The doctrine is problematic
on several levels. According to this way of thinking, we are all doomed to Gods’
wrath and judgment even before we’ve started in life. This flies in the face of
both personal accountability for our own actions and decisions and the idea
that God is both just and fair (since to condemn all humanity simply for “what
Adam did” is not just and fair). Furthermore, on that basis we can have no
confidence whatsoever that a deceased baby is not destined for hell (I’m using
their concepts here). The reader will need to make up her own mind on the validity
of the Calvinist interpretation of these things but suffice to say that in
Jewish thinking there is an “age of accountability” (or “an age of reason”)
corresponding to the ceremony of bar mitzvah/bat mitzvah (around the time of puberty).
(Stephen Burnhope, Reading the Bible With Its Writers: What They Were
Saying, Why They Said It, How They Said It [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books,
2025], 32)
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