Spiritual Hiccups - You Talking to Me?

I've blogged on this before, but Peter raises the issue himself in today's gospel. "Lord, are you telling this parable for us or for everyone?"  Modern day Christians, especially Protestants, are prone to think of the Bible as an evangelical tool.  We presume that everything in it is spoken for everyone, that if we could just get everyone to read it and believe what it says, the Kingdom would surely come.

But of course this is a relatively modern, Protestant notion.  For the first 1500 or so years of Christianity, almost no Christians owned a Bible.  And no one gave Bibles to non-Christians.  It took the invention of the printing press and the development of high literacy rates before Protestants could insist that every individual should read Scripture for himself or herself.  And this idea needed to become ingrained before handing out Bibles made any sense as a conversion technique.

All of this is to say that for most of Christian history, the Bible and its teachings weren't not necessarily thought to apply equally to everyone.  Jesus himself, in today's reading, suggests that those who weren't aware of what Jesus' return meant would not be held accountable the same way his followers would. 

Some Christians are quick to condemn non-believers, but Jesus seems to say that it is believers who need to be on their toes, that they are the ones who will be held to higher standards and scrutiny.  And I suspect that if we believers did hold ourselves to higher standards, that might prove to be the most effective sort of evangelistic witness.

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