ABSTRACT
On June 27, 1931, the theologian Paul Tillich, recently appointed professor of social education in the unorthodox philosophy department in Frankfurt, organized a day long meeting between members of the informal Frankfurt discussion group who were his regular partners in intense talk about social and political questions and a number of Protestant theologians, several of whom were not a little skeptical of Tillich’s secular involvements and social-philosophical religious thought. The immediate occasion was the soul-searching within the Church about the Christian mission in a secularized world, an inquiry given urgency by perplexity about the role of Protestantism in the face of the social and political conditions of the worldwide Depression. The participants included, in addition to “dialectical theologians” interested in Tillich, not only Karl Mannheim but also the classical humanist philosopher and university curator, Kurt Riezler, who brought most of these leftist thinkers to Frankfurt, and the three principals in the new Institut für Sozialforschung, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Wiesengrund [Adorno], and Friedrich Pollock. In his own first intervention Tillich defines the overall situation as one where the autonomization of culture and the rise of the proletariat critically challenge Christian thought and action. Mannheim concludes that he 134 cannot accept the available religious formulations of this world, but he will also not accept the impoverishment of human encounters, their reduction to functional responses. He wishes for a restoration of deeper encounter experiences and must find a way of expressing this undertaking without denying his modernity or accepting the premature gratification offered by the old theology. Modernity and rationality and sociology belong together, in short, and Mannheim will not deny his calling to any of them. Somehow Mannheim wants to show that sociology is indispensable to that which sociology reveals to the sociologist it cannot do, just as the most complete rationality is inescapable for moderns who cannot live by rationality alone.
