Theopedia

Infant salvation

— “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:14)

Definition

Infant salvation is the belief that those who die in infancy, before they are able to commit actual sin, are saved. Scripture never addresses the question directly, so the doctrine is built from principles Scripture teaches elsewhere rather than from one decisive text. Infants inherit the same guilt and corruption from Adam as every other descendant of his; their own innocence does not explain their salvation. Their rescue is credited entirely to Christ, applied by the Spirit apart from their own faith, repentance, or any use of the ordinary means of grace, since an infant is incapable of all three.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1677/1689 states the doctrine in its chapter on effectual calling:

“Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit; who worketh when, and where, and how he pleases; so also are all elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word.”1

The Westminster Confession (1646) and the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742) state the identical clause almost word for word,2 so this is the wider Reformed confessional family’s shared teaching, not a distinctive of the Baptist confession alone. By grounding the infant’s salvation in the Spirit’s own regenerating work rather than in baptism or any other outward means, the confession also marks off the doctrine from the Roman Catholic and Lutheran positions, which tie an infant’s standing before God to the sacrament.

Biblical Basis

When Jesus rebuked his disciples for turning away the children brought to him, he did not merely tolerate their presence: “of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14; Matt. 19:14; Luke 18:16). The Puritan Thomas Watson drew out the syllogism the text supports: children in their infancy may be saved, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to them, and it belongs to them “as it is clear from Mark 10:14.”3 Watson himself put that premise to further use, arguing from it to infant baptism, a paedobaptist inference this confession does not draw from it. The premise itself, that Christ’s own words place infants within reach of the kingdom, stands independently of the conclusion Watson drew from it.

David’s response to the death of his infant son by Bathsheba supplies a second text. Rather than continuing to mourn once the child had died, he said, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept… But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam. 12:22-23). Charles Hodge reads David’s words as an expression of the instinctive hope of a future reunion with the dead, “the language of every bereaved heart from that day to this.”4 David’s confidence that he would go to his son, not merely that death ends life, is the detail this argument turns on.

Historical Development

The confessional formulation

Westminster’s chapter “Of Effectual Calling,” which the 1689 follows almost verbatim, was framed against two other positions current at the time: the Roman Catholic and Lutheran teaching that the ordinary means of grace, chiefly baptism, are necessary to salvation, and Arminianism’s grounding of salvation in a personal act of choice. S. G. Craig later stated the logic behind the confession’s own answer: a doctrine of infant salvation is only coherent within a system that does not tie salvation to a rite infants cannot meaningfully receive or a choice infants cannot make. “No doctrine of infant salvation is Christian,” he wrote, “that does not assume that infants are lost members of a lost race for whom there is no salvation apart from Christ.”5 By making the Spirit’s regenerating work sufficient on its own, “when, and where, and how he pleases,” the confession secures the doctrine without appeal to any means an infant is incapable of using.

Calvin’s own position

Calvin has sometimes been charged with teaching that some who die in infancy are damned. An examination of his writings does not bear this out. Calvin held, consistently, that the reprobate bring about their own condemnation through their own acts of “impiety, wickedness, and rebellion,” acts that presuppose the capacity to sin actually, not merely to inherit a sinful nature.6 Since an infant who dies in infancy has had neither the capacity nor the opportunity to commit such acts, nothing in Calvin’s own stated principle commits him to the damnation of any infant as an infant, even though he held, consistently with the doctrine of election generally, that reprobation, like election, is eternal.

How far the hope extends

Reformed theologians have not spoken with one voice on the scope of the question. Herman Bavinck stated the confident hope specifically for children who die within the visible covenant: “the children of the covenant, whether baptized or unbaptized, go to heaven when they die.”7 About children who die outside the covenant, he judged that Scripture discloses too little to reach a definite conclusion in either direction, though he noted that earlier Reformed theologians had differed among themselves on the point: Franciscus Junius “would rather surmise out of love that they were saved than that they were lost,” while Gisbertus Voetius declined to answer either way, saying only, “I would not wish to deny, nor am I able to affirm.”8 Others read the doctrine more broadly. Warfield held that the destiny of everyone who dies in infancy, without qualification, “is determined irrespective of their choice, by an unconditional decree of God,”9 and Boettner, siding with Warfield and Charles Hodge, extended the hope to “all of those who die in infancy, in heathen as well as in Christian lands.”5

Opposing Views

Rome and Lutheranism both tie an infant’s salvation to baptism. Catholic teaching holds that children of Christian parents who die having been baptized, whether in fact or through the parents’ expressed intention, are saved; other children who die in infancy suffer what Bavinck’s summary of the position calls “a penalty of damnation but not of sensation” in the limbus infantum, the “limbo of children.”8 Lutheran theology takes the same view for children of Christian parents and leaves the salvation of other children to God’s judgment.8

Craig argued that Arminianism has the hardest time of all accommodating the doctrine, because it makes salvation depend on a personal, rational choice to accept the grace God offers, and has no principled way to secure the salvation of those who die before they are capable of choosing anything: “it does not appear… that a mere opportunity for salvation can be of any avail for those dying in infancy.”5 Boettner drew out the implication: consistency would require Arminianism either to posit a further period of probation after death, so the choice could still be made, or the infant’s annihilation, since on Arminian premises an unexercised opportunity secures nothing.5

Objections and Responses

The confession’s own wording, “elect infants dying in infancy,” seems to imply that there are non-elect infants who, dying in infancy, are lost. Craig traced the history of the phrase and argued that the contrast it originally drew was not between “elect infants dying in infancy” and “non-elect infants dying in infancy,” but between “elect infants dying in infancy” and “elect infants living to grow up” (a contrast about when God’s elect are called, not about which infants belong to that number).6 Concerned that the wording nonetheless invited exactly this misreading, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. adopted a Declaratory Statement in 1903 affirming plainly “that it is not to be regarded as teaching that any who die in infancy are lost. We believe that all dying in infancy are included in the election of grace, and are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit.”6

If infants have committed no actual sin, why do they need saving at all? John Gill answered this from the doctrine of original sin: death itself, which Scripture treats as the punishment of sin, falls even on infants who have “neither capacity nor opportunity” to commit any actual transgression, which proves they are not without guilt, only without the particular act of sin.10 Their corrupted nature is imputed from Adam, not acquired by imitation. Boettner drew out the consequence: minimizing what infants are saved from makes their salvation, and the gratitude owed for it, small as well. “Their salvation means something, for it is the deliverance of guilty souls from eternal woe. And it is costly, for it was paid for by the suffering of Christ on the cross.”9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 3. ↩

  2. The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 10, para. 3; the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 10, para. 3, states the same clause with only minor wording differences. ↩

  3. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), sermon 82. ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), “The Resurrection.” ↩

  5. Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 108. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 109. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 107. ↩ ↩2

  10. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, vol. 1 (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book III, chap. 10, “Of the Imputation of Adam’s Sin to All His Posterity.” ↩