Questions for Christians by John Morreall

Author:John Morreall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

If it would be irrational and unjust to punish the descendants of a wrongdoer, then, it would be irrational and unjust for God to punish the descendants of Adam just for being his descendants. The doctrine that babies are born depraved and deserving of hell rests only on Augustine’s questionable ideas that babies are Adam and sinned in him. Since those claims are not clear and credible, neither is the doctrine.

While the issues we’ve been discussing may seem pretty dry and academic, they have real-life implications. In the terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, for example, seventeen infants and toddlers in the day-care center on the second floor were killed. At a service held for their parents, Reverend Billy Graham assured them of God’s love for their little ones. “Someday there will be a glorious reunion with those who have died and gone to heaven before us, and that includes all those innocent children that are lost. They’re not lost from God because any child that young is automatically in heaven and in God’s arms.”

R. C. Sproul Jr., a well-known Presbyterian theologian and radio show host, was so upset by what Graham had said that he wrote an article in the Christian magazine World accusing Graham of preaching a new gospel, “justification by youth alone.” All babies are born guilty of original sin, Sproul insisted, and the only way to be saved from that sin is to profess faith in Jesus Christ. Since infants and toddlers aren’t capable of professing faith in Christ, they aren’t capable of being saved at their young age. In Sproul’s words,

Though Scripture is clear that in sin we are conceived, though it affirms that outside of faith in Christ alone there is no salvation, we comfort ourselves in the face of grim images of the dead children carried from the rubble with the biblically unwarranted assurance that if one only dies young enough, one will be saved.[15]

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