I think you are right in this respect: the age of accountability does not cleanly resolve the appearance of arbitrariness in God’s decisions about whom to save and whom to damn. In that sense, we might say, the age of accountability position fails on its own terms.

That said, it seems that you must also concede that–on your own terms–the appearance of arbitrariness in God’s decisions about whom to save and whom to damn isn’t really much of a concern, as this is one of the places where you bite the bullet.

1. There’s something that seems clearly taught in scripture.
2. It also seems arbitrary.
3. But if scripture is reliable, then it tells us something about a God who is not arbitrary.
4. So there must be a reason God does it,

The structure of your argument is:

1. I have a theological view that I don’t get from scripture but that seems like it must be right.
2. It also seems to involve arbitrary choices on God’s part.
3. If scripture is reliable, then God must not do anything arbitrary.
4. Therefore, there must be a reason God makes such seemingly-arbitrary choices.

The difference is that there’s another possibility with the second argument, namely that God doesn’t make such choices at all. If scripture does teach something, and we take scripture to be authoritative, then we can assume God does actually do such a thing. Such is the case, in my view, with Calvinism. I don’t think people who hold to an age of accountability really think that they derive it from scripture. They derive it, most of them admittedly, from what they think must be true of God. My argument is that it isn’t the teaching of scripture and thus that it’s not parallel to the kind of defense I’ve given for things we do see directly taught in scripture.

Thank you again for your follow up. You’ve clarified to my satisfaction why it is more of a problem, on your view, to charge God with actual arbitrariness.

However, in the context of your argument, your reply to me is perfectly inadequate. Notice how someone defending “the first view” against your charge of God’s arbitrariness could respond precisely the same way as you have responded to me. On the first view, God picks a precise moment in time in which Fergus becomes, as you say, “morally accountable.” So, if he dies right before that moment, Fergus will “be saved eternally”; if right after that moment, he steals a piece of candy and then dies, then it’s anyone’s guess what God, who saith, “vengeance is mine,” will do with poor Fergus. So the problem here is precisely the problem I pressed you with: if God does pick this a moment like this, then God seems to have made the crucial decision without sufficient justification. Notice also that the proponent of the first view can respond precisely as you have responded to me: “I think scripture is clear enough that God is not arbitrary, but in fact has excellent reasons for what he does.” In other words, given the strong evidences I have from scripture, we may assume that God has excellent reasons for picking a precise moment in Fergus’ life as the age of accountability.

More generally, I like to add that consistency can be fairly low standard. After all, a dozen absurd beliefs can be entirely consistent with each other. So recall that last issue I brought up. You wrote,

What we deserve is based on what we are, which is corrupted from the very beginning.

This means, I take it, that you accept that an unborn baby, and one which hasn’t yet developed the capacity to even have a thought, may still deserve to suffer. This is the sort of belief that seems perfectly absurd (or we might say “morally outrageous”) even if it is perfectly consistent with various additional beliefs.

I really appreciate the response. The problem of arbitrariness is a species of the more general problem of lacking a sufficient justification. That is, to say that it would be a problem if God arbitrarily selects some for salvation and others for damnation is to say that it is a problem if God lacks a sufficient justification for making such a selection. Since the fundamental problem is specifying a sufficient justification, this problem is not resolved by observing that God may have a reason for choosing some but not others. God’s reason for choosing St. Paul may be that St. Paul had divinely gorgeous hair. As far as a sufficient justification, however, this wouldn’t be an improve upon God’s choosing Paul arbitrarily. Moreover, if we observe that it was also God who chose to give St. Paul the divinely gorgeous hair (or. to have the apostolic capacities necessary for spreading the faith among the Gentiles), then there may even still be a sense in which we haven’t even gotten rid of the arbitrariness.

But perhaps all this is just beating around the bush, for you also say this:

What we deserve is based on what we are, which is corrupted from the very beginning.

This means, I take it, that you accept that an unborn baby, and one which hasn’t yet developed the capacity to even have a thought, may still deserve to suffer. It’s curious to me that you can accept this but you still agree that the random selection of some for hell and some for heaven would be unjust, or morally problematic. Why not go the whole hog and reject all the deliverances of common sense morality, including the conviction that randomly selecting some for bliss and others for condemnation would be unjust?

So it’s perfectly fine for God to have reasons for regenerating and saving people but for those reasons to be a matter of God’s decision. That’s compatible with thinking that an arbitrary decision for no reason is unjust. If there is literally no reason why God drew the line in a certain place, then it seems really problematic morally unless the line has just about zero moral import.

Janice, we have to distinguish between sin and sins. We all have sin, and that’s present from the beginning of our existence. It’s what makes us imperfect from the very outset, and it’s the reason why we all commit sins. That places us outside the possibility of God’s presence from long before we engage in any actions with any moral import. What we deserve is based on what we are, which is corrupted from the very beginning.

Raymond, I think there’s an explanation of age 20 that doesn’t imply anything to do with an age of accountability. Those who couldn’t enter the land were those younger than the age of military service at the time when Israel’s greatest gift was about to arrive, and the military operation to achieve it failed by refusing God’s gift. So those younger than military-serving age were not part of the covenant-breaking in that case.

Adam O, it has a very similar structure in one place to Ted’s argument. My immediate response to Ted’s argument when he showed me the draft of his paper was that it didn’t apply if Calvinism is true, and he conceded the point. I think his argument misunderstands the historic Reformation position even if it’s not taken in the Calvinist way, but Calvinism gets out of the problem even more easily (and that was the part he conceded). What I’m arguing here is basically that his argument, while unsound when used against Calvinism about hell in general, is sound when used against age-of-accountability views unless they avoid the problem by saying some things you might not have expected them to have to say.

Assuming such, and even assuming that it’s the age of 20 as Raymond Coffey in #6 suggests,

then I’m accountable and morally responsible for my sins.

Praise God I’m one of the Elect and that He has chosen to cover my sins with the precious blood of His Lamb, a miserable sinner.

Is simply having a sinful nature “truly sin, even now condemning and bringing eternal death upon those not born again through Baptism and the Holy Ghost”, or is it instead “the tinder for sin”? There’s a lot tied up in this topic.