Thread by @scottrswain

In addition to a good night’s rest, one benefit of going to bed early is that you miss late night Twitter.

But let me tell you a little story. I am a Florida man, born and bred, but I went to seminary in NC. In my last year in seminary, I married a girl from NC.

One day, while my wife was at work teaching second graders and I was at home working on my thesis, I decided to send her some flowers. I called the florist. She took my information. Then she asked me a question: “Is this fornication?”

Now, dear reader, I was raised on the KJV and I knew very well what fornication was.

And I was offended.

No. This was not fornication, I thought to myself. I have taken a wife by upright and honest means.

More than being offended, however, I was surprised—shocked, in fact, that the local florist was policing such matters.

Well, rather than protesting, I had enough sense to ask her to restate her question, which she did: “Is this for an occasion?”

You see, dear reader, even after three years in NC, my Florida-trained ear was still not fully adept at hearing a NC-trained tongue. We were two countrymen separated by a common language.

What’s the moral of this story? If your ear was trained in the dialect of EFS, etc, then you are probably going to have a difficult time hearing people using the same language in a different dialect.

Understanding is not impossible, of course! But it will often require listening closely, not assuming that our first understanding of something said is the right one, especially when the person on the other side of the phone says, “No. that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Before 2020, I’d published a number of things on the Trinity: including the pactum salutis, the obedience of the eternal Son, etc. But until 2020, I’d never published on EFS. When I finally published on that topic in 2020, I stated my views very clearly.

Here’s the thing: folks in the field who read, e.g., my 2008 piece on the obedience of the Son (Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and not) never read it as an affirmation of EFS. Why not? Because it speaks in a traditional dialect with at least a fair degree of clarity.

All of the sudden, in 2016, my 2008 article published in a research journal, and my chapter on the pactum salutis in CD, started getting all kinds of attention. Pretty great, right? Well, not if they think you’re writing about fornication when you’re just writing for an occasion.

So if you want to know what I think about EFS, read the 2020 book. If you’re interested in the (much more interesting) topics of the pactum salutis, the relation between processions and missions, etc, read the other pieces.

But please pay attention to what they say and how they say it.

One last thing: I’m not offended by being misunderstood or even misrepresented when that is done for non-malicious reasons. That’s just part of publishing.

Folks have been asking me to clarify and correct certain readings of my stuff for five years and I have not taken the time to do it. Partly because I don’t have the time. Partly because I don’t take myself all that seriously.

But, alas, here I am, Florida man, chacos and sweatpants, offering a note of clarification. However, other than a few more paragraphs on the topic in an essay I owe to @MattMBarrett, I don’t plan on addressing this again. Peace.

Here’s a red panda