What will separate us from the love of Christ?
"What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? … No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:35, 37–39) In this culminating moment of his great theological exposition in the Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul offers one of the most triumphant declarations of divine fidelity in all of Scripture. The question he poses—“What will separate us from the love of Christ?”—is not asked in doubt, but in rhetorical defiance of anything that might suggest such a possibility. The list of threats—both temporal and cosmic—reflects the full spectrum of human suffering and spiritual adversity. Yet Paul’s assuran...