@Ps82 @ttruscott
There are a few things here that I think need to be established before we start speculating about babies having committed sins in some pre-conception existence.
The starting point should be the character of God.
God is love. 1 John 4:8.
God is perfectly just.
"He is the Rock, His work is perfect;
For all His ways are justice,
A God of truth and without injustice;
Righteous and upright is He."
Deuteronomy 32:4
And God does not desire the destruction of the wicked.
"'Do I have any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?' says the Lord GOD, 'and not that he should turn from his ways and live?'"
Ezekiel 18:23
"The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance."
2 Peter 3:9
God is therefore neither looking for an excuse to condemn someone nor condemning people arbitrarily. If God condemns someone, that condemnation is just.
And that brings us to another principle that has already been raised in this thread, and one with which I agree:
"The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son."
Ezekiel 18:20
Guilt is personal.
Where I disagree with ttruscott is that none of this requires Pre-Conception Existence.
It doesn't prove PERSONAL sin by the person who physically dies.
That distinction matters.
Death entered the human race as a consequence of Adam's sin.
"For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive."
1 Corinthians 15:22
The consequences of one man's sin can affect others without making those others personally guilty of his sin.
Indeed, if the mere fact of physical death proved that the person who died must personally have sinned, then we have an immediate problem:
Jesus died.
Jesus was without sin.
Therefore physical death, by itself, cannot prove personal guilt.
Romans 6:23 does not say that every occurrence of physical death demonstrates that the person dying must have personally committed an offense worthy of that death.
That assumption is doing a tremendous amount of work in the PCE argument.
An infant dies.
Therefore, the infant must be personally guilty.
The infant hasn't had an opportunity to knowingly sin here.
Therefore, the infant must have sinned before conception.
But once the first inference fails, there is no need for the second.
Physical death does not establish pre-conception guilt.
And Scripture gives us very good reason to distinguish an infant from someone who has knowingly rebelled against God.
God Himself described children as those:
"who today have no knowledge of good and evil"
Deuteronomy 1:39
Isaiah likewise speaks of a period:
"before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good"
Isaiah 7:16
There is therefore plainly a stage of human development before a person knows good from evil in the morally accountable sense.
Which brings us to Jacob and Esau.
ttruscott has suggested that their struggling in the womb was sinful and that they were knowingly fighting over primogeniture.
But none of that is in Genesis 25.
The text says they struggled together. God then tells Rebecca:
"Two nations are in your womb,
Two peoples shall be separated from your body..."
The text does not say that Jacob and Esau understood primogeniture.
It does not say they knew which one was going to be born first.
It does not say they were attempting to murder one another.
Those are conclusions being imported into the event.
And Paul gives us an inspired commentary on the condition of Jacob and Esau before birth:
"for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil..."
Romans 9:11
That seems decisive to me.
Whatever was physically occurring in Rebecca's womb, Paul says they had done neither good nor evil.
That also answers another point Ps82 raised.
Jacob and Esau provide no evidence that God had secretly discovered righteousness in one fetus and wickedness in the other.
Quite the opposite.
Paul explicitly says God's selection was made before either had done good or evil.
And "Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated" doesn't change that.
Paul is quoting Malachi 1, where Jacob and Esau represent Israel and Edom.
Further, the Hebrew love/hate pairing is an idiom of preference and rejection. We see the same kind of usage with Jacob's wives. Genesis 29:30 says Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah," while the following verse describes Leah with the corresponding "hated/unloved" terminology.
The point is preference.
Romans 9 itself tells us that the preference was NOT based upon prenatal good or evil:
"nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand..."
God chose Jacob for His purpose.
That is not evidence that unborn Esau was already a wicked man deserving damnation.
Ps82 also brought up Cain and Abel.
But Cain and Abel were adults capable of moral action.
God's words to Cain actually support personal moral accountability:
"If you do well, will you not be accepted?"
Genesis 4:7
Cain knew what he was doing and made a moral choice.
That tells us very little about a baby who has "no knowledge of good and evil."
Likewise, God's choosing Jeremiah, John the Baptist, or others before birth for a particular purpose doesn't establish that babies God did not choose for that purpose are condemned.
Jeremiah was chosen to be a prophet.
That is an election to a purpose.
God's failure to choose another unborn child to be a prophet obviously does not mean that other child is damned.
Then there are the children killed during God's temporal judgments upon nations.
Again, physical death and eternal condemnation are being conflated.
God determines when every one of us dies.
The fact that God determines that someone will physically die today tells us nothing, by itself, about whether that individual is eternally condemned.
And one of Ps82's own examples illustrates this remarkably well.
Jeroboam's son dies.
Yet what does God say about him?
"because in him there is found something good toward the LORD God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam."
1 Kings 14:13
He was the one person in Jeroboam's house in whom God found something GOOD.
And he died.
In fact, his death spared him from the horrific judgment that would fall upon the rest of Jeroboam's house.
So that passage demonstrates almost perfectly why physical death cannot be used as evidence of eternal condemnation.
The same distinction applies to the Amalekite children ttruscott mentioned.
God commanding their physical deaths does not establish that God eternally condemned every child who died.
Those are two different judgments.
This is also why I don't think Ps82's abortion objection follows.
The fact that a murdered child goes to heaven does not make murdering the child good.
If someone murders a saved Christian, that Christian goes to be with the Lord.
Has the murderer therefore done the Christian a good deed?
Of course not.
Paul explicitly rejects that kind of reasoning:
"Let us do evil that good may come."
Romans 3:8
The moral character of abortion is determined by what the person DOING the killing is doing.
She is deliberately killing an innocent human being.
The fact that God receives that child does not somehow transfer God's goodness to the killer's action.
So, yes, I would tell a woman considering an abortion that killing her child is wrong.
And yes, I would also tell a woman who has already lost or killed her child that her baby is safe with God.
I don't see any contradiction between those statements.
In fact, I think there is a much greater theological problem in suggesting that God might eternally condemn a human being who has never knowingly chosen evil.
God is love.
God is just.
God does not desire that anyone perish.
God does not impute one person's moral guilt to another.
Scripture recognizes a condition in which children do not yet know good from evil.
Paul explicitly says that Jacob and Esau, while still unborn, had done neither good nor evil.
And physical death does not prove personal guilt.
What, then, is the sin for which an infant would be eternally condemned?
PCE supplies an answer:
"Something the infant did thousands of years before conception, which the infant cannot now remember and which Scripture never records."
But that answer only becomes necessary after assuming that the infant's physical death proves personal sin in the first place.
It doesn't.
And there is another problem with the larger PCE argument.
Throughout this thread, ttruscott has argued that Satan's rebellion must have occurred before God demonstrated His deity through creation because no one could possibly know that YHWH really is God and then rebel against Him anyway.
But Scripture describes that exact thing.
Romans 1 says God's attributes are clearly revealed so that men are without excuse, and then immediately says:
"because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God..."
Romans 1:21
They knew God.
They rebelled anyway.
James makes the point even more dramatically:
"You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe, and tremble!"
James 2:19
Knowing that God exists does not make rebellion psychologically impossible.
Sin is not merely an intellectual mistake about whether God exists.
A person can know the truth and rebel against it.
So I don't think we need to construct a previous existence before creation to explain either Satan's rebellion or an infant's physical death.
In both cases, the supposed necessity for PCE is being created by premises that Scripture itself does not require.
There are a few things here that I think need to be established before we start speculating about babies having committed sins in some pre-conception existence.
The starting point should be the character of God.
God is love. 1 John 4:8.
God is perfectly just.
"He is the Rock, His work is perfect;
For all His ways are justice,
A God of truth and without injustice;
Righteous and upright is He."
Deuteronomy 32:4
And God does not desire the destruction of the wicked.
"'Do I have any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?' says the Lord GOD, 'and not that he should turn from his ways and live?'"
Ezekiel 18:23
"The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance."
2 Peter 3:9
God is therefore neither looking for an excuse to condemn someone nor condemning people arbitrarily. If God condemns someone, that condemnation is just.
And that brings us to another principle that has already been raised in this thread, and one with which I agree:
"The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son."
Ezekiel 18:20
Guilt is personal.
Where I disagree with ttruscott is that none of this requires Pre-Conception Existence.
ttruscott said:
It doesn't prove PERSONAL sin by the person who physically dies.
That distinction matters.
Death entered the human race as a consequence of Adam's sin.
"For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive."
1 Corinthians 15:22
The consequences of one man's sin can affect others without making those others personally guilty of his sin.
Indeed, if the mere fact of physical death proved that the person who died must personally have sinned, then we have an immediate problem:
Jesus died.
Jesus was without sin.
Therefore physical death, by itself, cannot prove personal guilt.
Romans 6:23 does not say that every occurrence of physical death demonstrates that the person dying must have personally committed an offense worthy of that death.
That assumption is doing a tremendous amount of work in the PCE argument.
An infant dies.
Therefore, the infant must be personally guilty.
The infant hasn't had an opportunity to knowingly sin here.
Therefore, the infant must have sinned before conception.
But once the first inference fails, there is no need for the second.
Physical death does not establish pre-conception guilt.
And Scripture gives us very good reason to distinguish an infant from someone who has knowingly rebelled against God.
God Himself described children as those:
"who today have no knowledge of good and evil"
Deuteronomy 1:39
Isaiah likewise speaks of a period:
"before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good"
Isaiah 7:16
There is therefore plainly a stage of human development before a person knows good from evil in the morally accountable sense.
Which brings us to Jacob and Esau.
ttruscott has suggested that their struggling in the womb was sinful and that they were knowingly fighting over primogeniture.
But none of that is in Genesis 25.
The text says they struggled together. God then tells Rebecca:
"Two nations are in your womb,
Two peoples shall be separated from your body..."
The text does not say that Jacob and Esau understood primogeniture.
It does not say they knew which one was going to be born first.
It does not say they were attempting to murder one another.
Those are conclusions being imported into the event.
And Paul gives us an inspired commentary on the condition of Jacob and Esau before birth:
"for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil..."
Romans 9:11
That seems decisive to me.
Whatever was physically occurring in Rebecca's womb, Paul says they had done neither good nor evil.
That also answers another point Ps82 raised.
Ps82 said:
Jacob and Esau provide no evidence that God had secretly discovered righteousness in one fetus and wickedness in the other.
Quite the opposite.
Paul explicitly says God's selection was made before either had done good or evil.
And "Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated" doesn't change that.
Paul is quoting Malachi 1, where Jacob and Esau represent Israel and Edom.
Further, the Hebrew love/hate pairing is an idiom of preference and rejection. We see the same kind of usage with Jacob's wives. Genesis 29:30 says Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah," while the following verse describes Leah with the corresponding "hated/unloved" terminology.
The point is preference.
Romans 9 itself tells us that the preference was NOT based upon prenatal good or evil:
"nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand..."
God chose Jacob for His purpose.
That is not evidence that unborn Esau was already a wicked man deserving damnation.
Ps82 also brought up Cain and Abel.
But Cain and Abel were adults capable of moral action.
God's words to Cain actually support personal moral accountability:
"If you do well, will you not be accepted?"
Genesis 4:7
Cain knew what he was doing and made a moral choice.
That tells us very little about a baby who has "no knowledge of good and evil."
Likewise, God's choosing Jeremiah, John the Baptist, or others before birth for a particular purpose doesn't establish that babies God did not choose for that purpose are condemned.
Jeremiah was chosen to be a prophet.
That is an election to a purpose.
God's failure to choose another unborn child to be a prophet obviously does not mean that other child is damned.
Then there are the children killed during God's temporal judgments upon nations.
Again, physical death and eternal condemnation are being conflated.
God determines when every one of us dies.
The fact that God determines that someone will physically die today tells us nothing, by itself, about whether that individual is eternally condemned.
And one of Ps82's own examples illustrates this remarkably well.
Jeroboam's son dies.
Yet what does God say about him?
"because in him there is found something good toward the LORD God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam."
1 Kings 14:13
He was the one person in Jeroboam's house in whom God found something GOOD.
And he died.
In fact, his death spared him from the horrific judgment that would fall upon the rest of Jeroboam's house.
So that passage demonstrates almost perfectly why physical death cannot be used as evidence of eternal condemnation.
The same distinction applies to the Amalekite children ttruscott mentioned.
God commanding their physical deaths does not establish that God eternally condemned every child who died.
Those are two different judgments.
This is also why I don't think Ps82's abortion objection follows.
The fact that a murdered child goes to heaven does not make murdering the child good.
If someone murders a saved Christian, that Christian goes to be with the Lord.
Has the murderer therefore done the Christian a good deed?
Of course not.
Paul explicitly rejects that kind of reasoning:
"Let us do evil that good may come."
Romans 3:8
The moral character of abortion is determined by what the person DOING the killing is doing.
She is deliberately killing an innocent human being.
The fact that God receives that child does not somehow transfer God's goodness to the killer's action.
So, yes, I would tell a woman considering an abortion that killing her child is wrong.
And yes, I would also tell a woman who has already lost or killed her child that her baby is safe with God.
I don't see any contradiction between those statements.
In fact, I think there is a much greater theological problem in suggesting that God might eternally condemn a human being who has never knowingly chosen evil.
God is love.
God is just.
God does not desire that anyone perish.
God does not impute one person's moral guilt to another.
Scripture recognizes a condition in which children do not yet know good from evil.
Paul explicitly says that Jacob and Esau, while still unborn, had done neither good nor evil.
And physical death does not prove personal guilt.
What, then, is the sin for which an infant would be eternally condemned?
PCE supplies an answer:
"Something the infant did thousands of years before conception, which the infant cannot now remember and which Scripture never records."
But that answer only becomes necessary after assuming that the infant's physical death proves personal sin in the first place.
It doesn't.
And there is another problem with the larger PCE argument.
Throughout this thread, ttruscott has argued that Satan's rebellion must have occurred before God demonstrated His deity through creation because no one could possibly know that YHWH really is God and then rebel against Him anyway.
But Scripture describes that exact thing.
Romans 1 says God's attributes are clearly revealed so that men are without excuse, and then immediately says:
"because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God..."
Romans 1:21
They knew God.
They rebelled anyway.
James makes the point even more dramatically:
"You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe, and tremble!"
James 2:19
Knowing that God exists does not make rebellion psychologically impossible.
Sin is not merely an intellectual mistake about whether God exists.
A person can know the truth and rebel against it.
So I don't think we need to construct a previous existence before creation to explain either Satan's rebellion or an infant's physical death.
In both cases, the supposed necessity for PCE is being created by premises that Scripture itself does not require.
