Bullets that Cannot be Bitten: A Dilemma in Christian Soteriology

I will start this off in a rather strange way for a piece of philosophy, but my scruples are bothering me: Parents, I beg of you not to harm your children. If you are considering this, I promise you that it will not help, that it will not in any way benefit them whatsoever. If you are tempted to hurt your children, please seek help from a mental health professional.

Having said that…

The common Christian belief of some kind of Age of Accountability invites a number of difficult philosophical issues, although perhaps not so much as the denial of it.

If someone is guaranteed to go to Heaven, and avoid Hell, if they die before a certain age, it only makes sense for those who love to them to hope they die before that age. If going to Heaven is the best thing that can happen to someone, and going to Hell is the worst thing, then the sensible approach is for expectant parents to pray for miscarriage. It suddenly becomes sensible for the parents of toddlers to plead with God to take the lives of their children. The deaths of children become something to celebrate profusely, and each passing birthday becomes increasingly dangerous.

The first difficulty is simply that it seems repugnant to hope for the early deaths of children, despite that being quite sensible from this point of view. If you hold to some kind of Age of Accountability then you ought to hope children die young, and you should find it ultimately pleasing when it does happen.

Moreover, abortion, particularly early abortion, becomes quite appealing from the point of view of the unborn. Presumably if one is aborted is early enough, before brain activity has even started, then it is as if one simply opens their eyes in heaven. Such a person would never consciously experience this life, the entirety of their memories will be of paradise. Hardly a bad deal.

But it gets worse, because this circumstance would mean that conscious experience of this life is entirely unnecessary in order to enter into Heaven, which invites the question of what the point of this life is at all. If one needn’t live through all of the suffering and pain of this life in order to go to Heaven, what are we doing here?

And even more of an issue: this would mean that choice is unnecessary to go to heaven, since we can presume embryos make no choices. Which again invites the question of what the point of all this (gestures broadly) is. I suppose Calvinists would find this less of an issue.

On the other hand, shall we say that Hell is full of toddlers and babies and five-year-olds?

There is an escape hatch that allows us to turn the dilemma into a trilemma, but this requires us to speculate and go beyond what Christian Scripture would itself indicate: we could speculate that perhaps those who die very young are offered some kind of post-death choice at some point and in some way.