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.