Why does he feel that Nationalism, Confessionalism, Pietism and Liberalism have changed the original ideals of the Reformation?
The author notes a shift in the basic theological intention of the Reformation, which began in the mid-sixteenth-century. This shift or division began to redefine the focus away from renewal within the church, and toward establishment of a theological system for a particular church body. As a result, the authentic catholicity and ecumenicity common to the Reformation movement, was weakened by what Tjorhom calls an exchange for, or growing emphasis on confessional or denominational identity. Fueled by politically conditioned divisions, the Reformation/renewal movement began to change the direction of its denominational concerns toward the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism. Liberalism and pietism, which began to emerge in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, carried a theology that emphasized the human being. A concept that religion is feeling, according to Schleiermacher, and a theology that defines religion as being within the human being itself: a religion th
