F. Christians: Are the incompetent doomed to hell?

Caveat: I personally don’t believe that the answer to this question is “yes,” but I’d like to hear other people’s theological take.

My question was inspired by some reading I was doing for my Bioethics class last night revolving around what it means to be “living.” To make a long story short, it got me thinking about various characters who have either impaired, defective, or immature mental faculties. In short, this brings to mind people in comas, people in permanent vegetative states, young children, the mentally retarded, people with brain disorders, certain elderly people, and so on.

I got to thinking about the mainline fundamentalist position that one must consciously accept Jesus Christ as a personal savior in order to be “saved” and get eternal life. (As a Catholic, I don’t believe this…or more precisely, I don’t take the mainline view that a single moment of repentance equals a permanent state of salvation. But I digress.) Now, not knowing many retarded people, much less being able to peer into people’s souls, I began wondering how this view of salvation is reconciled with incompetents.(1) If God loves all his children, but his children are doomed due to original sin, and sinners must choose to repent unto Christ, then how can an individual repent when his or her capacity to repent is in question?

For example, how do fundamentalist Christian parents of a mentally retarded child raise him? For parents of normal children, I suppose there would be assurrance that the child’s intellectual capacity grows stronger over time, such that he/she eventually could/would make the decision to accept Christ. (Hence the case against infant baptism; again, as a Catholic I have no problem with infant baptism.) For a retarded child, I wonder if the parents, even raising the child in the Christian tradition, would question whether he/she would ever make a full “acceptance,” or if he/she would merely be following what his parents told him to do.(2)

Anyway, thoughts are appreciated.

(1) I’m using the term in its legal sense: an individual who doesn’t have the capacity to make decisions for oneself. I hope no one takes offense at the term.

(2) I’m saying this again with a caveat: I don’t know many retarded individuals, so I can’t testify directly as to their capacities as a whole or as individuals. But even barring the retarded, I believe my question still works if you substitute “people in comas” or “small children” or any hypothetical case of someone with diminished brain capacity.

Um, you must have missed the point where every evangelical I know says “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior to the extent possible.” A small child, for example, is capable of saying “Jesus loves me, and I love Him.” He is not obliged to repent of sins, etc.; he doesn’t have the mental framework in place yet to deal with those concepts. “Good boy/girl” and “bad boy/girl” – or, better, “don’t do bad things” are the extent of his moral awareness. There’s a post somewhere in the last few months where Triskadecamus discusses the moral and spiritual awareness of a developmentally disabled person he knows well – which is very much worth seeking out and reading.

GOD CANNOT BE STUPID!

what if there is no hell and the system works on reincarnation?

doesn’t God have to know more about psychology and socialpsychology and neurophysiology than we do? doesn’t God have to know why people belive the things they do? if people have been given distorted information doesn’t God know it? could any competent God come up with something as stupid as hell? doesn’t hell sound like a myth to terrorize children?

Dal Timgar