The Bible, like the parables of Jesus, is subversive speech that should inspire Christians to action today, according to Allan Boesak and Wendell Griffen.
The two are authors of Parables, Politics and Prophetic Faith, a new book that interprets and reimagines Bible stories for contemporary application. The duo talked about their work in a breakout session at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference in Little Rock, Ark., Feb. 18.
Boesak is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric, politician and anti-apartheid activist. Along with Beyers Naudé and Winnie Mandela, he won the 1985 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. He is a theologian who previously served Christian Theological Seminary and Butler University in Indianapolis as the Desmond Tutu Professor for Peace, Global Justice and Reconciliation Studies.
Griffen is a frequent BNG columnist, a retired circuit court judge, pastor of New Millennium Baptist Church in Little Rock and a civil rights activist.
Allan Boesak
The entire Bible and the parables of Jesus should be thought of not just about explaining a future heaven but about illustrating the work God already is doing on earth, Boesak said.
“Scriptures came together in some way, was written always, under the heel of one empire or another,” he explained. “So whether it was the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Greeks or the Romans, all Scripture therefore reflects the reality of empire.”
Thus a theme in Scripture is “what happens to people under empire, how some people within the oppressed community try to accommodate empire, make life for themselves a little bit easier and how others think.”
Children of God “must find ways to resist every empire,” he declared. “The worship of God in the sanctuary must be turned into the worship of God in the streets of confrontation and protest of pain and suffering.”
Griffen said their current work was inspired, in part, by Boesak’s previous book, Dare We Speak of Hope? In that book, Boesak writes: “The times we live in indeed depict a scandalous world of harsh, utter, shocking and growing inequalities across the world. … Our global situation is one of enormous riches for those who run it and benefit from it. But for the poor and vulnerable and the excluded, it constitutes an endless crisis, a constant battle for life.”
Version 1.0.0
The new book they coauthored arose from the COVID-19 pandemic, Griffen said. “The pandemic exposed to us the more graphic and more immediate showing that across the world, whether you were in the U.S. with its so-called rich economy or you were in the poorest of nations, the issue was suffering and death. And the people who were dying fastest and dying most were the people who were poor.”
The problem facing Christians today is not a lack of access to Bibles, he said, but “what does Scripture mean in our context?”
“What does it mean to talk about to be free in Christ, to be free indeed,” he continued. “The empire will have a flag of the United States in the church where the Bible was read. Did we not have enough church in the people to say the empire had no business having a place in the sanctuary? And as long as we don’t understand that, we don’t understand how we got to have the subject about Christian nationalism, which is an oxymoron.”
People who promote nationalism over the gospel of Jesus are not Christians, he declared. “We need to stop saying these are Christians. You should not call Jesse James a banker just because he had a lot of money, when he stole all the money he got.”
Wendell Griffen
A misrepresentation of the gospel has created a kind of global apartheid, he explained, “global inequality, global suffering and the extreme difference between the politics of Jesus and the practices of those churches that called themselves followers of Jesus but have led us to now elect a nationalist who is a fascist, who has pimped the name of Jesus because of people who call themselves Christians.”
Boesak wrote from his South African perspective, and Griffen wrote from his American perspective. And even though they were oceans apart, they found common themes. Both nations face broken political systems that keep nominating the same kinds of less-than-ideal candidates, and both nations struggle still to overcome histories of racism.
In America, “remember in 2000 we had George Floyd and got religion,” Griffen said. “George Floyd was murdered May 25, 2020. Today is February 18, 2025. We are three months short of five years. And the folks who had a come-to-Jesus moment about racism and racial injustice and Black Lives Matter are riding five to a mule away from DEI.”
What’s lacking, he asserted, is prophetic discernment. “We are living in a time of global apartheid.”
Related article:
That time Freddie Haynes preached like Jeremiah Wright | Analysis by Mark Wingfield