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Recently, the notions of testimony and parable appear in the discussions of the relationship between church and society. More precisely, they are proposed as models to understand human action. Rowan Williams, in his introduction to a collection of essays titled Theology and the Political: The New Debate, suggests that the understanding of human action as testimony may be an antidote to the kind of “barbaric” understanding that he sees in contemporary debates, that of “action as successful assertion of will.” Mary Doak, in her book Reclaiming Narrative for Public Theology, published in 2004, argues that the form of Christian public theology in the United States should take the form of a “double narrative”—the form of parable. Maintaining that the Christian narrative should take precedence in the interpretation of reality, she suggests that “the story of the United States” should be narrated “as a moment within a larger story of the divine intention for history.” While both authors cite Ricoeur as their source of the concepts of testimony and parable, they have not examined the full potential of them as paradigms to understand human action in general and Christian action in society in particular. Williams does not deal further with Ricoeur’s work besides mentioning his name. As for Doak, she relies on Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, especially narrative’s power to refigure the world of the reader, to argue for the importance of narrative in shaping one’s value. However, except the mutual influence of meaning in the structure of “a story within a story,” she does not take up much of Ricoeur’s discussion on the complex intertextual process of the “metaphorization of a discourse” as exemplified in the parable. In this paper, I want to scrutinize and deepen these two lines of thinking the relationship between the theological and the socio-political by exploring the rich implication of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of testimony and his idea of “parabolization.” Furthermore, I will suggest that the understanding of Christian social action needs to use both testimony and parable as complementary concepts. While testimony relies more on rhetoric to persuade, parable appeals to poetics to reshape the imagination. I will show how the practice of Christians in society can become cultural critique if it is understood both as testimony and as parable.