Never-Ending Prayer: A Case for the Christian Tradition

Is Christian ‘tradition’ to be maintained as the absolute body of truth? Can it be used selectively depending on the preferences of individual believers? What can ‘religious truth’ possibly mean in our age of opinions and overwhelming cultural diversity? These are unsettling questions for Christians, their effect aggravated by our daily encounter with non-western cultures and non-Christian religions, and by the increasing presentation of secularism and atheism as the ‘normal’ way of life.

In Never-Ending Prayer, Bert Hoedemaker outlines the continuing importance of tradition, while showing that in facing these challenges our understanding of tradition needs a ‘reset’. Drawing on his own experiences of world Christianity, he reconstructs the Christian tradition in such a way that it no longer defines and defends itself as a specific body of concepts and practices over against ‘the world’ but as a living community originating in and remaining in interaction with humanity’s permanent struggles. It is presented as a system of religious imagination in which prayer is the driving force and reconciliation is seen as the destination of humankind.