Truth in the Making: Knowledge and Creation in Modern Theology and Philosophy by Robert C. Miner (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 165 of this difference in two arguments in Plato's Crito. One is "an argument for obedience, but it is the obedience of a philosopher, and therefore, appropriately it is a philosophical argument." The other is "an argument for rule, but it is not a philosophical argument," but "an argument propounded by the rulers of a republic, the laws." Slade then shows how this distinction is collapsed in modern political theory, illustrating this in Thomas Hobbes. The characteristic modern assumption about political obligation, he says, is that the arguments of philosophy are reducible to the arguments ofrule. "Unlike Socrates in the Crito," writes Slade, "Hobbes unreservedly and emphatically identifies himself with the political arguments and the political arguments with reason." The final essay of the collection, by Msgr. Sokolowski himself, is entitled "The Revelation ofthe HolyTrinity: AStudy in Personal Prounouns." He begins by setting the ground for what a phenomenological theology of disclosure can do by contrasting it with other approaches. It differs from "speculative" Scholastic theology by focusing on how the Christian mystery comes to light, rather than on its definition, and from "positive" historical theology by focusing on structural necessities rather than primarily on matters of fact. He then proceeds to a detailed discussion of how the Trinity is disclosed through the use of personal pronouns by and about Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit in the New Testament-but especially on Jesus' use of the declarative form of the pronoun "I," to reveal the Father and to reveal himself as the Father's Word. Lenoir-Rhyne College Hickory, North Carolina PHillP BLOSSER Truth in the Making: Knowledge and Creation in Modern Theology and Philosophy. By ROBERT C. MINER. NewYork: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 192. $33.95 (paper). ISBN 0-415276985. Robert Miner's Truth in the Making has been published in the Radical Orthodoxy series edited by John Milbank. The movement claims to "combine a sophisticated understanding of contemporary thought, modern and postmodern, with a theological perspective that looks back to the origins of the Church." At first glance, Miner's book is not an obvious fit. Outside of a few caveats, he steers clear of both postmodern and patristic theology. Readers familiar with Radical Orthodoxy's origins will make the connection that both Miner and Milbank published their first books on Vico, who also proves to be the hero of the present work. Truth in the Making explores how six pre-Kantian thinkers (Aquinas, Cusanus, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and Vico) articulate the relationship 166 BOOK REVIEWS between making and knowing. Radical Orthodoxy thinks it for worse that the "verum-factum" has been associated so closely with Immanuel Kant. For Kant, the subject does not see the object in itself, but instead relies on the categories as well as sensible intuitions (time and space) constructed by the subject to see an appearance. Th.rough these constructions the subject gains a cognizance of the external world. Miner's thesis involves more than just the recovery of "less influential thinkers such as Vico and whoever else was fortunate enough to anticipate the Kantian standpoint" (xii). The problem at hand is not the one diagnosed by Heidegger, namely, that modernity conceives making within a mechanical-technical framework. For Radical Orthodoxy, Heideggerian "dwelling " in a world cut off from transcendence is just as nihilistic as the post-Kantian legacy culminating in Nietzsche. Miner suggests that we recover a non-nihilistic form of making that follows a trajectory analogous to that of the divine creation ex nihilo-in short, Miner wants poesis instead of techne. Miner calls Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes "the architects of radical modernity" in his analysis oftheir account ofconstruction. The uniquely modern account conceives "of making as technical production that occurs within a domain that has been sealed off from the transcendent.... This conception of making differs from the earlier concept of making found in Aquinas and Cusanus.... Our criticism is not that secular modernity connects knowing and making-orthodox theologies of creating had already accomplished this linkage-but that its particular mode of connecting the two ultimately serves to deny the dignity of making itself" (xv). The most common complaint about the radically orthodox is...