A wider frame for God, people, and mission, in the four movements the book prints.
A narrow frame eclipses God, drains the story of Jesus, and leaves a life in Grey Town. Hirsch and Nelson say the church's witness is at stake. People are already searching. A gospel reduced to a formula does not meet the longing already alive in them.
On this page
Reading path
Where it lives in the work
Start with the introduction, where the four movements are named. Read Moving the Moon, the curd chapter, and Grey Town so God, story, and life stay in his sequence. The Humming of Unseen Harps carries the longing. The Art of Seeing and The Great Reframation carry the re/enchanting. Romancing the City carries the practices once the frame is understood.
1
Start here
ReFramation, Introduction
2018 · introduction
Names the Camino and the Playa, the Nones and the Dones, and the four movements in the order the book prints them.
2
ReFramation, A Reduction
2018 · introduction
Names the domino: a reduced framework of God, then a reduced story of Jesus, then a life that reflects those reductions.
3
ReFramation, Moving the Moon
2018 · core
Describes the eclipse of God, heresy as a fragment mistaken for the whole, and the habit of forcing one gospel formula to fit every life.
4
ReFramation, A Curd Made from Mashed Soybeans
2018 · core
Shows a reduced story of Jesus as tofu, and names demythologizing, demystifying, and depoeticizing as the ways the story is drained.
5
ReFramation, Stranded in Grey Town
2018 · core
Reads Grey Town as the reduced life, with moralistic therapeutic deism, idolatry, lost wonder, and the sin of living small.
6
ReFramation, The Humming of Unseen Harps
2018 · core
Mark Nelson tells of Alex on the Camino. The chapter names sehnsucht, a restless heart, and the echoes of a voice.
7
ReFramation, A Re/enchanting
2018 · introduction
Turns toward the art of seeing and a great reframation of what had been extracted and siphoned from the story.
8
ReFramation, The Art of Seeing
2018 · core
Recovers perception through the Genius of the AND, paradox, and childlike eyes, then widens the gospel to guilt, shame, and power.
9
ReFramation, The Great Reframation
2018 · core
Shows how to steal past watchful dragons by remystifying, repoeticizing, and remythologizing, in the way Jesus told the story in parables.
10
ReFramation, A Re/learning
2018 · introduction
Sets the last movement as rhythms for noticing what God is doing now and for joining him in that work.
11
ReFramation, Romancing the City
2018 · advanced
Gives the practices of paying attention, listening, and interpathy, and of joining the Father in what he is already doing.
Reframation
Hirsch and Nelson present reframation as four movements, and they keep one order. A reduction names what has narrowed. A longing names the desire still alive in people. A re/enchanting asks for the art of seeing and for a story with mystery, poetry, and myth restored. A re/learning offers rhythms for joining God in the actual city. The introduction says the first half of the book identifies the reductions, and the second half enlarges the frames. Section openers use the spellings a reduction, a longing, a re/enchanting, and a re/learning. This module stays with those four names in that order.
01
A Reduction
God, the story of Jesus, and the life that follows have been narrowed, in that order.
our framework of God has been reduced, which has led to the reduction of the radical story of Jesus, which in turn results in a life that reflects those same reductionisms.
Section one says the struggle to tell the sacred story has a root, and the root is a series of reductions. The opener prints the domino. A framework of God has been reduced. That leads to a reduction of the radical story of Jesus. The life that follows reflects the same narrowing. Moving the Moon, the curd chapter, and Grey Town walk that order: a God greatly reduced, a story greatly reduced, a life greatly reduced.Moving the Moon takes the image from Martin Buber. An eclipse of God happens when objects, ideas, and idols move into the line of sight. Heresy, in the chapter's sense, is a fragment treated as the whole. YHWH, read as "I Will Be There as I Will Be There," will not be boxed. One formula, Luther's recovery of righteousness as a gift included, became for many the only doorway. The book affirms forgiveness of real guilt, and it says God has done more in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.The curd chapter quotes Brueggemann on a truth widely held and greatly reduced. Don Everts's tofu savior, "a curd made from mashed soybeans," is the reduced telling. Demythologizing, demystifying, and depoeticizing drain it. Jewish tradition, the chapter says, holds halakhah together with haggadah, code with story. Grey Town, from Lewis as the next chapter reads it, is the life that follows. Hell's doors are locked from the inside. Moralistic therapeutic deism is one creed of that life.
02
A Longing
Desire is already humming in people, and the gospel has to be able to hear it.
It is precisely this dialectic of desire we need to come to grips with if we are to be faithful witnesses to God and unlock human hearts, opening them to the wonders of God and gospel.
Section two, as the introduction and the re/enchanting opener describe it, explores longings for truth and beauty, and it names how narrow perception has become. The Humming of Unseen Harps is the chapter opened here. Mark Nelson's account of Alex stays his. The teaching around her is the book's.The chapter asks for a holy curiosity and for fifty-five minutes spent finding the right question. A reduced theology, it says, has produced a reduced anthropology. James K. A. Smith, as the chapter uses him, says human persons are lovers. Augustine's confession, quoted there, is that the heart is restless until it rests in God. Lewis's name for the stab of that desire is joy. The wider name is sehnsucht, longing for a life that is unfinished. Lawrence's line, which titles the chapter, calls it the humming of unseen harps. Ecclesiastes 3:11, as they read it, says God has set eternity in the human heart.N. T. Wright's four echoes, as the chapter lists them, are justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty. The book adds a fifth: significance, meaning, and purpose. These are traces of a voice, and they are material for witness. The work is to tell a story that makes sense of a longing already alive, and to point the seeker toward God.
03
A Re/enchanting
The art of seeing, and a story remystified, repoeticized, and remythologized.
To recover that which has been lost, there needs to be a REmystifying, a REpoeticizing, and a REmythologizing, which will result, with apologies to the protestant reformers of the sixteenthcentury, in a "Great Reframation."
The section opener says a correction of reduced theology begins with the art of seeing God in larger frames. A re/enchanting puts back what was extracted from the story. The Art of Seeing borrows Aldous Huxley's phrase. The eyes sense. The mind perceives. Seeing is both, re-educated with a child's humility.Collins's pair, which the chapter adopts, is the Tyranny of the OR and the Genius of the AND. Either/or analysis shrinks a fragment. Synthesis puts the fragment back into the whole. The defining truths of the faith, the chapter says, are paradoxical, and Kandiah's paradoxology treats that tension as the place where worship stays alive. The gospel is forgiveness and reconciliation and adoption and restoration and mission, held together. Three cultural frames follow, in his order. A Western frame works in guilt and innocence. An Eastern frame works in honor and shame. A Southern frame works in power and powerlessness. A glocal world, he writes, now carries all three.The Great Reframation names the repair as remystifying, repoeticizing, and remythologizing. Wonder, in Heschel and in the book's reading of Job, is the doorway. Poetry opens what a closed doctrinal habit flattens. Myth, in the sense Lewis and Tolkien give it, is a story with roots below the rational filter, and the true myth really happened. Jesus told it in parables and was never without a story. The Hebrew prophets, the chapter says, spoke that kind of alternative story in poetry.
04
A Re/learning
Pay attention, listen, and join the Father in what he is already doing.
The question that must drive us is whether we can join with God in his mission—learning to pay attention in whatever place we find ourselves.
The section opener says the last movement offers rhythms for seeing what God is doing and joining him. The opened chapter is Romancing the City. Shards of Heaven's Kaleidoscope was not opened, so the practices here are the ones this chapter gives.The metaphor, credited to Michael Frost, is romancing a city: courtship that learns the keys to a people's heart. Paying attention means noticing the bush that is already burning. With Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the chapter reads Exodus 3 as a test of whether Moses could look long enough for God to speak. Listening means reversing the megaphone. Interpathy, as the chapter defines it, is feeling with another across a cultural boundary, the climb into another's skin that Atticus names for Scout.Under the arts is a Christological pattern. After quoting John 5:19, the chapter says that when Jesus goes to the pub or the market he looks for what the Father is already doing, and he joins that work. Brad Brisco, quoted there, says God's primary activity is in the world, and the church is sent to participate. Newbigin, as the chapter uses him, speaks of the previousness of the kingdom. The five questions from NewStory Church in Edgewater, on power, pennies, pain, parties, and persons of peace, are one local form. Mark Nelson's memories in the chapter, the date with Monica and the hug from Roy Taylor, stay his.
The Camino de Santiago, then the cathedral at Santiago · mixed
Alex on the Camino
Mark Nelson walked with Alex, who said she did not believe in God and then described beauty, awe, and a life she was tired of living for nothing. Days later, in the cathedral, she wept and spoke of the church wall her flat in London shares.
Mark Nelson met Alex almost three weeks into the pilgrimage, at the end of a long walking day. She was from London, about thirty, in upper management for London Underground. She walked extremely slowly and still reached each day's destination.
Stories he tells
A conference, then a strip club in an Australian citymixed
Linda and the burning question
After John Smith preached, a young woman asked him to meet her later. The address was a strip club. She told him how a church had forced her to choose between dancing and belonging, and that night he prayed with her about coming home in the faith.
A rural village near the Ural Mountains, about 1917failed
The storytellers' festival
The book retells a Red Terror story in which storytellers were invited to a festival, the hall was sealed and burned, and a people were left without the stories that had told them who they were. A stolen story leaves a vacancy.
Questions people ask · asked along the way
Questions to sit with · 1 / 8
Where has our picture of God gone dim, and what have we set in the line of sight between us and him?
With your team
Try it
01This month
Name the three reductions
This month, name the reduction of God, of the story of Jesus, and of the life you are actually living, in the order the first section prints them.
02This month
Fifty-five minutes of questions
With one person who is already searching, spend the time on questions before you offer an announcement.
03This quarter
Look for what the Father is already doing
With others, walk one place you serve and ask the five questions, then name one work you can join.
Ask the work
Ask which frame is already shaping how you see God, people, and mission, and which of the four movements you have not yet walked.
Go further
Questions people ask
Questions and misreadings
The introduction names the conviction under the book. There is a great need for a reframation that allows followers of Jesus to see God, people, and mission through re/enchanted frames. The image they choose is a picture people have grown accustomed to. Surround it with a new frame. The picture can be seen afresh. A second look becomes possible, and a third. They compare it to the teacher in Dead Poets Society standing on a desk, and to Henri Matisse's line that looking at something as though for the first time takes courage. The flow they print is four movements. Section one names reductions in God, in the story, and in the life. Section two explores longing. Section three turns to a re/enchanting and the art of seeing. Section four offers a re/learning of rhythms for culture. The gospel they want told is the one Jesus announced, large enough for guilt and shame and bondage, and for a life that joins the kingdom already at work.
Contrasts
The locked theme file has no binary block. The Art of Seeing still adopts Collins's pair and uses it for God and for the gospel. Either/or is the analytical habit. Both/and is the synthetic habit the chapter asks leaders to learn.
The Tyranny of the OR
The Genius of the AND
How a tension is held
Things must be A or B
A way is found to have A and B
What happens to a fragment
The fragment becomes the whole
The fragment returns to its larger context
How mystery is treated
Paradox is solved by dropping a pole
Paradox is kept, with awe
What the gospel includes
One theme forced to cover every ill
Forgiveness and reconciliation and adoption and restoration and mission
The Art of Seeing says many problems grow when analytical formulas monopolize the mind. The Tyranny of the OR cannot live with two truths that seem to contradict. The Genius of the AND looks for a larger whole in which both can stand. The chapter applies this to doctrine and to the good news. Truth and goodness and beauty belong together. Faith and hope and grace belong together. Love and truth and obedience belong together. The gospel is forgiveness and reconciliation and adoption into the family and restoration and mission. Heresy, as Moving the Moon defined it, is the fragment that forgot the whole. Synthesis is how the chapter says a people heals that break. The pair is a habit of seeing. It is the art the section exists to recover.
The Art of Seeing names a Western frame, an Eastern frame, and a Southern frame, then says a glocal world now carries all three at once. The one-dimensional telling is the Western legal frame treated as the only biblical frame.
A one-dimensional gospel
A three-dimensional gospel
The Western register
Guilt, innocence, and forensic standing
Kept, and joined to the other registers
The Eastern register
Honor and shame left unaddressed
Love, acceptance, and a new family name
The Southern register
Bondage and fear left unaddressed
Liberation and the lordship of Jesus
What a glocal city needs
One legal doorway for every ache
Guilt, shame, and fear each addressed in its register
The chapter is clear that forgiveness of real guilt remains critical. Dallas Willard's phrase, as Hirsch and Nelson use it, is a gospel of sin-management: the legal remedy isolated from the other dimensions, and then forced to fit every person. Honor and shame, they note, run through the biblical story in great number, and they are the operating system of much of the world. Power and powerlessness, fear and freedom, mark many Southern readings, and they now appear in Western movements as well. The chapter's picture is overlap. The middle of the chart is where the frames meet, and the authors say that overlap is growing. Salvation, in their list, includes unconditional love, liberation from bondage, and the raising of the outcast and the brokenhearted. Loneliness, regret, identity, despair, addiction, death, and lostness are further ills the same good news addresses. The plea is for a larger telling in every Western context.
When it is missing
When it is missing
God explained until nothing in him can surpriseA Reduction
A napkin outline offered as the whole gospelA Reduction
Worship, ethics, and doctrine with the life drained outA Reduction
A church scoreboard of safety, programs, and a distant godA Reduction
Answers offered before anyone is asked what they loveA Longing
Desire treated as a threat to be shut downA Longing
Pilgrims' awe filed as unbelief and left thereA Longing
A telling with no words for justice, beauty, or belongingA Longing
Either/or debates that shrink the faith at every splitA Re/enchanting
A gospel that can speak only to guiltA Re/enchanting
Poetry and parable read as problems to be solvedA Re/enchanting
Wonder treated as ignorance that explanation will removeA Re/enchanting
A declaration of love with no time spent courtingA Re/learning
A megaphone pointed at the streetA Re/learning
God treated as cargo the team carries inA Re/learning
A program chosen before anyone has listenedA Re/learning
Exodus 3:13-15
The God who will not be boxed
Moving the Moon reads the divine name with Darrell Guder. Moses asks for a name. God refuses to be confined by the request. The meaning they give for YHWH is I Will Be There as I Will Be There. The triune God, the chapter says, cannot be conjured. He appears when and as he chooses. Nothing about him is neatly predicted. The name is a standing challenge to every attempt to master God for human purposes. Idolatry, in the same chapter, is the worship of a part in place of the Creator, the wish to possess a god and have him at one's disposal. The prophets unmask that wish. Stephen's speech in Acts 7, as Matthew Skinner is used there, says God's dwelling is heaven and earth and cannot be limited to one temple. The God of the Scriptures is Spirit and fire. Hebrews 12:18 and 12:29, as the chapter cites them, belong to that claim. Holy love will not fit the box built to keep a life safe. Romancing the City returns to Exodus 3 by way of the bush. A thorny shrub burns and is not consumed. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, quoted there, calls the bush a test of attention. The questions the chapter adds are its own. How long had the bush been burning? How long had the ground been holy? The name and the bush are one argument. God remains ungraspable and already present. Reframation is the willingness to look long enough to hear him.
Historical witness
Historical witness
Sixteenth centuryA medieval Europe the chapter calls enchanted, inside Christendom
Luther's anfechtung
Luther, a New Testament professor, could not see how God's righteousness in Romans 1:16-17 could be good news for a sinner. He received righteousness as a gift of grace through faith. The chapter says that recovery was so fitted to a guilt-ridden age that it became the only way the gospel was formulated.
Hirsch and Nelson treat the episode as the root of a one-dimensional evangelical gospel. They honor the insight. Righteousness received as a gift changed everything, and they say the Reformation was born from it. They also say the formulation left other dimensions of the human condition untouched. Guilt before God was treated as the only issue people ever face. Later outlines, the Romans Road, the Four Spiritual Laws, and the Two Ways, inherit that narrowing. The chapter's appeal is pastoral. Forgiveness remains vital. The incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus address more of humanity's brokenness than personal guilt alone. Luther is a witness to a true recovery that, in their telling, was then asked to carry the whole gospel. The art of seeing exists so that recovery can sit inside a larger frame.
19 September 1931Addison's Walk, Magdalen College, Oxford
Addison's Walk
C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson walked and talked about myth. Lewis could not see how a death two thousand years earlier could help him now. He came to call the story of Christ a true myth, a myth that really happened.
The Great Reframation tells the walk as the moment Lewis was reframed. He could grant that Christ was an example. The New Testament's language of sacrifice still seemed silly or shocking. Tolkien helped him see that myths carry fragments of light, and that the gospel gathers those fragments into a story that happened. Days later Lewis wrote that he had passed from believing in God to believing in Christ. The chapter takes the episode as a pattern for telling. Imaginative apologetics, as they name it, joins reason and imagination. Remythologizing is that work. The true myth claims love and obedience, and also wonder and delight.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
reframationalso "reframing", "the Great Reframation"
A new frame around the gospel the church already has, so God, people, and mission can be seen again.
The introduction's conviction: there is a great need for a reframation that lets followers of Jesus see God, people, and mission through re/enchanted frames. The picture stays. The frame changes what can be seen in it. The Great Reframation is the chapter name for the same work, with a nod to the sixteenth-century reformers and a different task: remystify, repoeticize, and remythologize.
The recovery of mystery, poetry, and myth in the way God and the gospel are seen and told.
The book prints the section as A RE/ENCHANTING. The introduction speaks of re/enchanted frames. The section opener says a re/enchanting restores what was extracted from the story. The Great Reframation proposes a re/enchantment of speech about God through remystifying, repoeticizing, and remythologizing. The slash is his spelling for the movement.
reductionalso "reductionism"
A narrowing of God, then of the story of Jesus, then of the life that follows.
Section one names a reduction in cultural Christianity. The opener prints the domino. The framework of God is reduced. The radical story of Jesus is reduced. The life reflects those reductions. Moving the Moon, the curd chapter, and Grey Town are the three cases: a God greatly reduced, a story greatly reduced, a life greatly reduced. Heresy, in their definition, is one form of it.
Grey Town
Lewis's image, as this book uses it, for a thin life chosen and locked from the inside.
In The Great Divorce, as Grey Town retells it, the inhabitants quarrel, move apart, and build by wishing. They can have what they want on poor terms, and they remain empty. Offered the journey toward heaven, almost all return. The chapter reads this as the reduced Christian life: domesticated, deistic, moralistic, and wonderless. Hell's doors are locked from the inside. The sin of living small is the chapter's closing caution.
art of seeing
The re-education of perception, so that sensing and understanding see God and the gospel again.
Huxley's phrase, adopted in the chapter of that name. Eyes and nerves sense. The mind perceives. Seeing is the product of both. The theological practice is childlike attention, the Genius of the AND, and a willingness to live with paradox. The same art widens the gospel from one cultural frame to three: guilt, shame, and power. Blake's line, as they use it, is that as a person is, so he sees.
eclipse of Godalso "the immanent frame"
God obscured because something else has moved into the line of sight.
From Buber, as Moving the Moon uses him. A solar eclipse is about the viewer's eyes, and the sun itself. An eclipse of God is the concealment that comes when idols, ideas, and ideologies interpose. Taylor's immanent frame is the modern form they cite: a view locked against transcendence. The repair they ask is to move the moon, to adjust the perspective, so a reframation can begin. God, they say, has not left.
heresyalso "the heresy of reductionism"
A fragment of the truth extracted from its whole and then treated as the whole.
Moving the Moon recovers an older sense. Heresy here does not first mean a straightforward denial. It means a particular truth pulled from its context. The heretic has often found something real. The error is the enthusiasm that makes the piece into everything. Wright's lines, quoted there, say an important element looms so large that it is debated as the only thing that mattered. Rumi's broken mirror is the poem they set beside it.
sehnsuchtalso "the humming of unseen harps"
The unfinished longing in every person, which no finite good can close.
The humming chapter uses the German word for longing or yearning. With McGrath and Lewis, it is a desire more desirable than any satisfaction, pointing beyond time and space. Augustine's restless heart is the theological root they claim. Lewis calls the pang joy. Lawrence's unseen harps are the poem of the same ache. The book says God is at the other end of it, and that Ecclesiastes 3:11 has set eternity in the heart.
Genius of the ANDalso "both/and"
Collins's name, which the book adopts, for holding more than one truth inside a larger whole.
Set against the Tyranny of the OR in The Art of Seeing. Either/or analysis keeps reducing. The AND seeks A and B together: synthesis, wholeness, mystery left intact. The chapter uses it for doctrine and for the gospel. Forgiveness, reconciliation, adoption, restoration, and mission travel together. The three cultural frames of guilt, shame, and power are the gospel-sized form of the same habit.
glocal gospelalso "three-dimensional gospel"
The good news told so that guilt, shame, and bondage can all be addressed in one place.
The Art of Seeing says Western, Eastern, and Southern frames of the gospel now overlap in ordinary Western life. Guilt and innocence, honor and shame, power and powerlessness are all present on the Playa, on the Camino, and in the neighborhood. A glocal gospel recognizes that the good news is many-faceted. Forgiveness addresses guilt. Love and a new name address shame. Rescue addresses enslaving powers. The chapter asks for a larger telling.
interpathy
Feeling with another across a cultural line, enough to carry something of their world.
Romancing the City takes the missiological term for a depth of affinity. An outsider learns a people's values, wounds, and direction, and almost becomes one of them. It is empathy across a boundary. The practice brackets one's own beliefs long enough to enter a different world of meaning. Atticus Finch's line to Scout, climb into his skin and walk around in it, is the chapter's plain-speech form. Prévert's rewritten sign for the blind man is the story they tell of how a changed sentence invites that crossing.
moralistic therapeutic deismalso "MTD"
The reduced creed Smith and Denton name, as Grey Town uses it: rules, self-help, and a distant god.
From Soul Searching, as the Grey Town chapter reports it. Moralistic: faith reduced to rules for a happy life. Therapeutic: religion as a tool used when needed, aimed at what makes a person happiest. Deistic: a creator somewhere out there, largely uninvolved. Unca Lonny's plainer deism sits beside it. The chapter says this creed pervades middle-class evangelical faith and domesticates discipleship. The life Jesus gives, abiding and Spirit-filled, is the contrast they draw by describing that life in full.
haggadahalso "halakhah"
The story, parable, and history that Jewish tradition holds together with the ethical code.
The curd chapter says halakhah, conceptual ideas and ethical code, is kept in balance with haggadah, story, parable, and history. Each interprets the other. Both are needed to make sense of the world. The Passover Haggadah is the annual reenactment they name. When biblical people forgot their narrative, the prophets say, they lost their way. The pair is the chapter's reason for refusing a gospel of principles with the story siphoned out.
About the authorAlan Hirsch
ALAN HIRSCH is a global thought-leader on missional movements and leadership. He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including The Forgotten Ways, The Shaping of Things to Come, 5Q, ReJesus, Reframation, Untamed, The Permanent Revolution, and, most recently, Metanoia. He has worked with churches and organizations worldwide, with a primary focus in North America, Europe, and Australia. He co-founded Forge in Victoria in 1996 with Debra Hirsch and Michael Frost, and is one of the founders of Movement Leaders Collective. He serves as movement mentor for NewThing International and resident consultant for Redeemer City to City, among other roles. His experience spans leading a local church movement among the marginalized, developing training systems for innovative missional leadership, training leaders in movement dynamics, and heading the mission and revitalization work of his denomination.
