Catholic Commentary
The Triumphant Hymn: Nothing Can Separate Us from God's Love (Part 2)
39nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from God’s love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:39 declares that nothing in creation—whether celestial powers, cosmic forces, or any other being—can separate believers from God's love revealed in Christ Jesus. Paul presents this relationship as a permanent covenant analogous to marriage, where divine love transcends all potential threats and remains unbreakable regardless of circumstance or time.
Nothing in all creation—not cosmic powers, not personal despair, not your own sin—can pry you from God's grip because His love is not a created thing but the uncreated God Himself.
"which is in Christ Jesus our Lord"
The love of God is not abstract or impersonal—it is located, incarnate, and named. The prepositional phrase en Christō Iēsou (in Christ Jesus) is among Paul's most theologically laden formulations, appearing over 160 times in his letters. Here it specifies that the love of God has a specific address in history: the person of Jesus Christ. The title "our Lord" (tou Kyriou hēmōn) clinches the personal, relational register—this is not a cosmic force but a Lord who has claimed his people. The love of God has, in the Incarnation, entered creation and become indestructible within it.
Catholic tradition illuminates this verse with particular depth at several levels.
The Love of God as Divine Attribute: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God is love" (CCC 221, citing 1 John 4:8), and that this love is not a reaction to human merit but flows from God's very nature. Because God's love is identical with his divine essence, it shares in divine immutability and omnipotence. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 20) argues that God loves all things insofar as they exist—since existence itself is His gift—but loves the redeemed with the superabundant love of adoption (agapē). Nothing can undo what is grounded in the divine essence itself.
Patristic Reception: St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, marvels that Paul does not say merely that these things will not separate us, but that they cannot—underscoring that the impossibility is ontological, not merely voluntary. St. Augustine connects this verse to the doctrine of perseverance: the elect are held not by the strength of their own grip on God, but by the strength of God's grip on them (De Dono Perseverantiae, ch. 1).
Christological Center: The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (§22) teaches that Christ, "the new Adam," has united Himself to every human being, and that through Him God has shown the depth of solidarity with humanity. The love "in Christ Jesus" is therefore not merely a past declaration but an ongoing incarnational reality.
Baptismal and Ecclesial Dimension: Catholic theology reads "us" not as isolated individuals but as the Church, the Body of Christ. The love from which nothing can separate "us" is covenantal and corporate—the bond between Christ and His Bride (Eph 5:25–32). This grounds the Catholic understanding that perseverance in grace is not a private achievement but is sustained by the sacramental life of the Church.
Contemporary Catholics face a culture that frequently offers rival accounts of love—transactional, therapeutic, conditional, and above all fragile. Many Catholics carry interior wounds from experiences of abandonment, failed relationships, or seasons of spiritual desolation in which God seems absent or indifferent. Romans 8:39 speaks with surgical precision into this experience.
The verse's concrete challenge is this: it invites the reader to locate their security not in their felt sense of God's love, which fluctuates, but in the ontological fact of it, which does not. St. John of the Cross, writing from the darkness of the "night of the soul," would have recognized this verse as a lifeline—the love of God is not extinguished when we cannot feel it. The "height and depth" from which we cannot be separated includes the heights of spiritual consolation and the depths of desolation alike.
Practically, a Catholic might meditate on this verse during Eucharistic Adoration, returning to the specific name at the end—"Christ Jesus our Lord"—as an anchor. The Rosary's Luminous Mysteries, particularly the Institution of the Eucharist, make this love visible and tangible: God has bound himself to creation not just in words but in sacrament. No anxiety, no sin, no suffering, no abandonment by other people places a believer outside the reach of that love—only the free, deliberate rejection of it does (CCC 1037).
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Commentary
Romans 8:39 — "nor height, nor depth"
Paul's final pair of cosmic opposites—hypsōma (height) and bathos (depth)—likely borrows from Hellenistic astrology, where these terms described the zenith and nadir of a star's arc through the heavens, positions associated with the influence of cosmic powers over human fate. For Paul's original audience, steeped in a Greco-Roman world that took astral determinism seriously, this is a pointed dismantling of the astrological worldview: not even the highest celestial power at its peak influence, nor the deepest abyss of demonic or chthonic force, can pry a believer out of God's grasp. The cosmos, in its full vertical dimension—from the highest heaven to the deepest underworld—is declared impotent against divine love.
This vertical pairing is the climax of a rhetorical list begun in verse 38, which covered temporal dimensions (present/future), quasi-personal powers (angels, principalities), and now spatial extremes. Paul has systematically exhausted every conceivable category of threat. The list is not arbitrary but architecturally designed to produce the overwhelming rhetorical effect of totality: nothing in the entire structure of reality stands outside the sweep of this claim.
"nor any other created thing"
This phrase (oute tis ktisis hetera) is the theological linchpin of the entire passage. Paul does not merely say "nothing I can think of"—he says nothing in the category of creation itself. This draws a sharp ontological line: on one side stands all of creation, finite and contingent; on the other stands the love of God, which is not a created thing but an attribute of the uncreated God. Because God's love belongs to the divine nature—not to the created order—no creature, however powerful, can reach it, diminish it, or interrupt it. The phrase functions as a universal quantifier, a logical closure: whatever Paul may have omitted from his list falls under this final canopy.
"will be able to separate us from the love of God"
The verb chōrizō (to separate, divide, put asunder) is the same root used in Matthew 19:6 of marriage—"what God has joined, let no man put asunder." The echo is striking: Paul presents the relationship between the believer and God's love as a covenantal bond of the most intimate kind, one that mirrors the indissolubility of matrimony. The future tense (dynēsetai) carries force: this is not a statement about current experience alone, but about the permanent, eschatological structure of the relationship.