We Believe: For Us and For Our Salvation, He Came Down from Heaven
The Purpose of Incarnation
The Nicene Creed states with characteristic precision that the Lord Jesus Christ “came down from heaven… and was made man” and that he did so “for us and for our salvation.” This classic theological affirmation captures the central purpose of the incarnation: Christ became human to save sinners. This simple clause from the Nicene Creed sheds light on the profound connection between God’s love and our need for rescue, a connection the early Church explored with both intellectual rigor and devotional wonder.
When we examine the earliest Christian controversies, we discover that the reality of Christ’s human nature was contested from early on. The Docetists (from Greek dokein, “to seem”) claimed that Christ only appeared human but wasn’t truly incarnate. His body, they suggested, was merely a divine phantom moving through human history.
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Against this view, Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Trallians around 110 AD, declared in paragraph 9:
Be deaf, therefore, whenever anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David, who was the son of Mary; who really was born, who both ate and drank; who really was persecuted under Pontius Pilate, who really was crucified and died while those in heaven and on earth and under the earth looked on.
Adding meaning to the incarnation, Irenaeus wrote in the preface to Book V of Against Heresies,
[O]ur Lord Jesus Christ… did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.
Irenaus, Against Heresies, book 5
This was not philosophical hair-splitting. These theologians believed that if Jesus did not become fully human, then humanity itself remained unredeemed. Salvation required divine participation in the full scope of human nature and experience, except for the experience of sin.
The Biblical Foundation
The phrase “for us and for our salvation” synthesizes several key biblical themes. Throughout his letters, Paul repeatedly emphasizes Christ’s self-giving “for us.” In Galatians 1:4, Christ “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.” Similarly, in Ephesians 5:2, “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us,” while Titus 2:14 describes one “who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness.” In addition, the redemptive purpose of Christ’s coming emerges clearly in passages like Luke 19:10, where “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost,” and John 3:17, where God sent his Son “in order that the world might be saved through him.” The connection between incarnation and salvation is perhaps most evident in Hebrews 2:14-15:
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death… and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.
Hebrews 2:14-15
Here, Christ’s assumption of “flesh and blood” directly links to his redemptive purpose—he becomes human precisely to save humans. The book of Hebrews explores the significance of Christ’s incarnation, using language that would become foundational for later theological debates:
Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest… to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
Hebrews 2:16-17
Salvation required the Word to take on our humanity with such thoroughness that not a single dimension of human experience would remain untouched by divine mercy. Like a physician who must enter the quarantined space to heal the afflicted, Christ plunged into the depths of our condition.
What Is Not Assumed Is Not Redeemed
This biblical insight was later distilled into a principle that became the defining axiom in post-Nicene Christological controversies. Gregory of Nazianzus articulated it most memorably in his Epistle 101 to Cledonius: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” If Christ did not assume some aspect of human nature (mind, will, emotions, flesh), that aspect remained unredeemed.
The Nicene affirmation that Christ “was made man” deliberately employed a term (ἐνανθρωπήσαντα) that encompassed the totality of human nature. It reflected the consensus that emerged from these debates: Christ assumed every aspect of humanity (except sin) to redeem every aspect of humanity. What exactly did Christ assume in becoming human? The early church fathers were remarkably comprehensive in their answer. They insisted that Christ took on everything that constitutes human experience. As Irenaeus explains:
He therefore passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are of this age, being at the same time made to them an example of piety, righteousness, and submission; a youth for youths, becoming an example to youths, and thus sanctifying them for the Lord. So likewise He was an old man for old men, that He might be a perfect Master for all, not merely as respects the setting forth of the truth, but also as regards age, sanctifying at the same time the aged also, and becoming an example to them likewise. Then, at last, He came on to death itself, that He might be “the first-born from the dead, that in all things He might have the pre-eminence.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 2, Chapter 22
Indeed, Christ assumed not just a body but a human mind and will. In the Christological debates following the Council of Nicaea, Apollinaris proposed that the divine Logos replaced the human mind in Christ. Objecting, Gregory of Nazianzus wrote in Epistle 101 to Cledonius:
If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is himself really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which He has not assumed He has not healed.
Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101 to Cledonius
Christ also assumed the full range of human emotions. In “The Unity of Christ,” for example, Cyril of Alexandria defended Christ’s experience of genuine human emotions and argued that the logos truly experienced hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sorrow. The comprehensiveness of Christ’s assumption of human nature is astounding. In Christ, God united himself with the concrete realities of human existence—developmental stages, emotional experiences, intellectual processes, volitional struggles, and physical limitations. Nothing genuinely human (except sin) was foreign to him.
Nicene Christology in Art: The Isenheim Altarpiece
Moving forward more than a millennium, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (seen as the cover image above) offers a powerful visual meditation on the redemptive purpose of Christ’s incarnation. Created for a monastery hospital, its central crucifixion panel depicts Christ with a body twisted in agony, skin covered with sores and lesions, and fingers splayed in distortion. The cross itself bends under the weight of his suffering.
By depicting Christ with lesions like those of the patients in that hospital, Grünewald visually declares that Christ assumes even the most painful aspects of human experience. The altarpiece stood where patients could see it during their treatments, communicating that Christ was present in their suffering because he had assumed similar suffering.
When the hospital patients gazed upon this gruesome depiction of Christ’s broken body, they saw their own suffering reflected and transformed. Their diseases—their twisted limbs, their painful sores—had been taken up into God’s own experience. Nothing they suffered was foreign to this Christ, who had “for us and for our salvation” embraced the fullness of human pain.
For Us and For Our Salvation
The phrase “for us and for our salvation” captures the purposeful nature of the incarnation. Christ didn’t assume human nature out of divine curiosity or cosmic experiment. His assumption of flesh had a specific salvific purpose that flows through every aspect of Christian theology.
In the incarnation, divine love meets human need at the deepest level. The eternal Word enters the fullness of the human condition completely. He doesn’t just offer divine sympathy for human suffering; he experiences it firsthand. He doesn’t merely forgive human weakness from a distance; he assumes it into himself, transforming it from within.
The incarnation thus transforms our experience of suffering, limitation, and mortality. When we face pain, we know that Christ has already incorporated that pain into his own experience. When we struggle with human weakness, we remember that Christ has assumed that weakness and redeemed it. Finally, when we confront death, we trust that Christ has brought even this final enemy within the scope of his redemptive work.
“For us and for our salvation” tells us that God’s assumption of human flesh demonstrates a love so concrete that it took on bones and blood, hunger and thirst, laughter and tears. In Jesus Christ, God’s eternal Word became man for us and for our salvation—entering our story to transform it from within. The mystery of the incarnation justifies our primal hope that nothing in human experience lies beyond the reach of divine redemption because everything truly human has been assumed by God himself in Christ.
Image: Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. Courtesy of Sartle.
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