Mark

Cheryl,

Family is great, baby is healthy happy and very smily now which is nice.

NIce try skirting around her abnormal hermeutical approach, but for anyone versed in biblical exegesis and hermeneutics would realise that such an interpretation needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The basic issue is this as i see it. Your presupposition is that this text is addressed to a specific false female teacher and presumably her husband. Yet, there is no internal biblical evidence to support the ‘theory’ that such a false teacher existed. Paul is not in the habit of keeping these decievers ‘anonymous’ and the only false teachers mentioned are men.
Second, there is no external extra biblical evidence to support your exegesis, for example other early documents ect.

So the only think your exegesis is based on, is Cheryl Schatz’s interpretation of the grammar. This is a hermeneutical approach which is not popular.

Now the weight of evidence against your interpretation is the writings of church leaders, exegetes theologians throughout the history of Christianity. Now of course this is not infallible, but when one weighs up the evidence, the proper hermeneutic should always lean on the latter.

Also you in no way answered my critiques of your exegesis. For example i said,

“If this text is dealing with a specific woman and her husband you should at least be consistent with your grammatical approach and say that ‘love’, ’sanctification’ and ’sobriety’ are all required elements for this ‘they’ to be ’saved’, since these are all part of the ‘conditional’ clause.”

And you answered,

“The conditional clause is set up only for her salvation. The Scripture doesn’t say “they will be saved…if…” I believe that Paul said what he meant and meant what he said. It was only her salvation that was in question.”

Please answer the critique. Let me modify the question just so you know what i am asking.

The conditional clause saids that ‘they’ (husband and wife according to you) must “remain in faith’ aswell as ‘love, sanctification and sobriety’. Now since this is a conditional clause it would appear that if the husband did not remain in faith, the ‘she’ forfeits her future salvation. That is her or ‘she’ salvation is conditional not only on her faith. love ect, but on their/they faith, love ect. How do you reconcile this?

Final example to show you not adequately answering the questions..

“Is her salvation conditional on his remaining in faith aswell.”

You responded…
“If he follows the lie, it will be very unlikely that she will have any motivation to work at unlearning the false doctrine and learning the truth. ”

You switched the conditional clause to a ‘very unlikely’ scenario, which of course squashes the force of the conditonal clause. PLease answer the challanges.

By the way. i don’t have an answer to this text and i openly admit that. It is a difficult verse, but as i stated before, your interpretation is no clearer or better than the traditonal one. Thus i will continue to lean on the traditional view since it actually has evidence to support it.

Thanks