Matt, I don’t mean to make light of what you were saying, but the very last sentence remind me of a recent quote from Brian O’Driscoll the Irish Rugby Union captain: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”

Great post. I think this is really, really important. Too often post-fundamentalist or post-conservative or post-whatever Christians become contemptuous of their past, forget their roots, and act like spoilt teenagers. The least we owe our mothers and fathers in the faith is a bit of grace, affection and understanding. After all, they must have done something right if we remain passionately engaged with the faith, even though we’ve moved beyond them in some ways. By comparison, how well are we going to do in passing on the faith to the next generation?
Richard Mouw is someone who models this respect for his fundamentalist roots – see The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals can Learn from their Fundamentalist Heritage.

An ethic of loyalty is important – but I think that it deals more with how we treat or think or talk about people. In the example of the young boy loyalty may demand respect for and defense of his father – but it doesn’t demand that he also grow up and emulate his behavior by coming home drunk often. This is far afield from the real issue here though.
Doesn’t the ethic of hesed require that we look for and acknowledge the real good in the group? The attitude of occasional comments here that seem to emphasize criticism or ridicule of the conservative evangelical or fundamentalist church really bother me – for two reasons. (1) they lack both love and hesed and (2) I know that these churches are populated by many good men and women who are looking to follow God – and a failure to recognize this is simply wrong.
This is a thought-provoking post.

And this leads to another thought – those who come after us will almost certainly disagree with some of our positions, conclusions, and thoughts. How we treat our parents will impact how our children treat us – especially in our errors and mistakes.

At the risk of being misunderstood and disrespectful, I think Jesus Who is *hesed* incarnate did not model a ‘third way.’ While always giving people their rightful place in his life (a Dr Victor Matthews’ insight), he was never hesitant to excoriate their rigid conservativism that in the name of truth actually blocked people from encountering God. We do not do service to our forebears by winking at their warped grasp and judgmental expression of *truth* in their harshly legalistic, dehumanizing ways. I think the Bonhoeffer quote hits the nail exactly on the head.

But John,
Wouldn’t you agree that we also do not do service to our forebearers or descendants if in our desire to excoriate mistakes we fail to acknowledge the successes, or the fact that these forebearers are real live people?

I agree that we need to respect and honor our more fundamentalist brothers and sisters. However, Jesus says that we may have to leave behind family and friends to follow Him and that this may put a metaphoric sword between us and those closest to us. The important thing is to follow as we’re led and trust God. And although right now our relatives might not understand, maybe they will join us at some point. But I think it is good to carefully think about these things. It weighed on me to leave the Lutheran Church, because it was one of the only links I had to my forebearers, and while at times I miss it, I don’t regret having made the move.

RJS,
Yes, I agree with you and believe we need to honor our forbears’ faithfulness to the Lord even though we may perceive it to be skewed, and we need to treat them with great respect. The call is “to speak the truth in love.” I don’t want a fundamentalist mindset and model of “Christian” behavior to hinder those who are sincerely seeking a relationship with God.

My friend who is a pastor, and would be modeling a ‘third way’ often challenges me on my view. The hardest part of the challenge though is how close some comments come to contempt regarding a past he came out of.
I wonder if those who lead the ‘third way’ realize that the trickle down effect of their insightful questions can lead the average follower to be a fracturing agent in the church not a healthy part of the body.
I dont read from Bonhoffer the need to stay silent about all things done wrong by his father. Just not to belittle him in front of people that have no intention or working through it.
Blabbing in boooks and blogs about fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals to people who are not going to go and seek to help them, but rather to pit people against them can’t be the best way. (So too should they not do the same to Third Wayers)

I think that it is relevant to note that the “strong language” used by Jesus or Paul to excoriate is always (I think) in response to a tendency to domination, power, exclusion. It is not in response to reasonable discussion with disagreement. And – it is not in response to honest seeking by anyone.
I would say that the loyalty of the boy for his father is misplaced if for example his father comes home drunk and beats his younger brother.

Though I have read and been deeply impacted by other Bonhoeffer writings I’ve never read his book on ethics. I don’t know the flow of this particular book but it seems the story of the boy and the quote are a bit incongruent. The quote seems less focused on speaking truth in general (or being honest) vs. the attitude, heart and motive of the “cynic”. I’ve been the “cynic” before, and, I’ve wrestled with trying to “speak the truth in love”. Although I struggle with “perfect” motives and intentions; humility, a love that seeks to bear the weight of wrongs, an attitude of speaking to another with the realization and confession that I have “logs” in my own eye while I am speaking to you about your “splinters” is not the intention of the cynic.

“By rejecting their extreme positions, am I rejecting my roots?” I think the simple answer is that we’re not necessarily being disloyal to someone by being disloyal to one of their ‘positions.’ In fact, loyalty to actual people will inevitably require being disloyal to some of their positions.
I’ve said for years it was my conservative (cessationist) upbringing that led me to embrace the reality that God still gives gifts, even before I really witnessed/participated in such things personally. Not because they said “X”, so I thought “Y” to be some kind of a rebel. On the contrary, because they taught me (perhaps above all) to take the obvious reading of the Bible seriously, and be suspicious of theological arguments that seem tortured and happen to line up with modern preferences more than biblical history, I chose biblical loyalty as a bigger, more important facet of my heritage than the cessationist loyalty, once I became convinced they conflicted.
That value is still driving me. I haven’t rejected my roots. I can’t. But I inevitably have to choose which parts to subject to other parts.
One could pose the same question above to Jesus. Was Jesus being disloyal to his Jewish roots by rejecting and critiquing some (many) of their views of what it meant to be Israel, to obey Torah? He was being as or more loyal to them than anyone had ever been, more loyal to them than they were being to themselves, even as he rejected many of their most prized positions or theologies.

I may be missing something but it seems to me that hesed in Scripture is at least primarily if not completely a faithfulness to people, to God or closely linked to a covenant which demands a particular way of living. It never is a dogmatic commitment to tertiary doctrines of insignificance. Therefore, it seems like there is absolutely no tension between having a loving commitment (hesed) towards people who may hold views that we disagree with and ‘third way pursuit of truth’. If these are actually in conflict then the third way is really just a new form of fundamentalism that is too rigid to make a place for love, which is supposedly one of its cornerstone ideas (at least as I understand it in my, admittedly, very limited understanding). Yet in our feelings of superiority in thinking that the third way is superior to every other doctrinal camp and that we hold all truth and everyone else is wrong, then there is no room for hesed love. We must allow humility and love to be the overarching way our pursuit of truth is guided for without it we are a clanging gong or a crashing cymbal. Further, I should never think that I have arrived at all truth and that all of my views on every issue are right because then I’m just a new fundamentalist, to use the much despised title. So I must hold firmly to the core truths, loosely to all else and hesed love everyone, even if they don’t want it.

In general, I reject legalism and pat answers. For example, I react negatively to those who put pressure on everyone to get rid of their TV, or those who say that you just need to pray more when trying to overcome an addiction.
But the funny thing is, the less TV I watch, the more focused and productive I become. When I spend regular time in prayer, my spiritual life does improve.
The legalist and the dispenser of pat answers still seem unhelpful. Yet, their answers are not devoid of wisdom. I think maybe it is partly the difference between a cliche and the original good wisdom that sparked the cliche.
Sorry, I didn’t speak to hesed in any way (great question, BTW). But this is a recurring issue for me in relationship to the legalistic side of Christianity, which was part of the question at hand.

Christianity, and I mean what people
call Catholic and Protestant, has blessed this world
for hundreds of years. Now that’s a fact that Bonhoeffer
understands. His above quote is all the more poignant when
you imagine a culture of Nazi devotees and compare it
with the truth telling on TV and its devotees.
But the point is that the model of Christianity we inherited
couldn’t stand up to the era of TV and radio. You can see
that from the very beginning in the church demonizing
of the media. And what we have put on the media is laughable.
We’re trying to come to grips with our faith not being seen as
useful in a changing world. It’s being marginalized corporately
and individually. Our ancestors in the faith are not disrespected
by our turning to new lifestyles.
I live in the 4th largest Amish community in the world. There is
a mental health facility here with beyond natural results in
schizophrenia. No patient, nurse, doctor, employee(the farm director
is Amish), or volunteer is joining an Amish congregation. But I’m testifying, because of these neighbors relationship to the Lord, it’s a main reason for the facilities success.
So you can stay the old way and shun your neighbor or not. But loving the Lord and your neighbor still is what counts.

The principle of honoring one’s fathers and mothers applies here, and is at the core of this great Bonhoffer quote. Respecting the role a parent has in your life doesn’t automatically mean copying everything your parent does, particularly if the parent is abusive, addicted or unbelieving. It absolutely may mean telling the truth about the brokenness of the parent, but the truth must spring from a context of love, of 70 x 7 forgiveness.
In the context of your question and the quote, it seems to mean finding ways to honor the good given you by “spiritual fathers”. I am grateful for the deep committment to the Word of God modeled me by the fundamentalist tribe that shaped the first few years of my walk with Christ. I do not love the legalism, the infighting or the mean-spiritedness I saw in some -not all – of these folks. But I am grateful for people that helped me learn the ABC’s of the B-I-B-L-E (yes, that’s the book for me) and encouraged me in the basics of some core spiritual disciplines.
Though we may not see eye-to-eye on lots of things, my desire to honor them helps me speak the truth with a somewhat more gentle tone than I’d be inclined to use otherwise.

Thanks for the comments, guys.
T #11 gets to the heart of what I am asking.
I am becoming more convinced that what we believe is about more than just “where the evidence directs us.” Our emotions play a significant role in what we believe–and I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing. Sure, we want to believe what the evidence suggests, but if we were honest we’d admit that the “evidence” is never 100% conclusive and that a number of factors affect what we believe.
Personally, when I have changed positions on an issue, a significant part of my conversion has been the “social tenability” of my conversion. Take alcohol, for example. I never had a drop of alcohol until I was 22. I was raised in a conservative church, went to a very conservative Christian college, and never knew a Christian who drank alcohol. Even in college, when I was convinced in my head that the Scriptures didn’t teach that it was wrong to drink alcohol, I still didn’t drink. It wasn’t until I went to seminary and I met other people who followed Jesus and drank alcohol that I considered changing my position. Until it was socially tenable to go where the evidence directed me, I would not change.
T brings us the issue of cessation. I would be curious about what would happen if T stood up in his cessationist congregation and started speaking in tongues. Would his community praise him for “going where the evidence led him,” or would they reject him because cessationism is such a core element of their community’s identity? I suspect the latter and I suspect that one of the reasons that T can now reject cessationism is because he is a part of a different community that does not put such a high value on cessationism.
But what if T never left his church? What if he was still in the cessationist church? Does he owe it to his community as an act of hesed to believe what the community believes?
Finally, before we badmouth the church for being “legalistic,” we need to remember that all groups do this. We all have stories, values, and beliefs that define our groups. Violating these mores leads to break with the group (or at least chastisement from the group). How would my fellow Americans respond if I joined a jihadist group? How would vegans respond if one of their members decided to eat cheeseburgers? How does the homosexual community respond to members who join fundamentalist Christian churches? Does a negative response mean that these groups are “legalistic” or just that they have expectations about what it means to be part of the group?
I didn’t mean to single out T, his response just provided an illustration.

We each do what makes the best sense to us, for known and unknown reasons. I think we can be compassionate toward people with whom we differ, and with ourselves when we make changes that unsettle. Here again, the path is humility and love. If it were easy, this question would not come up. Thanks, Matt.
Dana

#16: Good stuff, Matt.
Reminds me of Scot’s observation that most people will change their position based on someone they trust; they will not merely follow evidence.
I will connect this to James. James said that a law-follower does not get to pick and choose which laws to follow. You don’t get to keep 9 out of 10 commandments and claim success in keeping the commandments. But he says this in context of the royal law. Why? I believe his point was that followers of the royal law (love your neighbor as yourself, part of the JesusCreed) don’t get to pick and choose which neighbors to love. Muslims, Gays, Vegans, People who prefer Baseball to Hockey, Fighting Fundies, emergents, non-emergents, anti-emergents, post-emergents (ha!), egalitarian, non-egalitarian — each one is the neighbor which we must love. Agree with? No. Rebuke? Sometimes, yes. But treat with love and respect nonetheless.
Well, if that last paragraph that I just wrote is true, I’m screwed! I can’t do it. I don’t have that much love. I need a new religion!

Matt (#16),
Do you think that we should only fellowship and worship in communities with uniform beliefs?
Clearly there is an acceptable range – and somethings are outside that range. But I think that we err when we insist on agreement on all but core issues. And a big tent fellowship also means that we have to respect the positions of others as we wish they would respect ours.
On the other hand, while Paul respected Peter as a fellow Christian, he certainly didn’t simply acquiesce to his practice on table fellowship.

Let me offer an analogy: Fundamentalism is not too different from child abuse by a parent. As someone who has been deeply affected by both, I feel strongly that the two are similar. They often generate in me the same sort of angry, bitter response (although I’m working on that anger and bitterness), and they can both be forms of abuse.
Because of the serious harm it causes, fundamentalism is not something that should be taken lightly. It is absolutely not a rejection of your roots to reject fundamentalism, any more than it is a rejection of my family roots if I confront and challenge the child abuse I experienced.
Rejecting one aspect, however (the abuse or fundamentalism) doesn’t require rejection of the whole thing. I love my parents, and respect the good things I learned from them, just as I love the deep truths I learned in the fundamentalist churches I attended, no matter how distorted they were on some issues. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t challenge the negative aspects for what they are.

I think perhaps I was unclear in where I’m coming from. I am sorry to hear about the negative experiences some have had with “fundamentalism.” My experience was far from “child abuse.” There are people out there who take conservative, “fundamentalist” positions who are, in fact, loving people. They love God. They love others. They are building for the kingdom. Such has been my experience.
Also, I don’t come from a background that insists upon uniformity in belief. That’s not what I am advocating.
I think that groups often define themselves by a couple of core beliefs, behaviors, stories, etc. that separate their group off from other groups. I come from a Christian tradition that emphasized the “inerrancy of the Scriptures.” This is what distinguished us from the “liberals” who “didn’t believe the Bible.”
I am far less passionate about inerrancy. I don’t see it as a core issue and I have no problem fellowshipping, partnering, worshipping, etc. with those whom my community might call “liberal.” Many Christians I look up to don’t believe in inerrancy.
But would I ever reject the doctrine of inerrancy if “the facts” suggested to me that it was untrue? I don’t think so. Such a decision is socially untenable given the community in which I find myself.
Modern Westerners put a priority on individualism and the pursuit of “truth.” By truth, we often mean “the facts.” I wonder if we are missing out. Maybe there is more to “the truth” than just “the facts.” Maybe part of “the truth” is loving our community by honoring their beliefs.
I am part of a spiritual community with particular beliefs. My community has loved, nurtured, and invested in me. They are passionate about certain issues that I may find “peripheral.” Sure, I love others who don’t agree with the “core” issues of my tradition. But can I join them in rejection of these “core” issues? I don’t think so.
With regard to certain issues like inerrancy and origins, I am comfortable saying, “there is more at play here than just ‘the facts.’ There is also the question of who I am and where I came from. I am part of a tradition and a community that takes certain positions on these issues, and as an act of hesed I am sticking with those who have been faithful to me.”
I didn’t mean to tip my hand as to where I fell on this issue, but trying to be vague and hypothetical just ended up being confusing.

I’m not familiar with the third way, but I’ve also had the experience of changing my beliefs in some ways since leaving home. I think the key for me is Matthew 22:36-40, where Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love God, and the second is to love your neighbor. For me, hesed is a part of love. In other words, my hesed for God and others is an expression of my love for them. So the most important thing I can do in life is to love God, and my loyalty to God is an expression of that love. Love and loyalty to others is second only to that. Because my primary calling is to love God, my secondary calling must fall in line with the the primary. If we are loyal to another person in a way that impedes or takes precedent over our loyalty to God, then we are not truly loving Him. This is the lens through which I look at theology. Theology is ultimately about gaining right understanding about God. Therefore, my motivation in studying theology is loyalty to God, not loyalty to the ideas of others. If my goal is to develop a theology that meshes well with others, it may make life easier temporarily, but it won’t help me to grow in love or understanding of God. This is where the tension of “social tenability” comes into play. We want to be loyal to the truth of God, but we also want to get along well with others. The real decision here is not WHAT you believe, but HOW you express it. Obviously I won’t adapt my understanding of God and Scripture to a group of people so I can fit in. The issue is how I express a view that I hold amongst others who disagree with my view. I think that key is being able to differentiate between loyalty to people and loyalty to ideas. Standing by a person is not the same as standing by their beliefs. It is not loving for me to encourage someone to believe something that I think is false, but it is also not loving for me to be confrontational, forceful or manipulative to get my point across. We need to share in gentleness, humility and love (our expression of loyalty to them), while remaining loyal to God. It all comes back to love.
By the way, I think there is a bit of confusion throughout the comments based on how different people define “fundamentalism” in different ways. I try to avoid using the word because I assume whoever I’m talking to understands it differently than I do.

…So, to simplify, I think the proper response is something like: “I respect where you’re coming from and honor you as a follower of Christ, but I disagree with you on this point.” Though it probably depends on what the subject is.

Matt,
I don’t come out of a background I would class as fundamentalist (we could play games with cards and even go to school dances), we didn’t separate or emphasize prophecy or endtimes – but no alcohol and a strong sense of inerrancy and a commitment to follow God. I have some roots in or touching on fundamentalism. We, all of us, come out of a history and a people. I am sitting where I am today coming from a background with family and church family where the Christian faith was real – they loved God and loved others and acted on that commitment – even at great personal cost on occasion. It was that background in fact that kept me coming back when my “head” would tell me there was no way.
So what does loyalty to that background entail for me? It means wrestling with how the scripture we have is the authoritative Word of God (which I believe it is). It demands a total respect for the integrity of the individuals within the church. It certainly means not picking fights or stomping on sacred cows. It may mean starting slow and carefully to introduce possible ideas and approaches.
But another thing that it means is a sensitivity to the struggles that others may have – especially students, young adults – exposed to our greater culture and world. I think that an approach that holds to a particularly rigid view of inerrancy out of loyalty might, in fact, do a disservice to the reality of faith. Don’t we need loyalty both to our parents and to our children? Now, of course, I am making an assumption of what I think the future holds – but we all do this at times.

In fact as I think about it in light of your comment – I hold to the Bible as the authoritative Word of God – not on the basis of the “evidence” but on the testimony of the church. In some sense this is out of loyalty to the community, not out of individualism or pursuit of truth. More importantly the church gave us, gives us, the canon – and we accept some parts of it as they are on that authority. The faith we have is a received faith – we’d all be adrift without the community of the church.

Matt,
We all have our influences of our past and our community that shape what we believe about God, reality, and truth. You are right, western modernity has sometimes over emphasized rational arguement, evidence, individualism, and the quest for truth. But I wonder if we need to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bath water.
I am totally onside with having respectful discourse and being loyal to the community we come from. A lot of the posts contrasting ideas verses people make sense to me. What I wonder about is the influence of being faithful to community and what we regard as true.
Should community have the major say or define the boundaries in what we think is true?
I come from a liberal Christian upbringing but most of my adult Christian life has been in the evangelical tradition. Being faithful to that past liberal community could possibly have meant not entertaining or being open to such beliefs as bodily resurrection, inspiration of scripture, deity of Christ etc. being true.
Isn’t this very much like the reading scripture “through” tradition vs. “with” tradition? Maybe we need to pursue truth with our past community and not bounded by our past community?
Thoughts?
Cam

Matt,
I agree that “social tenability” is a strong influence. Community is not an inherent good or evil. It propels us forward and holds us back, for good and for ill. I do think, though, ultimately that we have to love Jesus and whatever he gets us into more than our most precious communities, even more than father or mother. That doesn’t mean we become ungrateful jerks, or even that we voice every disagreement. But we must be his more than anyone else’s. We must be willing to risk every relationship on Jesus.
When I’ve had these issues come up, I usually start with praying for God’s leadership and/or change. Most recently this came up a little over a year ago with the surprising conviction that we should shut down our church plant and completely revamp around discipleship. I remember praying and saying “Well, Lord, if this is just my own attitude that needs to change, please help/let me change. And if this is your conviction, I don’t think I’m the one to tell [the other leader] this, but I will if that’s what you have in mind.” Other times God just leads me to say something. But on this occasion, within about a week, I think, the other guy called me, said he was reading a book called Transforming Discipleship that had been changing his thinking about church, and wanted to know if I thought it was a good idea if we shut down for a while and see what God wanted to do. Bottom line when these issues arise: Maybe I’m wrong and need to be changed. Maybe I’m not, but don’t need to say anything. Maybe I will be an agent of change in others. Regardless, I usually start by swatting all these possibilities and more back to God and asking for his leadership. It repeatedly goes the way it needs to go, often in surprisingly cool ways.

Matt,
I think we have to be very careful suggesting that we just play along with “core” views that we disagree with out of loyalty to community. RJS (#24) is right, in my view: There is a real danger here that these sorts of commununities will turn people off to faith. I have seen it again and again.
In particular, I’ve seen people grow up in these churches, that later leave because — if *that* is what Christianity is about, they don’t want to have anything to do with it. I have seen people outside the church turned off from Christ for similar reasons. I want desperately to tell them that this isn’t what Jesus is about.
From where I sit, for these reasons, we should challenge fundamentalism (under any of the definitions used above) for what it is. I would even suggest that in many instances fundamentalism is sin. Love the fundamentalist, but don’t accept the fundamentalism — its just too destructive.

I want to add a question: What if the prophets of the Old Testament had not spoken out as they did, out of fear of disloyalty to the people of God? I understand that times and issues are different between then and now, but I still think its a valid question.
I also want to share a personal story: My own faith was restored after a leader in my prior conservative evangelical church was willing to rock the boat and express differing views from others on issues many believed were “core.” He did so in a loving, non-confrontational way, but he did it nonetheless. And it helped me realized that Christianity didn’t require me to ignore the questions that I had been secretly asking for years.

Scot — woohoo! A post on hesed!
The Abbess is totally bummed to basically have missed this conversation, but I’ll jump in and make an observation or two about the nature of hesed, if I may….
I believe that the point of hesed is faithful covenant-keeping — with God and with others in the covenant. This speaks to hesed-as-agape, where we are to faithfully have deliberate affection for one another (Jesus Creed!). It also speaks to hesed-as-charis, where we are to faithfully provide grace needed rather than what might be deserved. And it also speaks to hesed-as-eleos, where are to faithfully provide mercy that initiates that which the other needs in order to be able to keep covenant.
These attitudes motivate proper response. Love responds to the other with submission — restraining my want to their true need (not their want). Honor and respect are needs we all have, eh? But submission cannot be made when it is not supporting the other’s ability to keep covenant. We cannot support covenant breaking activity — and this is where speaking the truth in love enters.
Jesus honored Mary and Joseph in so many ways throughout his life, but he did not honor them above his Heavenly Father’s will. So, the Temple at 12 and Mary and the family coming to “take Jesus home.”
Grace responds to the other with service — working for their best interest to be served. Humble service that enables another to keep covenant is a treasure.
Jesus lived a live of service to others — and it is the indwelling Holy Spirit’s grace that serves us at all times so that we may be able to keep covenant.
Mercy responds to the other with leadership — taking initiative to help the other success in keeping covenant faithfully.
Jesus showed mercy that risks by taking the initiative to lead others toward obedience and faithfulness — sometimes by turning over tables and taking the Elders on head to head, and sometimes by touching the untouchable and healing on the Sabbath.
Hesed is a much bigger concept than most grasp — or, it is quite simple to comprehend (if one will take the time), but it requires the presence of, and submission to, faithful covenant-keepers around us (and the Holy Spirit within us) to help us practice this foundational faithfulness … one relationship at a time!
Great conversation….

Sorry I’m late to this one too — Matt, I’m not sure “social tenability” is on par with “hesed.” I completely understand that notion of social tenability. If you don’t feel compelled to challenge something that is a social taboo — perhaps, say, you can be a little more nuanced in what you mean by “inerrancy” rather than getting rid of the word (this kind of nuancing, after all, is what most evangelical theologians do) — then why challenge it?
But that isn’t “hesed,” that’s self-preservation, isn’t it? Challenging the status quo is uncomfortable, at home, at work, at church — maybe particularly at church, where so much of our identity is invested for those of us who take our faith commitments seriously. There’s nothing wrong with self-preservation per se — no sane person wants to be an outcast all the time.
BUT — real “hesed,” real faithfulness, is much like “agape” — a love that seeks the other even at a cost to one’s self. Jesus and the prophets displayed hesed, and their criticism of the community was so sharp it got them killed. Galileo displayed hesed, and he was put under house arrest. Martin Luther displayed hesed (at least in his better moments!), and it got him excommunicated. Martin Luther King, Jr. displayed hesed, and he was shot.
So, I think the question isn’t hesed or not, it’s “is this particular issue important enough that I’m willing to take a (methaphorical) bullet for it?” Maybe defining “inerrancy” doesn’t rise to this level, especially if the term is elastic enough to encompass what others call “mere” infallibility or something. Or maybe in a given situation, the prevailing view about the nature of Biblical inspiration or some other such thing has gotten so ossified that someone really does need to stand up and take some heat by challenging it.