Does this mean that an atheist gets to go to heaven if he’s married to a Christian?
If so, I can’t wait to wander around annoying everyone by saying, “You know this is all just a relic of an outmoded belief system, right?”
: snicker :
<mod>
I think you’ll find more answers/snerks in Great Debates.
Moved
</mod>
Lightnin’, that was priceless!
To the OP…seems to read that way to me. All the various translations say the same thing.
Paul was fond of using these little figures of speech, and of course anyone who takes them literally can have a lot of fun with them. For example, “But the woman is saved in childbearing.” God and Paul alone know what the heck he meant by that – perhaps that God’s providence will carry her safely through delivery? – but in the context he wrote it, it sure sounds like a cool-ass out to belief for women capable of bearing children.
In this case, I have a hunch that if you unpeel his meaning, it’s something like, “Oh, Okay, I’ll come along with you to your ‘church’ thing, just this once! Now, stop nagging!” leading to “Hey, that guy made a lot of sense! Is he addressing the group again next week?” or something of the sort.
But yeah, I think virtually every Christian around would sit back and join in the snerking at taking that passage, or a few similar ones, literally. 
Hey–where is that? Maybe I can finally get my wife to quit bugging me about going to church! “It’s OK, honey–you’ve got us both covered!”
(And while I’m dreaming, can I have a pony?)
1 Corinthians 7 - 12-14
To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.
I always thought that passage just meant that the church recognized the marriage between a believer and an unbeliever as being legitimate in God’s view.
That’s my take as well. I think Paul is really only trying to say that the marriage is still “sanctified,” even if one of the partners is not a believer. He’s basically telling converts not to leave their spouses just because the spouse is not a convert.
I’d say you’re right Monty. Sanctity of marriage. Occam’s Razor and all that.
This was a rebuke to Ezra who counseled people to divorce their non-Jewish spouses. Thus the children of non-Jewish mothers would be considered Jewish.
So what happens if a Christian marries a Hindu, and their child turns to Wicca?
Buddha cries.
This puts a spin I never before imagined on Christian (as opposed to Jewish) theology. Isn’t it Christian doctrine that we’re all born unclean (i.e., tainted with original sin), regardless of parentage?
It depends on the direction and speed of the treadmill.
Tainted with original sin, yes.
But illegitimate no.
Monty put it best.
Please note that at the time they were still dealing with all that stuff about “the children paying for the sins of the parents”. People knew that, for example, the children of prostitutes were more likely to be sickly, and thought it was because of the sin of the mother… even if they’d been able to make the connection between “mother has syphylis (sp?) and that’s what made the kid sick in turn”, they would still have said “ah, but the mother got the syphylis from her sins!” So what if the mother is a perfectly decent wife and the husband gives her syphylis? “Ah, but he got it through his sins!” It’s actually logical in a way that nowadays we find weird. I think that the idea of the person who first said “the children pay for the sins of their parents” was to admonish parents “be careful, because when you screw up, often it’s not you, the guilty, but your innocent child go gets screwed” - but like so many things, it got understood upside-down.
Also people, still nowadays, have serious problems understanding that “most molesters were molested as children” does not mean “anybody who was molested as a child will be a molester”.
Sorry, I just have to share this “how I originally read the OP title:”
For the unbelieving husband is sacrificed by the wife.
That is all.
Not all denominations buy into that version of original sin. Some consider children to be completely innocent before they reach what the denomination calls the age of accountability. The LDS, for example, believe that we will not be punished for Adam’s sin.
We’re talking about Christian doctrine, Monty. 