Fortnightly
Monday, December 19th, 2016Bloggers must set a pace. Some can write daily, others weekly. I’m discovering my pace–heretofore best labeled as sporadic–to be fortnightly.
A fortnight represents a period of two weeks; it is derived from the combining of two Old English words–fourteen (feorwertyne) and night (niht). A typical description of the period of two weeks in England, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, it has all but disappeared from widespread American usage.
The word, however, became incidentally crucial to the nurturing of my Christian faith in my late adolescence and early twenties.
I learned the word from reading Christianity Today when it was a crusading evangelical magazine begun in 1957 and published in Washington, DC. The banner and masthead of the journal of opinion and faith at that time read, “Christianity Today–Published Fortnightly.”
The journal’s pioneering editor was the progressive evangelical thinker Carl F. H. Henry. The magazine in that era sought to be a journal of Christian thought aimed at competing with the more liberal Christian Century and the even more culturally cutting-edge Christianity and Crisis.
Henry’s essays, which appeared in the journal fortnightly, challenged my adolescent faith that had been nurtured in Baptist dispensationalist fundamentalism, not in a harsh and argumentative manner of essays in the other religious journals of the time, but with a call to intellectualism and scholarship that was critical but convivial.
Henry’s approach was clear and honest, challenging both liberal extremes and fundamentalist militaristic attitudes. For the first time in my life, I began to see that neo-orthodox thinkers such as Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, as well as the theological and social revolutionaries Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, were not the “enemies” that fundamentalism made them out to be.
Henry became a leader and philosophical spokesperson for what at the time had been labeled “new evangelicalism.” Fortnightly, thanks to Henry’s essays in Christianity Today, I moved toward becoming one of that movement’s adherents.
(As a journalist, I have tried hard to clarify the distinction many of my colleagues were missing and continue to miss between “evangelical” and “fundamentalist.” Unfortunately, as the writer Jim Wallis has noted, contemporary right-wing fundamentalists have co-opted the term “evangelical,” and working journalists have been unwitting allies in that co-opting.)
I could go on describing my nascent intellectual awakening in faith, but for now, I merely want to give myself a pace for this almost random blogging I’m doing, and I want to give Henry credit for teaching me to exercise my brain and spirit fortnightly. You likely will see his name often mentioned in future posts.