While our modernist selves reactively reject PoMo’s “we just make up our own truth”, Penner is approaching truth from a whole different angle where that postmodernist cliche actually takes on some significant meaning and warrants revisiting. In terms of propositional truths (to the extent that those correspond with reality - and yes - I realize Penner contests this, but I’m setting that aside for now) it makes sense to acknowledge that we do not manufacture truth. But in terms of being truth, and living out truth, the claim that “we make truth” suddenly comes into new light for me, by changing the forcus from the proposition to the person.
Penner writes (p. 102):
Whether the truth I proclaim is true for me will be evident from how I live—if that truth is appropriated by me as an integral part of how I live and act. This means the act of witness is much more like a confession of personal conviction than a logical argument for the objective truth of its propositions.
This really raises the stakes and the challenge for what prophetic witness must entail. Now it isn’t me saying something (a comparatively easy way for me to let myself off the hook), but I must now live something out in front of and to my neighbor (a much harder and higher challenge). And in my visible life, my neighbor sees whatever truth I may have to share. My words and propositions to my neighbor are little more than a decorative overlay on all that, and succeed only in either confirming what the neighbor has already observed, or else turn me into a hypocrite when it is obvious to my neighbor that I don’t live up to them.