A close friend of our family came back from long term missionary work in an orphanage full of infants and children younger than four. He spoke often about how much he loved the children he worked with: "his" children. He mentioned the behavior problems you find in an orphanage: No matter how lovable a baby or toddler may be, they are capable of obvious, willful and spiteful misbehavior. He took it as evidence for the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.
"Yep, babies go to Hell."
I asked him not to mention that to my wife.
Rave reviews abound
[1] for new Christian feel-good book,
Heaven Is for Real[2], about a boy who died, visited Heaven and returned to life -- with verifiable proof like encounters with unknown siblings who died by miscarriages formerly unrevealed by his parents. My initial impression was that this book offered warm fuzzies to simple-minded Christians who believed in an afterlife
[3]. After my wife and I experienced a miscarriage and supported several friends through their miscarriages and stillbirths, I toned-down my public criticism of the book to a simple "never mind, sounds good". If the book offered hope and comfort to some, very well.
For those of us who need more than these anecdotes of purported afterlife conversations with fetal souls, can we be so sure our dead babies achieved peaceful rest in Heaven? Not the kind of question to bring up in a moment of loss
[4]. At those times some people try to comfort the bereaved with clumsy words. The wisest say very little but remain nearby and available. Many Christians jump right into the comfort we must have from knowing our babies are now safe with Jesus, in the gentle hands of God or of angels, or have become angels themselves
[5]. No one really wants to consider any other possibility.
Who deserves Heaven more than an innocent baby, especially the unborn?
The hard edge replies:
- the term "deserves" is overused these days
- no one deserves Heaven
- no one is innocent
- all have sinned
- the sins of Adam and Eve apply to every human upon conception
- no one deserves salvation and scripture says the majority of people miss it
Saint Augustine said unbaptized infants went to Hell
[6]. The Roman Catholic church developed the doctrine of Limbo just for babies: Not Hell or Purgatory (no sins to punish or purge) -- but not Heaven. (The term "Limbo" means the edge of Hell.) Original Sin still separates its occupants from God. Calvin offers more hope if a soul's fate is fixed in advance without alternatives: A fetus ends up in its predestined
[14] afterlife. Perhaps some of them (and some of us) will make it to Heaven.
The closest scripture related to babies dying is David's "I will go to him, but he will not return to me."
[15] The Old Testament afterlife, "paradise" or "bosom of Abraham", has important distinctions from the New Testament's Heaven (after Christ's death and resurrection). Jesus' parable of Lazarus and the rich man
[16] indicates a clear gap between paradise and Hades/Hell/torment. Still, if anyone had a good idea about the afterlife before Christ, it was David. He doesn't expect to be separated from his child in the hereafter. Does David's hope apply anymore?
The Bible also mentions an age of accountability
[7]. The family's sacrifices and devotion cover your sin until you're old enough to do it yourself. As husband, father, head of the household, responsible for the spiritual leadership of the family, what if I'm not living as faithfully as I should be? Have I doomed my unborn dead to Hell by not being Christian enough, religious enough? (This thought plagued me deeply for months
[8][9].)
The Christian life is not about doing enough good things to earn our way into Heaven. All the Old Testament references to an age of accountability have to do with temple sacrifices of living animals as payment for sins. Now Christ has satisfied the demand for sacrifice; we need no other sacrifice. Our sins are forgiven because of Jesus' work, not anything we do or did.
So we may be safe from worrying that our personal inadequacies have condemned our children to Hell. Our motivation to demonstrate and share our faith with our children does not come from desperate fear that we may not be doing it perfectly.
We may have dismissed that fear but we have not yet answered the question: Do babies go to Heaven? The unborn are insulated from opportunity to misbehave. They should have no sins to prevent their access to God except that Original Sin inherited with all human DNA. We know Christ's sacrifice covers our sin without requiring our merit. Instead of earning it, our salvation depends only on whether or not we accept it: "What must I do to be saved?" "Repent," that is, turn away from our sins.
The unborn cannot repent. Even if they could they have nothing from which to repent except that Original Sin. Yet there is no indication that anyone must repent of their Original Sin. (We may turn away from it but we will never escape the human legacy of preferring sin.) Seems reasonable to consider Christ's sacrifice adequate for covering Original Sin plus all repent-able sins-of-choice. For the unborn, they have no choices and therefore no sins that are not already covered. If coverage for Original Sin comes standard, so does Heaven for babies. (Not satisfied? Disagree? See the notes for references to further theological discussions of Original Sin and alternate interpretations
[10][11][12].)
This does not answer all questions. What about before Christ? What afterlife awaited babies then? What about mental retardation in children and adults? What about infants and toddlers who have choices but may not yet understand concepts like repentance?
Some of these questions (especially about the difference between Old and New Testament afterlives) require deeper coverage than I can offer here. As for infants, toddlers and the mentally handicapped, they live on the border of our two cases: Either they can consciously sin or not. Either they can consciously repent or not. We may not be able to tell at what point a soul is enabled to make eternal choices. No harm presenting the fundamentals of faith and repentance as early and widely and indiscriminately as possible.
But in every case except the case of our own immortal soul, we cannot affect the eternal position of an expired life. Fetus, infant, child, witless, we must trust God's justice and mercy with all. Blanket condemnation seems unlikely based on scripture and reason. Because of Jesus, we have the hope of Heaven for ourselves and others. Based on everything we have so far considered, this is more than a simple, blind hope. Praise God for that hope -- and for babies, for life no matter how long it lasts.
Feeling reassured that babies go to Heaven despite my skepticism of pop-Christian platitudes, I need two more clarifications:
- Reunions in Heaven will not be what we expect. The point of Heaven will not be to run around looking for everyone we wanted to see again. Our relationships with our own spouses will be dramatically different from their paramount significance on Earth. So will our relationships with our children and all other close ties. We have no reason to think that anyone will be hidden from us or that it will be a suffocating crowd we have to push through. Perhaps everyone will be facing the same direction with all attention and activity focused away from ourselves and off each other, based on the glimpses we have in scripture. All reunions will be happy incidental tangents yet somehow we will recognize people we knew -- and some people we never knew, never met, never even saw. Which leads to the the second clarification.
- Babies will not look like babies in Heaven. This disrupts those harmless emotional sentiments you hear at memorial services about how one deceased child is frolicking on the playgrounds of Heaven with another child. There may be much play and joyous activity in Heaven but it is as likely to involve crayons and blocks as chess pieces or astrophysics riddles. We have the strong promise of new life, including lucid minds and tangible, physical bodies: Those bodies will not be frozen at the age we died. That would be a bad deal for infants as well as the very old. Eternity as a 4 millimeter zygote or 4 centimeter fetus? Eternity as a bent, gnarled, rheumatic, wrinkly old centenarian with cataracts? Thank God some ageless optimal bodily form awaits us[13].
We spent much time researching this for our own comfort and we hope it may comfort others. Throw in your insights as a comment if you have also researched it, especially if we have missed something. For those of you eager to get elbows-deep in theology, dig into the notes, below.
