Reframation

We live in the cultural fallout of the Enlightenment—what Charles Taylor famously diagnosed as the "immanent frame" of a thoroughly disenchanted world. In this flattened reality, the universe is treated as a vast, predictable machine, human beings are reduced to economic producers and consumers, and religion is demoted to private moral compliance.

Tragically, the Western church accommodated itself to this exact reduction. We turned theology into an intellectual sorting mechanism of propositions to be defended, church into an entertainment enterprise, and discipleship into behavior modification. We lost what the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel called "radical amazement"—the capacity to perceive the holy mystery, grandeur, and sacred presence of God vibrating throughout all created reality.

Mark Nelson and I realized that the missional movement had reached an aesthetic and ontological frontier. We had successfully diagnosed the structural failures of Christendom, but we had not sufficiently addressed the impoverished worldview that created those structures in the first place.

ReFramation was written to blow the windows open. Drawing heavily on Hans Urs von Balthasar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, C.S. Lewis, and William Blake, we set out to guide readers through a journey of sacred re-enchantment—reframing our vision of God, humanity, mission, and the entire cosmos.²

The central reframe of ReFramation is that Christian discipleship is fundamentally an aesthetic and imaginative awakening: seeing precedes doing, and seeing requires the healing of our imagination.

Western religion has operated almost exclusively with the classical categories of the True (intellectual doctrine) and the Good (moral ethics), while completely abandoning the Beautiful (theological aesthetics). As the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar warned, when a civilization loses its grasp of beauty, the good loses its attractiveness, and the true becomes an arid, defenseless concept.

ReFramation restores the primacy of the Beautiful, proposing four fundamental reframations:

1. Reframing God: Moving beyond the therapeutic, domesticated deity of Western religion to encounter the sheer, unmanageable beauty, holiness, and poetic majesty of the Triune God.
2. Reframing Humanity: Recovering the imago Dei—seeing human beings as living works of divine art endowed with sacred dignity and infinite depth.
3. Reframing Mission: Shifting from utilitarian task management to participating in the cosmic dance of divine love and redemption.
4. Reframing the Cosmos: Dismantling sacred-secular dualism to see the entire material world as charged with the grandeur and sacred theater of God.³

When our imagination is re-enchanted by the glory of God, mission ceases to be an exhausting duty and becomes the overflow of overwhelming wonder.

ReFramation moves through four major movements across fifteen chapters, blending philosophical theology, literary analysis, and artistic contemplation.

Diagnoses the modern malaise. Chapter 2, "Moving the Moon" (p. 47), shows how our culture has pushed God to the periphery of existence, treating him as an occasional celestial guest rather than the ground of all being. Chapter 3, "A Curd Made From Mashed Soybeans" (p. 63), critiques the reductionism that turns the rich feast of divine life into bland institutional porridge. Chapter 4, "Stranded in Grey Town" (p. 83), draws on C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce to expose the spiritual ghost-town of modern secular existence—where cynicism and self-absorption slowly starve the human soul.⁴

Explores the inextinguishable thirst of the human spirit. Chapter 6, "The Humming of Unseen Harps: The Spiritual Anatomy of Desire" (p. 98), explores what C.S. Lewis called Sehnsucht—the inconsolable longing within every human heart that points to our true homeland in God. Chapter 7, "Thro' Narrow Chinks in the Cavern" (p. 112), uses William Blake's imagery to describe how our perception has been imprisoned by rationalism, and how the Holy Spirit breaks open the cavern to let in the light of infinity.⁵

The theological climax of the book. Chapter 9, "The Art of Seeing" (p. 135), unpacks von Balthasar's theological aesthetics, teaching readers how to contemplate the divine glory. Chapter 10, "The Great Reframation" (p. 156), re-articulates the character of God around holy love, breathtaking generosity, and boundless creativity. Chapter 11, "I'll Have What She's Having" (p. 178), shows how an encounter with genuine divine beauty makes the gospel irresistibly contagious in a cynical world.⁶

Translates re-enchantment into lived reality. Chapter 13, "Shards of Heaven's Kaleidoscope" (p. 198), helps believers recognize glimpses of sacred truth, goodness, and beauty embedded in art, literature, culture, and nature. Chapter 14, "Romancing the City" (p. 215), articulates an incarnational urban missiology rooted in deep affection for our neighborhoods, calling the people of God to fall in love with their cities as God loves them.⁷

ReFramation represents a profound, mature turning point in the Hirsch canon.

Across the first fifteen years of my writing—from The Shaping of Things to Come (2003) and The Forgotten Ways (2006) to The Permanent Revolution (2012) and 5Q (2017)—my primary focus was ecclesiological, structural, and missiological. ReFramation dives beneath the architecture to explore the ontological and aesthetic foundations that hold the entire structure upright.

It picks up the high Christological thread of ReJesus (2008) and the discipleship formation of Untamed (2010), expanding them into a comprehensive worldview. It also serves as the direct theological and imaginative precursor to Metanoia (2023), where the renovation of imagination articulated here is translated into the psychology and biblical practice of total cognitive transformation.

• The deconstructing Christianwho is disillusioned with superficial, moralistic, or dogmatic church cultures, yearning for a spacious, majestic, and intellectually beautiful vision of God.
• The tired pastor or church leaderwhose soul has been desiccated by pragmatic church-growth techniques, seeking the waters of spiritual renewal and artistic wonder.
• The Christian artist, creative, or marketplace thinkerwho has felt that institutional church has no category for imagination, beauty, and cultural engagement.
• Anyone feeling the numbness of modern secular lifelooking to recover the ability to see the world charged with sacred meaning.

For readers who want to understand how this renovated imagination translates into personal repentance, cognitive renewal, and neural transformation, Metanoia (2023, with Rob Kelly) is the natural companion.

For those wanting to ground this expansive aesthetic vision in the historical, wild Jesus of the Gospels, ReJesus (2008, with Michael Frost) provides the Christological anchor.