What About the Children?

Someone asks this at a graveside, not in a debate, and it deserves a page that does not pretend. This site holds the question open: we do not know, and we are not going to invent an age to fill the gap. What follows is every text that bears on it, the traditions named as they would name themselves, and an honest account of what each one can and cannot carry.

If you are reading this because it happened to you, the fourth section is the one you want. The rest is the working.

1. The strongest thing anyone has

David's child by Bathsheba dies. He had fasted and wept while the boy lived; when the child dies he gets up, washes, and eats. His servants cannot understand it, and he explains:

2 Samuel 12:22-23

While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.

I shall go to him. Not he shall not come to me and that is the end. A direction of travel, and David expects to arrive.

And the honest caution belongs beside it. Adam Clarke, who believes the comfort is true, will not pretend the verse proves it:

It is not clear whether David by this expressed his faith in the immortality of the soul; going to him may only mean, I also shall die, and be gathered to my fathers, as he is. But whether David expressed this or not, we know that the thing is true.

Adam Clarke, on 2 Samuel 12:23

That is the shape of the whole question in one commentator. The hope is real. The proof is thinner than the hope. Clarke does not solve it by making the verse say more than it says; he separates what the text establishes from what he believes on other grounds, and says which is which. This page will do the same.

2. Scripture does treat the very young as a separate case

Whatever else is uncertain, this much is not: the Bible repeatedly distinguishes people who cannot yet tell good from evil, and it treats them differently.

At Kadesh, the generation that refused to enter Canaan is condemned to die in the wilderness. Their children are explicitly exempted, and the reason given is knowledge:

Deuteronomy 1:39

Moreover your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it.

The same people, the same rebellion, the same wilderness. The children go in. The stated ground is that they had no knowledge between good and evil.

At Nineveh, God's closing argument to a sulking prophet is a headcount of people who cannot tell their right hand from their left (Jonah 4:11). And John Gill, who is about as far from a sentimental reading as a commentator gets, takes the number to mean the infants and says plainly why they change the case:

but infants only, as next described: that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand… cannot distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong; are not come to years of maturity and discretion; and therefore there were room and reason for pity and sparing mercy; especially since they had not been guilty of actual transgressions.

John Gill, on Jonah 4:11

Room and reason for pity and sparing mercy. That is a high Calvinist writing, and it matters that it is: he is not building a system about infant salvation, he is reading why God spared a city.

Isaiah uses the same measure as a unit of time, "before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good" (Isaiah 7:16), which assumes a period before that knowledge arrives. And Christ puts children forward rather than to one side: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:14).

What this establishes, and what it does not. It establishes that Scripture recognises a stage before moral knowledge and does not treat it as identical to adult guilt. It does not establish an age, a mechanism, or a guarantee. Deuteronomy 1:39BH is about entering Canaan, not heaven. Jonah is about sparing a city from destruction, not about eternity. These are real data and they are not the doctrine some people build on them.

3. The argument on the other side

It has to be stated, because it is not nothing. Paul says men are "without excuse" precisely because what may be known of God is visible to them (Romans 1:20), which locates guilt in what a person could see and did not honour. Press that and you get a clean principle: culpability tracks capacity. But run it the other way and it cuts against the comfort too, because it says nothing about what happens to those who never had the capacity. Paul is explaining why the guilty are guilty. He is not writing about infants and no honest reader can make him do so.

And the harder point, which this site takes seriously elsewhere: everyone is born into a dying race, and an infant genuinely needs Christ. Born Fallen works that through, and lands where the early church did — the damage is inherited, the guilt is each man's own. If the guilt is each man's own, an infant has none of his own. That is an inference, and this page will call it one.

4. Where the traditions stand, fairly

Named as each would name itself, and none of them is being silly.

Rome teaches that unbaptised infants are entrusted to the mercy of God, and hopes for their salvation. Limbo was a theological opinion, never a defined dogma, and the Church has moved away from it; the current formal position is hope, not certainty.

The Orthodox decline to systematise it and commit such children to God's mercy, which is close to what this page does.

The Reformed are divided and their confessions are careful. Westminster speaks of "elect infants dying in infancy" being saved, wording chosen precisely so as not to say all or some.

Most Baptists and evangelicals hold an age of accountability: a child is not held responsible until able to understand and choose. It is pastorally kind and widely taught. It is also not in Scripture as a doctrine, and no verse names an age.

The old severe view that unbaptised infants are lost was held by serious men, including Augustine, who reasoned from original guilt to a real if mildest condemnation. This page does not hold it and does not think it follows, but it was not cruelty for its own sake; it was a man following his own premise where it led.

Where this lands

Three things, and no fourth.

Scripture never sets an age. Not seven, not twelve, not thirteen. Every number offered is a pastoral estimate wearing doctrinal clothes, and this site will not add one. Children differ, and a God who judges "the secrets of men" is not working from a birthday.

Scripture does show God distinguishing those who cannot yet discern. That pattern is real, it is in the Law and the Prophets and the Gospels, and anyone who tells a grieving parent the Bible is silent has not read Deuteronomy 1, Jonah 4 or Matthew 19.

And the ground under the hope is not a proof text. It is the character of the Judge. Abraham, arguing for Sodom, does not appeal to a rule. He appeals to who God is: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25). It is a question, left standing as a question, and it was enough for Abraham.

So we do not know, and we will not pretend to. What we know is the disposition of the One who does. He took children in His arms. He spared a city for the sake of people who could not tell their right hand from their left. And a father who had lost a son said, without being corrected, I shall go to him.

Related: Born Fallen, Baptism, Judgment, Heaven, Who Believes What, Prayers for the Dead. Gill and Clarke quoted verbatim from their published commentaries (public domain). Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. This page states a question this site holds open and does not resolve it.