The Greek term, metanoia, means a change or reversal of mind, purpose, or disposition. Repentance, in other words, means to re-decide, to choose afresh. But the mercy thus freely offered through Christ's atonement, His gesture of supernal grace, cannot extend to the point of choosing on behalf of individuals. Repentance is therefore an ongoing process by which we repudiate unrighteous choices, acknowledging Christ's role in suffering the consequences of those sins on our behalf, and choosing afresh in accordance with purified desire. And so we go on choosing, again and again. The process continues—perhaps aeons into the future—until in perfect harmony with the laws that underlie the nature of happiness (and thus the nature of God), we have reached a sanctified condition that permits a perfect at-one-ment with God. God's desire to save is reconciled with the sanctity of human choice. Love and agency, justice and mercy, meet.
At least, that is the hope Christ's atonement holds out for us. How many, in actual fact, will be partakers of the feast to which they are invited? Was Wesley or Whitefield right about the proportion of the blessed and the damned? The answer hinges on what we consider to be the time frame, and the circumstances, under which repentance and moral growth can occur. Exactly who, in other words, is eligible for heaven?
One reason for the horrifying statistics cited by the eighteenth-century friar was the understanding, commonplace from the Middle Ages forward, that two enormous classes of humanity were outside the saving grace of Christ: unbaptized infants, and non-Christians. For many centuries, Christian theologians defended the inscrutable justice of God and cared little for making His harsher decrees palatable to humans. But condemning biblical figures from Adam to Abraham, who happened to be born before the era of Christian hope, seemed patently wrong even to the most stalwart defenders of orthodoxy, so exceptions were made for them. Museums are full of paintings by the masters, depicting Christ leading a line of bearded patriarchs out through the underworld's gates, in what theologians called "the harrowing of hell."
Whitefield correctly saw that compromise could not be reached on this point without a radical reformulation of foundational precepts—such as Original Sin. Meanwhile, Wesley agonized over "How uncomfortable a thought is this, that thousands and millions of men, without any preceding offence or fault of theirs were unchangeably doomed to everlasting burnings!" He and others considered that unbaptized children could not be guilty before they had attained moral awareness—but what about the legions of those who had never heard of Christ or His gospel in the first place?
Most Christians have gradually come to agree that little children are not guilty of Adam's sin—or their own sins until they are old enough to be morally responsible. In 2007, the Catholic Church claimed "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved." But that leaves two problems unaddressed. First, to exempt children from sin is not the same thing as to accord them an opportunity to grow and progress, to acquire the understanding, embrace those principles, and practice the virtue, that constitute true goodness and happiness. Godliness, sanctification, the imitation of Christ, all presuppose more than the absence of sin; perfection itself, as its Middle English roots remind us, means "completeness," not just freedom from blemish. How does mere absolution from an Adamic inheritance itself integrate an individual into a process of profound transformation and progress?
This takes us back to our earlier point about how limiting, confining, and ultimately unhelpful is a model that sees damnation as our default condition, and simple rescue as the solution. Rescuing children from a condition they didn't deserve and never really inherited in the first place doesn't reveal a great deal about the meaning of their eternal nature, their brief lives, or their future possibilities.
Second, if it is not fair to consign children to hell because of their incapacity to either embrace or reject Christ and His teachings, neither does it make any moral sense to believe those never exposed to Christ and His teachings, or to any moral framework at all, would be consigned to hell—or lack the opportunity to grow toward heaven. Surely an infant is the most deserving object of our compassion, and therefore of God's compassion. If any justice reigns on high, it seems, unbaptized infants would not be punished for dying before having the opportunity to accept Christ and His gospel.
The larger problem, however, is that vastly more people have lived, and will always live, outside the orbit of Christianity, never hearing a sermon, seeing a missionary, or reading a Bible, than have died in infancy. The multitudes that covered the earth before Christianity made its appearance, all the inhabitants of nations past, present, and future where Christianity is virtually unknown, the countless children reared in secular homes—the numbers of these uncatechized throngs dwarf the number of children who have died unbaptized. The largest portion of humanity would still fall outside the gospel's reach.
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