“Why you can’t be loyally opposed to the Church”

I don’t want to drive people out of the Kingdom.  But I also don’t want us to pretend that just about anything goes and that truth and standards don’t matter.

http://www.mormonwomenstand.com/you-cant-be-loyally-opposed-to-the-church/

I can’t help but think, in this context, of a deservedly very famous motto from an otherwise little-remembered German Lutheran theologian of the early seventeenth century, Rupertus Meldenius.  The phrase or motto occurs in a tract on Christian unity that he wrote during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), probably around 1627, and is probably a slightly modified form of a very similar 1617 declaration from Marco Antonio de Dominis:

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

All three attributes are necessary.  Charity, yes.  Of course.  And liberty.  But also — and this is the one commonly forgotten by some today — unity on essentials.  And there are essentials.