Will babies who have died automatically be saved?

[Celsus]

Will babies who have died automatically be saved, go to Heaven and get eternal life?

[McCulloch]

The Bible is pretty silent on this topic. Go ahead and make up any answer that is consistent with the rest of your theology and you're good to go.

[Metatron]

The Bible is pretty silent on this topic. Go ahead and make up any answer that is consistent with the rest of your theology and you're good to go.

I'm under the impression that some variations of Christianity believe that the baby has to be slam dunked in a pool of water before the baby is "safe". Perhaps someone with a better understanding of baptism than me can clarify this.

[puddleglum]

Paul wrote "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died." Romans 7:9 ESV. The only time this could have been true of Paul would be when he was a baby and didn't yet know the difference between right and wrong. We are born with a tendency to do evil but we can't actually sin until we are mature enough to know what we should do, so anyone who dies during this time isn't guilty of sin. Jesus said that we must be converted and become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven and this could not be true unless little children were innocent.
Some Christian groups teach that babies must be baptized, but the Bible teaches that baptism is the way those who have repented and been forgiven publicly declare that they are now followers of Christ.

[Coyotero]

Paul wrote "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died." Romans 7:9 ESV. The only time this could have been true of Paul would be when he was a baby and didn't yet know the difference between right and wrong. We are born with a tendency to do evil but we can't actually sin until we are mature enough to know what we should do, so anyone who dies during this time isn't guilty of sin. Jesus said that we must be converted and become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven and this could not be true unless little children were innocent.
Some Christian groups teach that babies must be baptized, but the Bible teaches that baptism is the way those who have repented and been forgiven publicly declare that they are now followers of Christ.

So where do you draw the line? When does it go from childhood foolishness to sin?

[Celsus]

So Christians actually don't have a common view/doctrine on this?

[InTheFlesh]

If a baby is not chosen,
age of death matters not.
Age has nothing to do with seed type.

[transient]

So Christians actually don't have a common view/doctrine on this?

Lookup up "Limbo of Infants" and while you're at it, baptism of desire and baptism of blood.

The Roman Catholic church has a number of ways to satisfy grieving parents and lovers when they know that whomever the knew has died without being in a state of grace.

Limbo has long been held to be the place where the souls of children go if they die before they can be baptised. However, a 30-strong international commission of theologians summoned by the late John Paul II last year to come up with a “more coherent and illuminating� doctrine in tune with the modern age is to present its findings to Pope Benedict XVI on Friday.

Vatican sources said yesterday that the commission would recommend that Limbo be replaced by the more “compassionate� doctrine that all children who die do so “in the hope of eternal salvation�.

There is little doubt that the Pope will agree. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger he presided over the commission’s first sessions. He is on record as saying that Limbo has no place in modern Catholicism. In 1984, he told Vittorio Messori, the Catholic author, that Limbo had “never been a definitive truth of the faith�.

He said: “Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis.� The commission is currently chaired by Archbishop William Levada of the United States, appointed by the Pope in May to be his successor as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In Christian doctrine, Heaven is a state of union with God, while Hell is separation from God. Christians have long wrestled, however, with the thorny question of what happened to those who died before Jesus, who “brought Man salvation�, as well as the fate after death of children who die in the womb.

Although there is no basis for it in Scripture the traditional answer is Limbo, from the Latin limbus, meaning a hem, edge or boundary. It is described as the temporary resting place of “the souls of good persons who died before the resurrection of Jesus� (limbus patrum) and the permanent home in the afterlife of “the unbaptised who die in infancy without having been freed from original sin� (limbus infantium).

[Celsus]

If a baby is not chosen,
age of death matters not.
Age has nothing to do with seed type.

Chosen by whom, when and on what criteria?

[Celsus]

So Christians actually don't have a common view/doctrine on this?

Lookup up "Limbo of Infants" and while you're at it, baptism of desire and baptism of blood.

The Roman Catholic church has a number of ways to satisfy grieving parents and lovers when they know that whomever the knew has died without being in a state of grace.

But that's only the Catholics and it's not based on the Bible, right?