Moltmann on Pietism

"A Theology which settles faith in the 'existence' of the individual, in the sphere of his personal, immediate encounters and decisions, is a theology which from the viewpoint of sociological science stands at the very place to which society has banished the cultus privatus in order to emancipate itself from it. This faith is in the literal sense socially irrelevent, because it stands in the social no-man's-land of the unburdening of the individual- that is, in a realm which materialist society has already left free to human individuality in any case. The existential decision of faith consequently hardly provokes the counter decision of unbelief any longer, and is consequently not really engaged in a struggle with unbelief at all. What it actually does constantly provoke is its own non-commital character- namely, the now notorious attitude of refusing to take sides in disputes of faith that have long become socially irrelevant, the well known 'religion void of decision.' The battle of faith is socially no longer necessary, since for social life it has no longer any binding character. The transcendent point of reference which is constituted by man's free subjectivity, and in view of which this proclamation addresses him, has already been socially neutralized before it can be made use of in the decision of faith. Hence this theology threatens to become a religious ideology of romanticist subjectivity, a religion within the sphere of the individuality that has been relieved of all social obligations. Nor does the appeal of its existential radicality prevent the Christian faith, as thus understood, being brought to social stagnation."

--Jurgen Moltmann. Theology of Hope Trans. James W. Leitch. Harper & Row, 1967, p.316