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

Krish: Yes. Some of the things I found were that we really can't just settle for the simplistic answers - the kind-of bumper sticker Christianity. We need to plumb a bit deeper. We need to allow the Bible to set the agenda rather than our brains.

One of the paradoxes we look at is the idea of Jesus being fully God and fully human. That seems paradoxical: how can God be like that? I studied science: I was a chemist for my first degree - and I drew on the way that science has to operate. So when scientists investigated light they came across the idea that it operates as a particle, a physical object, but also as a wave that can be in two places at one time. Those are seemingly contradictory or paradoxical experimental findings - but rather than ignore one set of evidence, what the scientists did was they came up with a new concept and they called it wave-particle duality.

I think that kind of humility is important: that we don't expect the world around us to fit our brains. We have to say: 'Actually l can't conceptualise this, I can't picture this; I'm going to hold two things in tension'. I think that's what I've had to do with a lot of my understanding of the Bible: that I can't fully understand, I can't fully grasp in my head how a loving God allows suffering but the Bible does teach both that God is all-loving and that he's all-powerful and those two things are not contradictory and I can hold both of them in tension when I experience suffering. So trying to learn the humility that science sometimes shows when faced with complex situations.

Heather: Is that word 'tension' key when dealing with these paradoxes? Holding things in tension?

Krish: Yes: I think that really is important, that you don't ditch one side of the evidence, you don't just write it all off as mystery and beyond our understanding - but you are holding onto two different aspects of God's character at the same time, or two seemingly contradictory views about God that's revealed in some of the Bible stories. It is in the tension that your faith is proved.

Heather: We've talked about Christians being challenged in their faith with these things, but what about people who don't have a faith? Do you think some of these paradoxes are stumbling blocks: that are what stopped them from taking that step to choose to believe? I'm thinking of people struggling to understand how a loving God could watch and stand by while people suffer.

Krish: Yes, definitely. I think that there are issues that stop people believing and sometimes they are intellectual. I don't think it's only intellectual when someone doesn't come to faith, but I think this book will help someone who is exploring faith to ask those difficult questions and not settle for easy answers and recognise that God might be more complicated than we're fully able to grasp - but we don't have to give up too early. It does encourage a really inquisitive mindset, not just for people that are exploring faith but for Christians too. I don't want to necessarily give lots of answers: I want to help Christians ask good questions and learn how to cope with the way the Bible answers them rather than settle for a quick and easy answer.

Heather: So taking one specific rather large issue in terms of why God doesn't intervene: If the Jews are his chosen people, why did he allow millions to be killed in the Holocaust?

Krish: Yes, that's a massive question. I draw on that a little bit when I look at the Job paradox: why did God allow Job to suffer when obviously Job was loved by God - and it's told very clearly that he is? Or the Esther paradox, which is where the Jews also are facing apparent genocide and God remained silent. I think the hard thing is the context that we live in. So, I sometimes describe ourselves as caterpillars climbing up a billboard: we can't see the big picture of what God is doing. In the book of Job, Job never fully is told the big picture of what God is doing, that is allowing Job to face this amount of suffering. Job is told to reflect on the universe; to look at what God has done, to reflect on his life and basically he's told to hold on to a faith and a trust in God despite the circumstances.

A similar thing happens in the book of Habakkuk, where Habakkuk has a full-on row with God about why God is allowing bad things to happen in his world and God never gives Habakkuk the answer that he was hoping for. God exceeds and breaks Habakkuk's imagination; he just says something that's so difficult for Habakkuk to understand.

In the end of the book of Job and the book of Habakkuk, both men end up saying to God: 'Look, I don't fully understand what you've done but I am going to trust you nevertheless'. I think that is a really tough place to live but it is part of what the life of faith is called to be.

Heather: Having a full-on row like you've just mentioned is quite an extreme way of wrestling something. Is that ok in our relationship with God as we're getting to grips with these things?

Krish: Yes definitely - and I think that's another reason I wrote the book. You sometimes hear about couples who say, 'We've never had an argument,' and that's held up as a model for a good relationship. But I think if you don't argue, you never actually meet the other person: you just live with a projection of what that other person is. I think it's actually in the difficult parts of the Bible or in the difficult parts of life that our true relationship is revealed, because it's when you fall out, it's when God doesn't measure up to your expectations, it's when God lets you down as it were, that you find out if you really love him. One of the dangers I think, is that we end up creating a ventriloquist's God, like a little ventriloquist's dummy that just turns up telling us whatever we want to hear, or doing whatever we want to say: a kind of vending machine God. Actually God is real and he has personality, he has character and he doesn't do things on our demand: he's his own person, he's in charge of his own intentions.

I think it is in those conflict times when we are able to talk it out with God - and Habakkuk does it; the psalms are full of people shouting at God or arguing with God - and I think that is allowed actually. I think that's a genuine, emotionally rich relationship rather than just a kind of thin veneer of Christianity.