The Mifepristone Revealer
The mifepristone abortion pill (as distinct from the contraception pill), now accounts for over two thirds of our country’s abortions. Last week, the Washington D.C. based Ethics and Public Policy Center reported, based on the insurance claims data of close to 900,000 women, that 10.9% of women who take this pill experience an adverse health effect, that is, hemorrhaging, infection or the very dangerous condition of sepsis. It is not exactly safe. Yet, that information, it turns out, has been suppressed. Why would such a critical matter in women’s health be swept under the carpet?
This pill has powered up abortion in this country, despite the 2022 overturning of the SCOTUS Roe v. Wade decision. Because of this pill, the number of abortions has actually increased in the U.S. It now goes over a million a year. I commented, back when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, how the controversy over the ruling served as a great revealer of the heart of our culture. It still does so. As its handling of mifepristone continues to show, our culture determinedly devalues children and the bearing of children. Abortion as a way of life, to the tune of a million a year, arises from a deeper contradiction of God’s gift. Society rejects intergendered love’s purpose of fruitfulness.
The Saving Through The Childbearing
As I highlighted last week, and earlier, the Scriptures are profoundly “pronatal.” An important New Testament renewal of this pronatalism is found in the apostle Paul’s correspondence to Timothy:
8 I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; 9 likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, 10 but with what is proper for women who profess godliness– with good works. 11 Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14 and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. 15 Yet she will be saved through childbearing– if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.
1Timothy 2:8-15, with its controversial thoughts, is easily the most commented on passage in this letter since the nineteenth century began, and its last verse, v15, garners particular interest. (Thus, I discussed this passage in depth in enGendered, pp137-140).
You can take that last verse, about, being “saved through childbearing,” in a number of ways.
You could read it to mean that women receive eternal salvation by having babies. But, as I wrote in the book, “that would be absurd, not only in Paul’s theology, but merely in the theology of the letter taken by itself, which situates ability to save squarely on God through Christ (1 Tim. 1:1, 15; 2:3; 4:10). So it cannot mean that. What then?”
Some look at the broader meaning of the Greek verb, to save, σῴζω (soezoe), here in v15 used in the passive. Σῴζω is sometimes employed with a more medical meaning, as in ‘to make whole’ or ‘preserve from harm.’ The preposition, διά (dia), as used with the genitive here, like the English word “through,” could mean ‘during’ as well as ‘by means of.” So, Paul could be saying that, if the couple continue in faith and love and holiness, a woman is made or kept whole during the danger and difficulty of childbirth.
This is a neat alternative but doesn’t really work. To bring up death through childbirth out of the blue, as the problem Paul is addressing, does not seem likely, especially in the context of the passage. And godly women yet die in childbirth. But, more crucially, this is not the way Paul uses σῴζω. He doesn’t use the word to refer to being saved from anything except our sin. So, really, in this context, σῴζω should be taken as salvific, referring to eternal salvation.
So…again, what could it mean?
The best way to understand v15, as explained in more detail in enGendered, is that Paul is stepping back into the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2-3 to explicate gender relations in Ephesus. And not only in Ephesus, but for all churches, as he says, “in every place” (v8). Following each of the verses through from v13, we find that Paul is going through the Genesis 3 passage. In v15, he is still speaking of Eve. God promised her that she would bring forth the Savior. For through her giving birth, the woman, Eve, produced not only Seth to call on the name of the Lord (Genesis 4:26), but also the line of the Messiah through which she, and generations of her children, would be saved. Thus, indeed, she would “be saved though (literally:) the childbearing.”
This would only happen, of course, if the first couple continued genderly, allowing its fruitfulness, staying together in faith and love.
Pronatalism For Our Time
This explains the passage well but forces upon us the question of application: Why does Paul bring it up in his A.D. letter? He is obviously drawing an analogy between Eve and Adam and the Ephesian people. The point is that through Adam and Eve staying together and thereby allowing gender its fruitfulness, God brought the Savior. God determined the coming of the one woman who would fully be “clothed with the sun,” thereby bringing forth the manchild Who will rule with a rod of iron. Before Christ, God brought about His salvation through intergendered fruitfulness. But, again, Paul is making this point about Ephesian (and our) lives! That is, also since Jesus Christ’s coming, the apostle argues, God still unfolds Christ’s salvation through intergendered relations. The implication is that this includes intergendered fruitfulness. We are still called to “increase in number” (Genesis 1:28), still called to the duty of bearing children where it is possible to see the Kingdom come.
In light of such a powerful statement, Christian women and men should not travel along with the culture that mifepristone is revealing. In addition to the regret which that anti-natal road leads to, the culture runs counter to Christ’s unfolding kingdom.
We would be wise to allow New Testament pronatalism to shape our lives.