“Could it be that God has given to some “nothing” as a means of saving grace?”
I suppose God could do that but then it opens up a whole new argument for say, the people in Nepal, a closed country who never hear the gospel yet look at creation and say the cow or Buddha or another avatar could be god. Or maybe some unfortunate preteen in Harlem who has never seen the country side or God’s magnificent nature or any sort of loveor discipline except from the gang having been raised in the streets. How is it just to provide “special grace” for the infant and not for these? Certainly it could be argued that they have been given “nothing”.
There is nothing definitive in the scriptures concerning “special grace”; there is only the one way to God. We depend on His righteous and graciousness for our salvation and the unborn and infants who die. This appears to be one of those Deut. 29:29 deals.
You have put your finger on the deep contradiction that envelopes the Calvinist construct. If there is "only the one way to God", then what is it?
If it is somehow synergistic and faith is an essential element pof it, then my whole argument for saving the infants falls apart as does the hope of any infant of being saved.
Indeed if faith is a necessary ingredient of salvation, then you cannot escape it being synergistic. But if salvation is monergistic, as you Calvinists claim, then the "only one way to God" is not by faith but by election and what follows election is entirely God's responsibility and whatever faith is put into the elect's heart or mind by God following election is a "saving faith" even if it is no faith at all!
So what is it? Is it all of God and none of man? If so, then Faith and works and everything that follows election is just window dressing and the elect is saved not by anything that follows election but by the election itself.
And who is to say that the infant or the Nepalese peasant or anyone else God so chooses to be numbered among the elect is not saved, regardless of any outward expression of objective or even subjective faith in Christ. For all we know saving faith to those who die without Christ is imparted monergistically during the five minutes when the oxygen stops flowing through the veins and the brain shuts down.
So what is it? Is God wholly responsible for those he saves or do men actually have to do something to secure their election.
At the healing of the man born blind, Jesus told his opponents that if they were blind they wouldn’t be accountable, but since they say “we see” that their sin remains.
Sounds quite a bit like P-Marlowe’s take on this.
So much more for children. They don’t “see”, so their accountability is absent.