For us and for our salvation

It is no news that I love liturgy. Or rather, I love being excited about liturgy: I love the passion that still transpires through prayers crafted centuries ago. The Nicene creed has probably been said by billions of people (in various forms and languages) and is an example of such a powerful prayer. I’ll focus on one line:

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.

nicene

Icon of the Nicene Creed in the public domain

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven! It’s not abstract! It’s not “For the world”, or “for humanity”. The original Greek actually starts with “For us humans” – making it clear that “us” is not simply a byword for an abstract concept, but something deeply and utterly personal and communal. The same goes for “our salvation”, where the Greek ἡμετέραν is the emphatic form of “our” (although, admittedly, this form is far more frequent than its non-emphatic counterpart ἡμῶν).

More than that: it is for us and for our salvation that Jesus came down from heaven. Jesus did not simply come to be nailed upon a cross and provide salvation. No, he came first for us. Redemption is not a cold, mechanical adjustment of a cosmic balance sheet. Penal substitution, without love, is nothing. There is a tendency, especially in evangelical circles, to focus too much on sin and thereby on the need for salvation through atonement. This focus is backwards: his love comes first. “For us” comes first, because it is only in the light of this love that the cross can begin to make sense.

The Nicene Creed does not say “For our sanctification and for our salvation”, either. The Incarnation is Jesus coming down from heaven, to meet us where we are. This isn’t about meeting the potential, sanctified person we will end up being – no, it is about meeting us in the here and now.

But the Nicene Creed does not stop at saying “For us” – it recognises the importance of atonement. “For us” is where Christ meets us, “for our salvation” is where he takes us. In saying the Creed, we should be taken by this movement and filled with a hope that has no bound – a hope of salvation, grounded in the intimate knowledge of Christ’s love.

Next time you read the Nicene Creed, feel the passion and the involvement it invites: from the very first “We believe” to the final agreement “Amen”.

Joseph Turner

So I love liturgy, but mostly because I don’t go to a C of E church! Consequently when I say it it seems fresh and special. Saying it week after week though surely means that the extent to which you say it with passion is reduced? Just like if you sang the sang worship song every service it would soon get tiresome?
- http://edsslipper.net/ Pierre
  
  Loving liturgy from not going to a CofE church is akin to Anglicans loving Wesleyan hymns because they don’t go to a methodist church… ;-)
  
  Let me put it this way: if all the worship songs you sang in a service were brand new, you’d struggle with the music and concentrate on that (at least a little bit) rather than on the worship itself. The same goes with liturgy – it is a form of worship which is liberating: freeing people up to actually mean what they say rather than having to think of how to end the sentence they started about 10 “dear Lord”s ago…
  
  Even more so, especially in the case of the Nicene Creed, it is a guide. You wouldn’t say reading John 3:16 over and over again would be tiresome, would you? As long as it is prayerfully said, it can enlighten and guide our hearts, minds and souls into areas we haven’t contemplated before – such as “for us”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying liturgy is on the same level as Scripture ! It’s just a helpful analogy.
  
  And, yes, the same liturgy every single week *is* tiresome, and I don’t always get revelation from saying the Creed. But the service is not wholly the same liturgy week after week after week. There are 8 or 9 communion prayers to choose from; the collect and post-communion prayers change every week. Additionally, there are broadly speaking two main (communion) services to choose from, and there is some liberty within each of them.
  Morning Prayer is a tad more restricted if you want to do it properly, but then communion-free services are not that frequent in liturgical Anglican churches…
Stephen Wigmore

The story of the origin of the Nicene Creed: a Hammerblow struck at Heresy.

http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1996/issue51/51h011.html
- http://edsslipper.net/ Pierre
  
  Took me a while, but I finally got around to reading that. Thanks for the link. I love church history told candidly!

Ed's Slipper

About predestination and smaller matters

For us and for our salvation