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
• a God who is distant and yet present at the same time

Many of us have big questions that the Christian faith seems to leave unanswered. So we push them to the back of our minds, for fear of destabilizing our beliefs. But leaving these questions unexamined is neither healthy for us, nor honouring to God. Rather than shying away from the difficult questions, we need to face them head on.

What if the tension between apparently opposing doctrines is exactly where faith comes alive? 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?

PARADOXOLOGY makes a bold new claim: that the paradoxes that seem like they ought to undermine belief are actually the heart of our vibrant faith, and that it is only by continually wrestling with them - rather than trying to pin them down or push them away - that we can really move forward, individually and together.

Krish Kandiah is Executive Director for Churches in Mission at the Evangelical Alliance, Chair of the Theological Advisory Panel for Tearfund and lecturer at Regent Park College, Oxford University. He is in demand as a speaker and lecturer. He lives with his wife, children and foster children in Oxfordshire.