The question:

            I have always had a weird feeling when it came to limited atonement. I can’t put a finger on it, it just doesn’t ever feel right when I stop and think about it. I listen to all the arguments for and against, and people always have their ducks in a row, but that doesn’t make the feeling go away. The question that I still have is kinda limited atonement/ babies dying/ people who never herd the gospel. So they get judged. Fine. People like to tell me they have original sin and must die. Why? I was always under the impression that part of Jesus’ death was to take our sin away, but also the imputed sin of Adam. If that is so, why can people argue that people still go to hell because they have original sin? I mean they still sinned and have earned a death ticket, but not a one way ticket to hell. I sinned, and I deserve to die, but because of Christ I can go to heaven. It just never makes sense to me when people argue that some go to hell because of adam’s sin. I would say adam’s sin killed us all, but because of Christ, adam’s sin doesn’t send us to hell. That’s prolly my biggest question/concern/idea that I can fully put words to.

Warren says:

Yeah, limited atonement is hard. I think people who do not believe in it still have to deal with your question, though. Everyone but Universalists has to, and Universalism is clearly heretical, albeit appealing at times like this.

I have made some progress on this, over the years. Of course, the first thing is deciding to believe the clear teaching of Scripture even when I don’t like it or understand. That took the longest.

The second bit of progress came when I was considering Pharaoh. God hardened his heart, then judged him for his sin. That doesn’t seem even remotely fair- isn’t Pharoah being blamed for what God did?? Then I realized that, even before God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, Pharaoh was already a lost, guilty sinner. God didn’t change where Pharaoh was going. Pharaoh’s goose was already cooked.

From this, I slowly came to see that I had not been looking at mankind the way God does. I really had been feeling like people are innocent and deserving, when suddenly God steps in and sends them to hell. But the Biblical account is that people are guilty and undeserving, and condemned, when suddenly God steps in and rescues them.

If you find a person who is otherwise innocent, except for Adam’s sin, then that is an issue. But we are all abundantly guilty. Adam did impute guilt to us, but we all enthusiastically cooperate. We have no problem at all with our inheritance from Adam. We’ve got the whole guilt-thing covered in spades. We’re all goners unless God steps in. And if He doesn’t step in, that’s His right. He’s not cheating anyone.

That leaves babies, doesn’t it? What did they do? What’s up with that? Well, first, I can’t find where the Bible talks about babies at all. All I can find is David being content that Bathsheba’s baby is in heaven. So objecting to something God may or may not actually be doing is probably a little questionable. But thinking about it has been very profitable to me:

At the CREC I have gotten a much better handle on how excessively individualistic we are. I had “known” that, but now I realize it much more. Being individualistic, we are pretty blind to other kinds of relationships and connections. For instance, Paul says things like, a child is holy because of its believing parent. We tend to dismiss that as Paul being superstitious. At least I did. But maybe Paul actually meant it and actually was right. Or, in Acts, entire families are baptized, including kids and even slaves, because the father believed. Did they misunderstand something? Or are we not grasping something? And the Bible makes many promises to believing parents about their children. God seems to feel that there is some spiritual, theological, salvific dynamic there, when we feel that could not be possible, or would violate free will or autonomy or something.

So, along these lines, we encounter everybody being guilty because of what father Adam did. That seems utterly silly to us. Then I realized that I was very comfortable being forgiven because of what Christ did. When Christ, as my covenant head, imputed holiness to me as His federal son, I understood that just fine. So what’s so complex about my father Adam imputing his sin to me? Ah! The difference is that I chose Christ, and nobody chose Adam. Right?

Wrong. Most all of us believe we chose Christ, and from our perspective that is exactly how it looks. God explains in the Bible that he actually chose us. He put all of us in relation to Adam, then He put some of us in relation to Christ. So our relation to Christ is just like our previous relation to Adam, and the holiness and the guilt work the same way, albeit in opposite directions.

So, eagerly granting that I can’t find where the Bible says, my opinion is that babies of believers are saved on the faith of their federal head, and babies of unbelievers are lost on the unbelief of their federal head.

That’s how far I’ve gotten.