Can Women Achieve Salvation Through Childbirth?

1Timothy 2: 15—Women will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.

The Apostle Paul couldn’t have been using the word “saved” in the sense of eternal destiny. That’s because all other scripture concerning salvation gives us specific light. That is, eternal salvation is given by the grace of God as a gift, through our faith alone; not by our works.

The verse also couldn’t be saying that females will continue to exist as a natural consequence of the randomness of birth, because he attaches their being saved to having faith. All childbearing women aren’t of the Christian faith; all females aren’t born in faith.

What Paul may be alluding to is this. During Paul’s time, the prevailing belief was that if a woman died in childbirth, it was because of the curse of Eve’s transgression falling upon her. This may be why Paul mentions Eve’s disobedience in vs. 14.

If this is what Paul is getting at, then women being saved would have to do with their survival, or preservation, during the birthing process. But only will they survive it if their lives are the opposite of Eve’s life.

In other words, Paul may have been assuring the women that all would go well with their birth deliveries if their character were one of modesty; adorning themselves with godly works instead of with costly and immodest clothing, and there weren’t attempts to usurp the priestly role of a man (verses 9-13).

Women’s safety in childbirth, Paul may have been suggesting, is in exhibiting that in which Eve didn’t: faith, love, sanctity, and self-restraint.

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