Craig

Hi TL,
I hope you are recovering well from your operation.
The issue I am thinking about here is not whether the woman is alive or dead, but rather whether the future tense indicates whether she is a believer or not at the time of writing.
The way I read it, there is a sense in which a believer who is currently alive, like Timothy at the time of writing, or you or I today, “will be saved” in the future (1 Tim 4:16) and also a sense that we “have been saved” (Eph 2:8,9).
I think you expressed it well by saying “we are saved at the moment of belief, and we are saved daily from ourselves and sin, and finally if we persevere until death we will be ‘finally’ saved.”
So I am not sure that we can know for sure that “the woman” is not a believer simply from the fact that the future tense is used of her salvation.

So my question is only a very small one. If this whole passage is dealing with a particular Ephesian woman, can we know for sure whether she is a) an unbeliever or b) a believer, belonging to the church, who has been deceived by Satan (cf Paul’s concern that this not happen to those in the church at Corinth 2 Cor 11:3) and also, what part does the future tense of v15a play in that decision.
This is only a small point in the overall scheme of things, but I am just thinking that the future tense alone cannot decide this issue. We have to look at other things like the commandment for her to learn, and that she is not permitted to teach, and that she is in transgression through being deceived. Also that Paul says “BUT” she will be saved, if they persevere. The “but” to me would indicate that all these other factors cast doubt upon her salvation. So he is saying “but, in contrast to the way it looks now, she will be saved, if….”
We need the context to decide these things. The future tense alone (because of the way it is used in 1 Tim 4:16) doesn’t decide it by itself.