Romans 8:38

f. The Apostle's personal conviction given in confirmation of all that has been said, especially of Romans 8:37. πέπεισμαι cf. 2 Timothy 1:12. οὔτε θάνατος οὔτε ζωὴ : death is mentioned first, either with Romans 8:36 in mind, or as the most tremendous enemy the Apostle could conceive. If Christ's love can hold us in and through death, what is left for us to fear? Much of the N.T. bears on this very point, cf. John 8:51; John 10:28; John 11:25 f., 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 1 Corinthians 15; 2 Corinthians 4:16 to 2 Corinthians 5:5; Romans 14:8; Hebrews 2:14 f. The blank horror of dying is annihilated by the love of Christ. Neither death nor life is to be explained: explanations “only limit the flight of the Apostle's thoughts just when they would soar above all limitation” (Gifford). οὔτε ἄγγελοι οὔτε ἀρχαὶ : this, according to the best authorities, forms a second pair of forces conceivably hostile to the Christian. As in every pair there is a kind of contrast, some have sought one here also: either making ἄγγελοι good and ἀρχαὶ evil powers, though both spiritual; or ἄγγελοι heavenly, and ἀρχαὶ (as in Luke 12:11; Titus 3:1) earthly powers, in which case either might be either good or bad. But this is arbitrary: and a comparison of 1 Corinthians 15:24; Ephesians 1:21 favours a suggestion in S. and H. that possibly in a very early copy οὔτε δυνάμεις had been accidentally omitted after οὔτε ἀρχαὶ, and then added in the margin, but reinserted in a wrong place. The T.R. “neither angels nor principalities nor powers” brings together all the conceptions with which the Apostle peopled the invisible spiritual world, whatever their character, and declares their inability to come between us and the love of Christ. οὔτε ἐνεστῶτα οὔτε μέλλοντα : cf. 1 Corinthians 3:22. οὔτε ὕψωμα οὔτε βάθος : no dimensions of space. Whether these words pictured something to Paul's imagination we cannot tell; the patristic attempts to give them definiteness are not happy. οὔτε τις κτίσις ἑτέρα : nor any created thing of different kind. All the things Paul has mentioned come under the head of κτίσις; if there is anything of a different kind which comes under the same head, he includes it too. The suggestions of “another world,” or of “aspects of reality out of relation to our faculties,” and therefore as yet unknown to us, are toys, remote from the seriousness and passion of the Apostle's mind. Nothing that God has made, whatever be its nature, shall be able to separate us ἀπὸ τῆς ἁγάπης τοῦ θεοῦ τῆς ἐν Χ. Ἰ. τοῦ κ. ἡμῷν, The love of Christ is God's love. manifested to us in Him; and it is only in Him that a Divine love is manifested which can inspire the triumphant assurance of this verse.