Tag Archives: New Testament

Saint Aristobulus: First Bishop of Britain

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Aristobulus

In the first century, only a few years after the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, a certain man who had been living in Palestine began traveling around the Mediterranean preaching about Jesus Christ to the pagan Gentiles. I’m not talking about St. Paul, although he did travel with St. Paul. He also traveled with and assisted St. Andrew on his journeys, and is even numbered among the 70 (72) disciples sent out by Jesus in Luke 10. He knew St. Paul probably through the apostle Barnabas, his brother. And it was while traveling with Paul and Barnabas that the apostle Paul ordained him as a bishop and sent him further West than Paul could then go. This man, a brown skinned, Jewish Cypriot, hailing from Palestine, traveled more than 2,000 miles Westward toward Spain, and then northward into Britannia. Continue reading →

The Project – Part 3

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This has been a difficult little article series for me to write because it’s stretched me so much.  These are big concepts, and the implications of chasing them out are big.  Though the writing hasn’t come easy, part 3 has finally arrived.  [See Part 1 and Part 2].  So far I’ve given sort of a thumbnail proposal about how we ought to look at the pictures we find in Genesis 1-2 and in Revelation 21-22 (the first two and last two chapters of the Bible, the story of the world).  It’s a difficult endeavor to imagine a world which depended upon sinless people to tend and care for it.  And imagining a re-created world surging with the glory of God which affords redeemed humanity the dignity of a purposeful, active eternity is even more difficult. Continue reading →

The Project – Part 2

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On either side of the river is the tree of life … and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

In part 1 of The Project, I looked at the “project-ness” of Creation, the somewhat alarming notion that the world was meant to go somewhere before the Fall.  God made a world full of potential  – a transitory kosmos full of exploding stars and volatile elements, untamed earth and nameless creatures.  He set capable stewards in a sacred turf with the charge to master it and then expand.  Imagine where that could have gone.  But the stewards strayed from their glorious task and onto the path of “Self Divorced from God.”  That path has thenceforth fractured humanity, taking what was the noble man and yielding, as one author put it, “two pitiable horrors, a corpse and a ghost.” Continue reading →