How does my personal theology come to bear in moments like the death of my G.O.A.T, Kobe Bryant? My theology emphasizes the grandiosity of God’s Grace as Christ. As such, when I attempt to reflect on Kobe’s eternal destiny, I can think from this grandiose position. Not knowing Kobe personally makes it really hard to know exactly what his spiritual life was. So, I must rely on the reports of him being a serious Catholic Christian. As I somewhat sketched and detailed in my last post, there is latitude, in my view, because of the expansive and personal nature of God’s Grace, for those who are outside my tradition to equally have a saving faith; albeit, these must be within some gambit of the Christian tradition. Again, and as such, it is reasonable and hopeful for me to conclude that Kobe is now in the eternal Joy of the living God; enfolded into the garb of Christ’s mediating humanity. I don’t know where the others on the helicopter with Kobe were at spiritually, save Kobe’s daughter. I do maintain that children automatically enter the presence of Christ upon their ‘untimely’ deaths (I think of aborted children this way as well); which would mean that Gigi Bryant and Alyssa Altobelli (I’ve made an inchoate argument for that here) went immediately into the presence of the risen Christ the moment the helicopter crashed.

The ground of my thinking, in regard to the grandiosity of God’s Grace for us in Christ, comes from my doctrine of election; a doctrine that was first noticed and articulated (at least in the way he does it) by Karl Barth. To summarize Barth’s doctrine of election, in a sort of in nuce way, Tom Greggs writes:

Election’s nature is . . . Gospel. The dialectic evident in Romans remains and can be seen between electing God and elected human in its most extreme form in terms of election and rejection. Humanity continues to need to be rescued by God in its rejection of Him. What is new is that this dialectic is now considered in a wholly Christological way which brings together the Yes and No of God in the simultaneity of the elected and rejected Christ. It is He who demonstrates salvation as its originator and archetype. It is, therefore, in the humanity of the elected Christ that one needs to consider the destiny of human nature.[1]

 Greggs helps us understand what is at stake in God’s choice to be for and with us in Christ in Barth’s Christologically styled doctrine of election. The ‘destiny’ of human nature itself, which bespeaks the way Barth thinks of salvation in ontological terms (albeit not abstractly from the concrete human nature of Jesus Christ), is the very ground and basis upon which all creation and its purpose finds orientation. Here is how Barth intones such things:

This all rests on the fact that from the very first He participates in the divine election; that that election is also His election; that it is He Himself who posits this beginning of all things; that it is He Himself who executes the decision which issues in the establishment of the covenant between God and man; that He too, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is the electing God. If this is not the case, then in respect of the election, in respect of this primal and basic decision of God, we shall have to pass by Jesus Christ, asking of God the Father, or perhaps of the Holy Spirit, how there can be any disclosure of this decision at all. For where can it ever be disclosed to us except where it is executed? The result will be, of course, that we shall be driven to speculating about a decretum absolutum instead of grasping and affirming in God’s electing the manifest grace of God. And that means that we shall not know into whose hands we are committing ourselves when we believe in the divine predestination. So much depends upon our acknowledgement of the Son, of the Son of God, as the Subject of this predestination, because it is only in the Son that it is revealed to us as the predestination of God, and therefore of the Father and the Holy Spirit, because it is only as we believe in the Son that we can also believe in the Father and the Holy Spirit, and therefore in the one divine election.[2]

These might seem like weighty and technical matters, and they are. But let’s attempt to regroup. The Barth[ian] understanding of divine election—which is the bringing together of divinity and humanity in inseparably related but distinct ways—grounds the outer reality of creation in the inner reality of God’s triune life and choice to be freely with us and for us in Jesus Christ. This means that creation’s ground is God’s Graciousness ‘all the way down’ (as TF Torrance says it).

If the above is the case, as Barth presses, we have no space to ‘speculate’ (i.e. decretum absolutum) about who God is in Himself and for us, and what He is about in the creative process. So, when I attempt to think about Kobe’s eternal destiny, and the others with Kobe, my very first thought as a Christian must be to think that God’s choice has always already been for and with them; rather than against them. If this is so, there is a correspondence of faith available and waiting for each of them, or there was prior to death, wherein they could say Yes to God, from God’s Yes for them in Christ. Not knowing where these folks were at with this choice for God, clearly, it is not really possible to dogmatically state where they all went when they died in the helicopter crash (except for the exceptions already noted). What is possible though is the possibility for hope; hope because creation’s eternal destiny has always been oriented toward Christ rather than away from Him; hope because God has freely chosen to not be humanity’s enemy, but instead, to be its brother, friend, and bridegroom. As such, because of the grandiosity of God’s Grace, there is always room for eternal hope, because God is an eternal God of Grace in Himself and then for us.

True, there are things in this post that are suggestive, but hopefully some sort of gist comes across. Maranatha

[1] Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, 26.

[2] Barth, CD II/2:111.