ineke.co.uk

If you find someone who claims they didn’t initially pick up this book because of its cover, I bet they’re lying! The author even ended up talking to the public from a matching sofa! Yes, I did pick this book up because it was a brightly coloured, geometric pattern, but normally I’d have a quick look and put it down again. Instead, I read the back and thought, gosh this sounds interesting. And I wasn’t wrong.

I take forever to read non-fiction, so the fact this took three months isn’t a bad thing. If you saw the number of page corners I’ve folded down, that speaks for itself. For each chapter, the book takes a character (or occasionally a book) and the paradox tied in with it to look at, so the book could be dipped in and out of, chapter by chapter if you wanted to. The chapters are as follows:

• Introduction
• Abraham – The God who needs nothing but asks for everything
• Moses – The God who is far away, so close
• Joshua – The God who is terribly compassionate
• Job – The God who is actively inactive
• Hosea – The God who is faithful to the unfaithful
• Habakkuk – The God who is consistently unpredictable
• Jonah – The God who is indiscriminately selective
• Esther – The God who speaks silently
• Interlude at the border
• Jesus – The God who is divinely human
• Judas – The God who determines our free will
• The Cross – The God who wins as He loses
• Romans – The God who is effectively ineffective
• Corinthians – The God who fails to disappoint
• Epilogue – Living with Paradox

He highlights in his introduction how these aren’t questions every asks, but that a lot of people avoid asking, for fear of shaking our faith. At one point I was going to put in here the bit from each page that I folded down, but that would now be a tad excessive. But I’ll share two or three – Kandiah’s text is littered with citations, quotes and footnotes, so I’ve given credit to others where it’s due:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentence, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confessions.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It was no accident, either, that God appeared to Moses as a flame. The movement of a flame and its bright colours attract us, and yet the heat of the flame pushes us away.”

“There is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” – D F Wallace

There’s a lovely story from a Royal Film Premiere when he didn’t quite get to meet the Queen, an excellent look at the hotel with infinite rooms problem, and wave particle duality and Schrodingers Equation. He also introduces us to some paintings and the significance in what they show – I felt quite well educated after reading this!

The only critique I’d give this book is that some chapters could have been helped by starting with either an overview of the story of the character we were looking at, the relevant bible passage, or at least a reference to the correct bible passage. I have to confess, when we jumped into Habakkuk, I didn’t have a whole load of background knowledge to go by!