Below is a structured, doctrinal discussion of the error of the teaching of inherited depravity, presented from a biblical standpoint, with clear Scripture support and practical illustrations. The approach reflects a restorationist, Scripture-alone framework that emphasizes individual accountability and the moral innocence of children.

1. Definition of Inherited Depravity

Inherited depravity (often associated with Augustinian and later Calvinistic theology) teaches that:

• All humans are born morally corrupt due to Adam’s sin.
• Guilt and a sinful nature are inherited at birth.
• Humans are incapable of choosing righteousness apart from a special act of grace.

This doctrine goes beyond what Scripture explicitly teaches.

2. Scripture Teaches Individual Responsibility, Not Inherited Guilt

Ezekiel 18:20

“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.”

Key Point:
God explicitly denies the transfer of guilt from one person to another. If Adam’s guilt were inherited, this passage would be false.

Illustration:
A judge who imprisons a child because of his father’s crimes would be unjust. Scripture consistently affirms that God is perfectly just (Deuteronomy 32:4).

3. Children Are Described as Innocent, Not Depraved

Deuteronomy 1:39 “Your little ones… who today have no knowledge of good or evil…”

Isaiah 7:16 “Before the child will know to refuse the evil and choose the good…”

Key Point:
Moral accountability requires knowledge. Scripture teaches that children are morally innocent until they reach awareness.

Illustration:
A newborn cannot choose obedience or rebellion any more than a stone can choose to fall upward. Accountability presupposes understanding.

4. Jesus Affirmed the Moral Purity of Children

Matthew 18:3 “Unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 19:14 “For of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

Key Point:
If children were born totally depraved and guilty, Jesus’ statements would be incomprehensible. He holds children up as models, not warnings.

Illustration:
Jesus did not say, “Become corrupt like children,” but rather “become like children”—humble, trusting, and unburdened by guilt.

5. Sin Is Always Presented as an Act, Not a Condition at Birth

1 John 3:4 “Sin is lawlessness.”

James 1:14–15 “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin.”

Key Point:
Sin occurs when a person knowingly violates God’s law. Scripture never defines sin as something inherited at conception.

Illustration:
A person is not a thief because he is born, but because he steals. Likewise, a person is not a sinner until he sins.

6. Adam’s Sin Brought Death, Not Guilt, to Humanity

Romans 5:12 “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

Key Point:
Death is the inherited consequence; sin is personal. The passage says death spread to all because all sinned, not because Adam sinned for them.

Illustration:
Children inherit their parents’ mortality, not their moral failures. A child may inherit a genetic disease, but not a criminal record.

7. Inherited Depravity Undermines God’s Justice and the Gospel Call

Ecclesiastes 7:29 “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.”

Acts 17:30 “God now commands all men everywhere to repent.”

Key Point:
If humans are born incapable of responding to God, then divine commands to repent are meaningless and unjust.

Illustration:
Commanding a paralyzed man to run a race—and punishing him for failing—would be cruelty, not justice.

8. The Biblical Teaching: Inherited Weakness, Not Inherited Guilt

Scripture teaches:

• Humans inherit mortality (Hebrews 9:27)
• Humans inherit an environment corrupted by sin (Romans 8:20–22)
• Humans develop sinful habits through choice (John 8:34)

But never inherited guilt.

9. Summary of the Error

Inherited depravity:

• Contradicts individual accountability (Ezekiel 18)
• Denies the innocence of children (Deut. 1:39)
• Misrepresents Jesus’ teaching (Matt. 18:3)
• Redefines sin apart from law (1 John 3:4)
• Makes God unjust and arbitrary

10. Biblical Conclusion

Man is not born a sinner—he becomes a sinner by choice.

Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

All sin—but none are born guilty.

When people speak of an “age of accountability,” they are usually referring to a theological concept rather than a term found explicitly in Scripture. The idea is that a person is not held morally or spiritually culpable for sin until he or she reaches a level of cognitive, moral, and spiritual awareness sufficient to understand right and wrong and to respond knowingly to God’s commands.

The concept typically includes the following elements:

1. Moral awareness and understanding
   Advocates of an age of accountability argue that guilt presupposes knowledge and intent. Until a child can meaningfully understand God’s law, recognize personal wrongdoing, and grasp the consequences of sin, that child is not held accountable in the same way as a morally responsible adult. This reasoning is often connected to passages such as Romans 5:13 (“sin is not counted where there is no law”) and James 4:17 (“whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin”).
2. Development rather than a fixed age
   Most who hold this view do not claim there is a specific, universal age (such as 12 or 13). Instead, accountability is understood as a developmental threshold that varies from person to person, depending on maturity, mental capacity, and understanding. This is why the term is sometimes criticized as misleading; it suggests a precise age where Scripture gives none.
3. God’s justice and mercy
   The doctrine is often motivated by a concern to uphold both the justice and mercy of God. It is argued that a just God would not condemn those who lack the capacity to understand sin or respond in faith. Texts such as Genesis 18:25 (“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”) are frequently cited to support this reasoning.
4. Biblical inferences commonly used
   While Scripture does not explicitly teach an “age of accountability,” proponents infer the idea from several passages:

• Deuteronomy 1:39 speaks of children who “today have no knowledge of good or evil.”
• Isaiah 7:15–16 refers to a time before a child “knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.”
• Jesus’ attitude toward children (e.g., Matthew 19:14) is taken to suggest a special standing before God.

In summary
When people suggest an age of accountability, they are usually saying that God does not hold individuals guilty of sin until they are capable of moral understanding and conscious rebellion. It is an inferential doctrine, not an explicitly defined biblical teaching, and Christians differ on whether it is valid, how it should be defined, and how it relates to original sin and salvation.

Does the Bible say that little babies are by nature born in sin

By Wayne Jackson | Christian Courier

During a speech some time back before the American Humanist Association, television mogul Ted Turner leveled a blast at Christianity for its alleged doctrine that infants are born in sin.

The fact is, though this teaching is popular with certain denominational groups, it is unknown to the Bible. However, a few biblical passages are perverted in a futile attempt to support the doctrine.

In Ephesians 2:1-3, Paul wrote:

And you did he make alive, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein ye once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

Here, the apostle describes unregenerate people as being by nature children of wrath.

Calvinists appeal to this verse for support of the doctrine of hereditary total depravity. They feel the passage is affirming that humans are by birth children of wrath.

Baptist writer B. H. Carroll contended that Ephesians 2:3 “knocks the bottom out of the thought that sin consists in the wilful transgression of a known commandment.”

He argued that the allusion is to “original sin” (1973, 105-106). This is the theory that all people are born tainted with the guilt of Adam’s sin.

The assertion is absolutely false. There are several interesting observations that can be made in connection with Ephesians 2:1ff.

Personal Sin

Note that in verse one the apostle plainly declares that spiritual death is the consequence of your trespasses and sins (ASV). Note the word “your.” This emphasizes personal sin.

We are not spiritually dead as a result of Adam’s transgression. Though the term “your” is not found in the King James Version (following the Textus Receptus), it is amply supported by evidence from ancient Greek manuscripts, early versions, and the writings of the “church fathers” in the post-apostolic period (Salmond 1956, 283).

Habitual Sin

In verse three Paul affirms that all of us “were . . . children of wrath.” The verb emetha (“were”) is an imperfect tense form. The imperfect tense describes continuity of action as viewed in the past.

Thus, here it depicts the habitual style of life which had characterized these saints prior to their conversion. Had the apostle intended to convey the notion of inherited sinfulness at the time of their birth, he easily could have expressed that idea by saying, “you became by birth children of wrath.”

They Did It To Themselves

It is also significant that the verb is in the middle voice in the Greek Testament. The middle voice is employed to suggest the subject’s personal involvement in the action of the verb. The language, therefore, stresses that the sinful condition of the Ephesians had been their individual responsibility.

Hence, combining the imperfect tense and middle voice aspects of the verb, we might paraphrase the passage thusly: “you kept on making yourselves children of wrath.”

Sinful Custom By Years of Practice

It is probable that the King James Version, and most subsequent translations, reflect a Calvinistic bias in the rendition, “by nature children of wrath.”

The Greek word phusei, rendered “nature” in our common versions, can denote “a mode of feeling and acting which by long habit has become nature” (Thayer 1958, 660).

Edward Robinson observed that the term can be understood of a “native mode of thinking, feeling, acting” on the part of those who are “unenlightened by the influence of divine truth” (1855, 771).

Clearly, these people, by habitual practice, had become worthy of divine wrath. Hugo McCord’s translation has an excellent rendition of this passage. It suggests that the Ephesians had “by custom” become children of wrath.

Wiener contended that their trespasses and sins had made them “natural children of wrath” (1882, 270). Moule suggested that the phrase rendered “by nature children of wrath” might be equivalent to saying, “left to ourselves we are destined to suffer the consequences of sin” (1953, 174).

Thus, the Ephesians, in their unregenerate state, had become, by long practice of sin, deserving of the wrath of God. These thoughts are consistent with the immediate context and with the tenor of the Bible as a whole.

The Consequences of False Doctrine

It is worthy of note that if this passage teaches that babies are born totally depraved, one would have to infer necessarily that infants who die in that condition are lost since they are clearly designated as “children of wrath” (cf. the expression “son of perdition” in John 17:12).

Yet, this is a conclusion that even denominationalists are loath to accept.

The Bible does not teach the doctrine of inherited depravity. The dogma is strictly of human origin.

And it is a serious tragedy that those who profess to be friends of the Scriptures will teach this error, thereby subjecting the Christian system to unjustified criticism.

Ephesians 2:3 does not teach inherited depravity.

Sources

• Carroll, B. H. 1973. An Interpretation of the English Bible. Vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
• Moule, C. F. D. 1953. An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek. Cambridge, England: University Press.
• Robinson, Edward. 1855. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. New York, NY: Harper & Bros.
• Salmond, S. D. F. 1956. Ephesians. The Expositor’s Greek Testament. Vol. 3. W. R. Nichol, ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
• Thayer, J. H. 1958. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. Edinburgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark.
• Wiener, G. B. 1882. Grammar of New Testament Greek. Edinburgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark.

eology Alignment

Core Emphases

• Original sin affirmed
• Prevenient grace extended to all
• Emphasis on human response enabled by grace

Accountability Framework
Methodism teaches that prevenient grace covers children until they are capable of knowingly resisting or accepting God’s grace. This creates functional agreement with an age of accountability, grounded in grace rather than innocence.

Key Theologian

• John Wesley

Teaching Emphasis
Children are not condemned because grace is already at work before conscious faith.

Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ / Christian Churches)

Core Emphases

• “Speak where the Bible speaks”
• No creeds; emphasis on biblical language
• Baptism for the remission of sins following belief

Accountability Framework
Strong affirmation that sin requires conscious transgression. Children are not guilty of sin until capable of understanding law and choosing rebellion.

Key Scriptures

• Ezekiel 18:20
• Isaiah 7:15–16
• Deuteronomy 1:39

Teaching Emphasis
Reject inherited guilt; accountability arises with moral awareness.

Unified Teaching Slide (Recommended)

Shared Convictions Across Traditions

• God is perfectly just
• God is abundantly merciful
• Scripture never gives a numerical age
• God judges hearts, not merely actions

Anchor Text
Genesis 18:25 — “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”