#389 Confessionalization

Certain Christians take pride in their denominational confession of faith.  But according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, the 16th century practice of creating them sealed the defeat of the Reformation as a reformation:

"This post-1570 era also witnessed a process to which historians have given the unlovely but perhaps necessary jargon label 'confessionalization': the creation of fixed identities and systems of beliefs for separate churches which had previously been more fluid in their self-understanding, and which had not begun by seeking separate identities for themselves - they had wanted to be truly Catholic and reformed.  Confessionalization represents the defeat of attempts to rebuild the unified Latin and Catholic Church.  In 1618 the outbreak of the most widespread warfare so far in the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, sealed that defeat."