don’t worry,it’s not what you think!! Read the entire passage, if not the entire letter to Timothy. Paul is trying to correct the abuses that were occuring. He is not trying to create a set of guidelines of behavior, but should be read with a knowledge of what was happening at the time. Well to do women were being mouth pieces of false teachers. One fasle teaching was that marriage was bad, and Paul was trying to correct that notion. That is why he uses that example of bearing children.

I highly suggest the Navarre Bible to help give a better explanation of why some things were written.

 

[laura_kathleen]

Of course women who cannot bear children are not immediatley doomed to hell, but I would urge you to read that passage with the knowledge that we do not take the Bible literally word for word, considering the fact that Paul was writing to a very androcentric society and lived in one himself (some would argue we still do). So fear not women who cannot bear children are still welcomed into heaven the same way all of us are out of a great and ever abiding love of the Father.

 

[jpjd]

There is only one thing that determines whether you go to heaven or not: and that is, are you in a state of grace. Whether a woman gives birth or not, has nothing to do with it.

 

[Mintaka]

The point is that, whatever state God has called us to, and whatever we do in life, we can do it to God’s glory.

Anyway, it’s not just marriage that some people back then thought was icky, but childbirth.

snooty voice
So… material. So blood-related and fleshy. Oh, so declasse.

back to normal voice
The early Christians liked being virgins, they liked being widows and widowers for life, they liked being married and adopting babies who’d been abandoned to die (whether or not they had fertility problems), and they liked being married and having lots and lots of kids. Even if they ended up pregnant in embarrassing or inconvenient circumstances, they refused to abort their kids. All these things weren’t fashionable in Greco-Roman society of their day. Some philosophers and cults actually taught that they were evil or non-spiritual. Christians had to fight this constantly.