Heather Bellamy spoke with Krish Kandiah, the Executive Director for Churches and Mission at the Evangelical Alliance

Krish Kandiah

The Christian faith is full of apparent paradoxes: A compassionate God who sanctions genocide; an all-powerful God who allows horrific suffering; a God who owns everything yet demands so much from his followers and a God who is distant and yet present at the same time.

Many people have big questions that the Christian faith seems to leave unanswered, so they push them to the back of their minds. But leaving these questions unexamined is unhealthy. Rather than shying away from the difficult questions, they need to be faced head on.

What if this ancient faith has survived so long not in spite of but precisely because of these apparent contradictions? What if it is in the difficult parts of the Bible that God is most clearly revealed?

Heather Bellamy spoke with Krish Kandiah, the Executive Director for Churches and Mission at the Evangelical Alliance about his book, Paradoxology.

Heather: So first of all, why did you write this book?

Krish: I've wrestled with the difficult questions of faith since I was a young lad. I've always had a very inquisitive brain and I remember my Sunday school teacher always telling me one of three answers when I asked her a tough question. One was: 'If we could understand God then we would be God'; the second is: 'God works in mysterious ways'; and the third one was: 'Get on with your colouring'. I thought, actually there might be a whole bunch of people out there that have had really complex, difficult questions about their faith and their understanding of who God is and this would give them an opportunity to go a bit deeper and ask those questions in a grown-up way.

Heather: Could you unpack some of what you see as paradoxes in the Bible?

Krish: Yes, there's a whole bunch of them that I look at in the book. The first one is the Abraham paradox and that's the God who needs nothing but asks for everything, because God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Why would a God who owns the universe need someone to do that?

The second one is the Moses paradox. That one talks about the idea that the Bible says that God is here with us and yet he's above us and different and far away from us. So how can God be both far away and so close?

Then the Joshua paradox is the God who is terribly compassionate. We look at the idea of why God would encourage Joshua to commit some kind of genocide against the people that were living in the land of Palestine. What's going on there: God seems to be a God of love but he's seemingly asking his nation to do something pretty terrible?

There are a whole bunch of paradoxes like that in the Old Testament. Then by the time we get to Jesus, what do we do about the God who's incredibly human? What about Judas? Does God determine our free will? So really trying to wrestle with the complexity of the faith.

Heather: Have you struggled in your faith at different times with these sorts of issues - not just as a child in Sunday school - but actually when circumstances have happened in life? Have you wrestled with who God is?

Krish: Yes, definitely. I can remember a number of instances where we were facing either a personal tragedy in the family: my mother died of cancer and that was obviously a tough time for everybody involved. When I was a church pastor there were lots of very difficult situations, particularly involving children: one child that went in for a routine operation and then came back in a virtual vegetative state and just trying to help the parents through that. We've wrestled with the reality of: Where is God when it hurts? Why would a God of love allow these really complex suffering situations to occur? And so I guess the book was trying to help people future-proof their faith, so they ask the questions ahead of time rather than while they're in the middle of it.

Heather: Could you share some of what you found as you wrestled through those issues?