Chapter 30
The Encounter and the Smallest Souls
Condensed Edition
She was six months old. Her parents had waited years for her. They had painted the nursery, argued over names, whispered prayers over the crib. And then, on a Tuesday morning, she was gone. No warning. No explanation the doctors could give that made the grief any smaller. Just silence where her breathing used to be.
If you are reading this chapter because you have buried a child, I want you to know something before we go any further. I am not writing about a theory. I am writing about your son or your daughter. And I believe, with everything this book has built across twenty-nine chapters, that your child was not alone when they died. Christ met them. This chapter is about how and why I believe that.
We have already met this grief in the person of Anna, the infant from Chapter 4 who died at six months without ever hearing the name of Jesus. This chapter is her answer.
Christians have been asking what happens to babies who die for as long as there have been Christians. The answers have ranged from the severe to the hopeful, and none has fully satisfied.
Augustine taught that unbaptized infants are condemned. He softened the blow by calling their punishment the "mildest" of all, but mild condemnation is still condemnation. For centuries, the Western church lived under the weight of that verdict. Few hold it today. But its shadow is long.1
The Catholic tradition developed the idea of limbus infantium, a place of natural happiness without the full vision of God. Unbaptized babies would be content but never see God face to face. In 2007, the International Theological Commission released a study titled "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized." It signaled a real shift. The document urged that we have "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope" that such infants are saved, even without baptism.2 Limbo was never formal dogma, and Rome has moved toward a more hopeful posture.
The Reformed tradition took a different path. The Westminster Confession speaks of "elect infants dying in infancy" who are "regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit" (10.3). The covenantal reading has generally affirmed that children of believing parents are included in God's covenant promises. R. C. Sproul and others extended this further, arguing that God's mercy reaches even beyond the covenant community to all who die in infancy.3
Many evangelicals appeal to an "age of accountability." Children below a certain threshold of moral awareness are not held responsible for personal sin. The concept is pastorally powerful and widely held. Its difficulty is that Scripture never names such an age, and the idea requires us to draw a line we cannot see.4
A broader view is what we might call the "presumption of grace." On this view, God's grace simply extends to those who cannot make a personal decision. It asks us to trust God's goodness without specifying how that goodness reaches them.
Each of these views has merit. I respect them. But each one shares the same gap: none of them tells us how God saves these children. They give us a verdict without a mechanism. The book you are reading offers something they lack. It offers a meeting.
Scripture does not give us a single clear text on the fate of infants who die. But it gives us several strong signals, and all of them point in the same direction.
Primary Source — David's Confidence
"I shall go to him, but he will not return to me." — 2 Samuel 12:23 (ESV)
David lost his infant son. He fasted and wept while the child was alive, hoping God would spare him. When the child died, David got up, washed, ate, and spoke these words. The contrast with David's anguished cry over his adult son Absalom (2 Sam 18:33) is striking. David expected to see his infant again. He did not expect the same reunion with Absalom. Something about the infant's death gave David a confidence he did not have for the older child who had rejected God.5
When Jesus's disciples tried to keep children away from him, he rebuked them. "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 19:14; cf. Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16). The children in question were too young to articulate a creed. Jesus did not ask them for a confession of faith. He welcomed them.6
Psalm 139 tells us that God knows us before we are born. He knit us together in the womb. He saw our unformed substance. We are not strangers to God even before our first breath. Jeremiah 1:5 pushes even further: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." God's knowledge of persons runs ahead of their own self-awareness.7
And then there is the strange, beautiful moment in Luke 1:41. When Mary, pregnant with Jesus, greeted Elizabeth, the unborn John the Baptist leaped in Elizabeth's womb. Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, said the child leaped "for joy." An unborn child recognized the presence of the Lord. Whatever we make of the details, Luke is telling us that spiritual recognition does not wait for adult cognition.8
These passages, taken together, form a biblical foundation for hope. God knows the unborn. He welcomes children. He gives fathers confidence of reunion. And he can stir spiritual recognition in a child who has not yet been born. The direction of the evidence is clear.
Here is what I believe happens. The infant's soul, at the moment of death, encounters the risen Christ. And in that encounter, the soul is not locked inside the limits of an infant body.
This is the same claim the book has made for every dying person. The mechanism does not change for babies. What changes is the context. An adult who meets Christ at death carries decades of choices, habits, and formed loves into the encounter. A baby carries none of that. The soul meets Christ with no history of refusal, no ingrained rebellion, no long practice of turning away.
Key Argument — Full Capacity in the Encounter
At the moment of death, the infant's soul is not constrained by the body's developmental limits. The encounter itself grants whatever cognitive and spiritual capacity the soul needs to recognize Christ and respond freely. The baby who could not yet speak in the body meets Christ as a soul. The meeting includes the full capacity for the meeting.9
This claim rests on substance dualism, the view that the human person is a soul joined to a body (developed in Chapter 8). The soul is not identical to the body's current abilities. An infant's brain cannot yet form complex thoughts or language. But the soul is not the brain. At death, when the soul begins to separate from the body, its expression is no longer filtered through an undeveloped nervous system. The soul awakens to its full capacity in Christ's presence.10
James Beilby makes a similar point about Anna's case. He asks us to consider: How old are people in heaven? No one imagines that Anna retains her infancy forever. If her relationship with God requires understanding she never developed on earth, then the resurrection must include what Beilby calls an "idealization" of her cognitive capacities. She will stand before Christ as a "fully intellectually capable person." Beilby argues that this is no more problematic than believing that an elderly person with severe cognitive decline will be restored at the resurrection.11
I agree with Beilby's reasoning. But I place the moment of that restoration earlier than the final resurrection. The encounter at the moment of death is where the soul first meets Christ with its full capacities. The resurrection completes what the encounter begins.
I believe that babies who die almost certainly accept Christ in the encounter. I want to explain why carefully, because I don't want to overstate the case.
An adult who encounters Christ at death may carry seventy years of practice at saying no. The encounter is fully persuasive, and God does everything love can do to bring the soul home (Chapter 28). But decades of formed resistance can, I have argued, sustain a final refusal (Chapter 27).
An infant has none of that history. The soul has not spent years building walls against God. It has no practice at turning away from love. When a soul that has never learned to refuse meets a love that has never stopped pursuing, what is the natural result? Recognition. Acceptance. Joy.
Beilby puts it plainly. He says he cannot imagine a situation where Anna would stand before God, "the God who created her to be in relationship with him, the God who wept with her parents when her time on earth was cut short," and not recognize him as her Lord.12
I think Beilby is right. I'm not saying it's logically impossible for an infant to refuse. The encounter preserves genuine freedom. But I am saying that the overwhelming weight of probability falls on the side of acceptance. A soul with no history of rebellion, encountering perfect love for the first time with full clarity, has every reason to say yes and no practiced reason to say no.13
A reader might worry that I'm not taking original sin seriously enough. I want to address that directly.
I take original sin seriously. The doctrine teaches that every human being inherits a fallen nature from Adam. Even babies are born into a world bent by sin, and they carry that bent nature with them. This is historic Christian teaching, and I affirm it.14
But original sin is not the same thing as personal guilt. The inherited nature makes us prone to sin. It does not make a six-month-old guilty of sins she has never committed. Personal guilt comes from personal choices, and Anna has made none. The distinction matters because it means that the infant does not come to the encounter as an enemy of God. She comes as a soul bearing a nature that bends toward self, but she has never acted on that bent. The encounter with Christ is God's provision for the lack she carries. In his presence, the bent is healed before it ever bore its fruit.15
Common Objection — "Doesn't This Soften Original Sin?"
Some may worry that granting infants a favorable encounter undercuts the seriousness of the Fall. But the book does not claim that infants are innocent by nature. It claims that they have not yet personally refused Christ. Original sin is real, but it is addressed by grace, not by condemnation of those who never had a chance to choose. Augustine's own position, which condemned unbaptized babies to even the "mildest" punishment, has been quietly abandoned by most of the traditions that once held it, and for good reason. The God revealed in Scripture does not punish the six-month-old for sins she has not committed.16
In his study of purgatory and postmortem grace, Jerry Walls surveys how different theologians have handled the problem of infants. His account is worth pausing over, because it shows both the strengths and the limits of other proposals.17
Walls reports the view of Olin Curtis, a nineteenth-century Methodist who argued that infants who die undergo a kind of postmortem maturation. In the intermediate state, Curtis proposed, these children grow into moral awareness and eventually respond to Christ in faith. The idea preserves the principle that everyone must freely choose, but it requires us to imagine a prolonged growing-up process after death.18
Tiessen, a Reformed theologian, took a different approach. He insisted that all persons who are saved respond to God in faith before death. Even infants. Tiessen argued that babies possess a "personal ability" that outstrips their physical development, and he appealed to substance dualism to defend it. His most striking claim is one that sits remarkably close to the thesis of this book: all persons, infants included, meet Christ at the moment of death.19
Walls himself is cautious. He warns against simply assuming that all who die in infancy are saved. The assumption is comforting, Walls says, but it has "little to be said for it, beyond its sentimental appeal." He argues that, given optimal grace, we may hope that many will respond favorably, but he declines to guarantee it.20
I agree with Walls that the question cannot be waved away with sentiment. And I appreciate his intellectual honesty. But I think this book offers what his survey lacks: a concrete mechanism. Where Curtis must imagine a postmortem growing-up, I hold that the encounter itself grants the soul its full capacities at the threshold. Where Tiessen appeals to a speculative infant faith before death, I locate the meeting at the moment of death, where the evidence from near-death experiences and the theology of the encounter converge. And where Walls stops at hope, the convergence of biblical, theological, and empirical evidence gives us, I believe, something stronger than hope. It gives us confidence. This is optimal grace applied to the smallest souls.21
Some readers will wonder about a four-year-old, or a seven-year-old, or a twelve-year-old. The same mechanism applies. At the moment of death, the child's soul encounters Christ with full cognitive and spiritual capacity. The soul is freed from the limits of a still-developing body and mind.
The difference between a child and an adult in the encounter is a difference of moral formation, not of mechanism. A four-year-old has had some moral experience but has not spent decades building a settled disposition against God. A twelve-year-old has had more. But neither has the entrenched, lifelong resistance that makes the encounter difficult for some adults. The younger the child, the less there is to overcome. The encounter's persuasive power faces less resistance, and the probability of acceptance is correspondingly higher.22
And the encounter is offered to every dying child, regardless of the family's faith background. A Muslim child, a Hindu child, an atheist's child. The encounter does not depend on the parents' beliefs. It depends on Christ's presence at the threshold of every death.
I want to speak carefully here, because these situations carry different kinds of grief.
I am pro-life. I believe abortion is a moral evil that takes the life of a human being made in God's image. But I also believe that the unborn whose lives are ended are not abandoned by God. They have their encounter with Christ at the moment of death, just as every soul does.23
This is not a justification of abortion. The wrong done to the child is real. But the wrong done does not seal the child's fate. God meets them. The pastoral truth here is for women who carry the weight of an abortion and for anyone who wonders whether an aborted child is lost forever. That child was met by Christ.
Miscarriage and stillbirth carry a different grief. There is no moral guilt, only loss. Psalm 139 tells us that God saw that child's unformed body in the womb. Every conceived human being is a soul. Every dying soul encounters Christ. This means that every pregnancy that ends in loss, whether at six weeks or at full term, involves a soul that meets the risen Lord.24
I cannot tell you what the encounter looks like for a soul that lived only weeks in the womb. I don't know what form the meeting takes for a being whose earthly experience was so brief. But I know this: God, who knit that child together, is not surprised by the death. And the same Christ who stands at the threshold of every death stands at this one.
The near-death-experience literature includes a small but significant body of pediatric cases. Melvin Morse's study Closer to the Light documented children's NDEs with careful attention to age-appropriate language and experience. P. M. H. Atwater's The New Children and Near-Death Experiences expanded the data further.25
Insight — What Children's NDEs Tell Us
Children's NDEs share the core features of adult experiences: the sense of peace, the encounter with a being of light, the feeling of overwhelming love. They describe these features in the vocabulary of childhood, but the structure is the same. This is modest evidence, but it is suggestive. The encounter does not seem to require adult cognition. It reaches children where they are.26
The pediatric NDE data is limited. Most documented cases involve children old enough to report their experiences afterward, which means we do not have direct testimony from infants. But the consistency of the pattern across ages tells us something important. The encounter adjusts to the person. It is personal. It meets each soul at the level it needs to be met. That is exactly what we would expect if God composes each encounter individually, as Chapter 19 and Chapter 18 have argued.27
I don't want to leave the Reformed covenantal tradition behind. I think it gets something deeply right. The conviction that God's promises cover our children is biblical. It is grounded in texts like Acts 2:39, which extends the promise "to you and to your children." The covenantal instinct is sound.28
But I want to extend it. The moment-of-death encounter does not limit God's grace to covenant children. It opens the same encounter to every dying child, everywhere, in every time and place. The Muslim family's baby. The Hindu family's stillborn. The atheist's miscarried child. Each soul meets Christ. The covenantal view is not wrong. It is not wide enough.
If you have lost a child, here is what I believe. And I do not believe it lightly.
Your child met Christ. Not in some vague, spiritual, "they're in a better place" sense. Your child met the risen Jesus at the threshold of death, in an encounter composed for your child's soul. In that encounter, your child was not a helpless infant or a confused toddler. Your child's soul met Christ with full capacity to see him, to know him, and to respond.
Your child responded. I cannot prove this with certainty. But the weight of everything this book has argued points in one direction. A soul with no history of refusal, encountering perfect love, says yes.
You will see your child again. David believed it. "I shall go to him." The resurrection is the reunion. The body that failed your child in this life will be raised in glory. The soul that met Christ at the threshold will be clothed in a body fit for eternity.
You do not have to wonder about an "age of accountability" cutoff. You do not have to ask whether your child was old enough to be "in the covenant." You do not have to live with Augustine's shadow. The God who knit your child together in the womb is the same God who met your child at the door of death.
Note — A Pastoral Word
To the grieving parent: your child met Christ. Your child responded. Your child is with the Lord. You will see your child again. This is not sentimentality. It is a doctrine grounded in Scripture, in the mechanism of the encounter, and in the universal saving will of God. A pastor standing at the funeral of a stillborn child can speak this word with confidence. It is not a guess. It is a hope with reasons behind it.29
The next two chapters carry the same logic into harder territory. Chapter 31 asks what happens to the mentally handicapped and the cognitively impaired. Chapter 32 takes up the unevangelized. In every case, the answer is the same: the encounter meets each soul at the threshold, with the full capacity for a real and free response. And in Chapter 34, we will see what this means for the way we grieve and the way we preach.
Anna met Christ. So did your child.
↑ 1. Augustine, Enchiridion, 93. Augustine held that original sin was sufficient for condemnation even without personal sin, and that unbaptized infants suffer the "mildest condemnation of all" (mitissima poena). See also De peccatorum meritis et remissione, I.16.21. Millard Erickson surveys the development in How Shall They Be Saved? The Destiny of Those Who Do Not Hear of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), ch. 9.
↑ 2. International Theological Commission, "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized" (2007), §79. The document notes that the notion of limbo "remains a possible theological hypothesis" but stresses that "there are much stronger grounds — both theological and liturgical — for hope." The document did not formally abrogate limbo but made clear that it was never defined dogma.
↑ 3. Westminster Confession of Faith, 10.3. R. C. Sproul argued for the salvation of all who die in infancy, not only covenant children, in various published comments. See also Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1871–73), I:26, who extended the hope broadly. B. B. Warfield held that the Reformed tradition provides "no exception" to infant salvation.
↑ 4. Robert P. Lightner, Heaven for Those Who Can't Believe (Schaumburg, IL: Regular Baptist Press, 1977). Lightner develops the age-of-accountability view in detail. Greg Boyd has also argued for infant salvation on the basis of God's character and universal love. See also Millard Erickson, "The Salvation of Those Who Have Never Heard," in Christian Apologetics Journal 7.1 (2008).
↑ 5. 2 Samuel 12:15–23. The contrast between David's response to his infant's death and his response to Absalom's death (2 Sam 18:33) is widely noted. David expected to be reunited with the infant; he had no such confidence about Absalom. See Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 6, who cites this text as one of the most significant for the infant-salvation question.
↑ 6. Matthew 19:13–15; Mark 10:13–16; Luke 18:15–17. Luke's version uses βρέφη (brephē, "infants"), not just παιδία (paidia, "children"), making clear that very young children were included. Jesus's welcome of these children, combined with his statement about the kingdom belonging to "such as these," has been read across traditions as a strong signal of God's disposition toward the very young.
↑ 7. Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5. Both passages affirm God's knowledge of the person before birth. The Hebrew יָדַע (yadaʿ, "to know") in Jeremiah 1:5 implies intimate personal knowledge, not merely awareness. God's relationship with the person precedes the person's self-awareness.
↑ 8. Luke 1:41, 44. Elizabeth says the baby "leaped in my womb for joy." The theological point is not that every fetus is capable of doctrinal comprehension, but that spiritual responsiveness, in at least some cases, precedes cognitive maturity. See Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 59, for a discussion of pre-cognitive spiritual awareness.
↑ 9. This is the claim developed in §2.11 of the theological commitments. The soul, at the threshold of death, is not limited to what the body allowed it to express. The encounter grants "whatever maturity, knowledge, and spiritual understanding is needed to make a genuine choice." The infant body's developmental limits are real in this life; they do not constrain the soul's encounter with Christ. See Chapter 19 on the dynamics of the encounter.
↑ 10. See Chapter 8 for the full case for substance dualism. The soul-body composite is essential to the argument here. On physicalism, the infant's cognitive limits are final, because the mind is the brain. On dualism, the soul's capacities exceed what the body's current hardware can express. The encounter reveals capacities the body had not yet developed the capacity to express. See Chapter 9 for why physicalism fails here.
↑ 11. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 59–60. Beilby argues that the "idealization" of cognitive capacities at the resurrection is unproblematic: "The person who dies in infancy and the intellectually forty-year-old version of that person are — in terms of personhood — identical, just as the one year old and forty-year-old version of me are the same person." See also pp. 62–63 for his treatment of Anna.
↑ 12. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 63. Beilby adds: "I cannot imagine a scenario where Anna (and the millions of others in her shoes) would stand before God, the God who created her to be in relationship with him, the God who wept with her parents when her time on earth was cut short, and have her not recognize God as her Lord and Savior."
↑ 13. Beilby acknowledges that "neither Nash nor I know — in a philosophically precise sense of that word — what Anna will decide because we are not God" (p. 63). I share his epistemic humility. But the convergence of theological reasoning, biblical signals, and the logic of the encounter all point strongly toward acceptance. The book's argument in Chapter 27 holds that refusal requires a long history of practiced self-deception. Infants have no such history.
↑ 14. Romans 5:12–19 is the classic text on the universality of sin through Adam. The distinction between inherited sinful nature and personal guilt is developed by Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), ch. 29, and by Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 62–63, who argues that "the doctrine of original sin means that even babies have a sin nature, but there is no biblical justification for taking the additional step and holding that they are personally guilty of sin."
↑ 15. The infant's lack of personal guilt does not remove the need for the encounter; it changes the encounter's dynamics. As Beilby argues (p. 62), even if there is a difference between infants and adults regarding personal guilt, "that does not mean that Anna and Sam are not in need of a postmortem encounter, it just means that their encounter will likely be favorable." Salvation is more than the removal of guilt; it is a "chosen, committed relationship with God the Father, Son, and Spirit." The encounter is the occasion for that relationship to begin.
↑ 16. Augustine's position was dominant in the West for centuries but has been softened by nearly every tradition that inherited it. The Catholic Church's 2007 ITC document effectively set limbo aside. Most Reformed theologians since Warfield and Hodge have affirmed infant salvation. Most evangelical treatments (Lightner, Erickson, Boyd) affirm it. The Augustinian hard line is now held by almost no one.
↑ 17. Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 5, "Purgatory and Theories of a 'Second Chance,'" section "When Seconds Matter." Walls surveys Curtis, Tiessen, and the infant-salvation question within the larger framework of optimal grace.
↑ 18. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5. Curtis proposed that infants who die undergo an abbreviated probation in the intermediate state: "In the intermediate state every man must see Jesus Christ as he really is; and seeing him as he is, every man who is in harmony with Christ's nature will accept him." On infants specifically, Curtis argued they would "grow into moral awareness" and "freely accept Christ." Walls notes that Curtis's speculation "that God takes the lives of infants for providential purposes is theologically as well as pastorally highly dubious."
↑ 19. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5. Tiessen's position as Walls reports it: "his proposal is 'that God reveals himself to infants (and the unborn) during their brief lives, and that their salvation can, therefore, take place before death, but that it does not occur without an act of personal faith.'" Walls notes that Tiessen appeals to substance dualism and argues that "personal ability" cannot be reduced to physical ability. Walls is skeptical: "it is much more dubious that dualism provides good grounds for Tiessen's theory."
↑ 20. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5: "Curtis's widely shared assumption that all infants are saved has little to be said for it, beyond its sentimental appeal." He continues: "Given optimal grace, however, and God's infinite mercy, we may hope that many persons will respond to God in a saving way in the afterlife." Walls explicitly declines to guarantee universal infant salvation, though he offers hope grounded in optimal grace.
↑ 21. This is optimal grace — the measure of grace God knows each person would respond to most favorably — applied to the smallest and most vulnerable souls. See Chapter 28 for the full development of optimal grace and its integration with the moment-of-death encounter. Walls first worked out the optimal-grace concept in Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), ch. 4.
↑ 22. The question of older children is a matter of degree, not of kind. A seven-year-old has begun to develop moral habits and dispositions, but nothing like the entrenched self-deception described in Chapter 27. The younger the child, the less formed the resistance, and the more transparently the love of Christ will be received.
↑ 23. The moral status of the unborn is not the focus of this chapter. The book affirms the pro-life position that every conceived human being bears God's image. Nothing in this chapter should be read as softening the moral gravity of abortion. The pastoral application is for those who carry the weight of past decisions and need to know that the child is not lost. See also Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 62–63; and Norm Geisler's suggestion (reported by Beilby, p. 62) that the salvation of infants explains high infant mortality rates in unevangelized countries, which Beilby rightly calls "horrifying" because it "comes close to attempting to justify infanticide."
↑ 24. Psalm 139:13–16. The theological claim that every conceived human being is a soul rests on substance dualism and on the biblical witness that God forms and knows persons from conception. At what point ensoulment occurs is a debated question in the tradition; the book follows the dominant conservative Protestant and Catholic view that it occurs at conception.
↑ 25. Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard, 1990). P. M. H. Atwater, The New Children and Near-Death Experiences (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2003). Both researchers document NDEs in children with careful attention to age-appropriate reporting and methodology. Morse's was among the first systematic studies of pediatric NDEs.
↑ 26. The consistency of NDE features across age groups is noted by Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's, 2021), ch. 1. Children describe the same core elements — the being of light, the feeling of peace, the life review (in simpler form) — that adults describe. The data set is smaller, and very young children cannot report at all. But the pattern is consistent with the book's thesis that the encounter adjusts to the person.
↑ 27. See Chapter 18 on the Christological necessity of the encounter and Chapter 19 on the dynamics and personal composition of the encounter. The claim that God composes each encounter individually is developed further in Chapter 28, where optimal grace and middle knowledge explain how God tailors the encounter to each soul.
↑ 28. Acts 2:39 (ESV): "For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself." The covenantal tradition reads this as extending God's promises to the children of believers. The book affirms this instinct but extends it: Christ's encounter at the threshold of death is offered to every dying child, not only to the children of covenant families.
↑ 29. Beilby makes a similar pastoral point: since salvation is "a chosen, committed relationship with God the Father, Son, and Spirit," God would desire to provide Anna "an opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel" — "the spiritual equivalent of the wedding day" (Postmortem Opportunity, p. 62). The book agrees: the encounter is not just about removing guilt but about beginning a relationship. The infant meets Christ, and the relationship begins.