Paradoxology

Why Christianity Was Never Meant to Be Simple

Krish Kandiah

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830897728
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

It seems that the God of the Christian faith is full of 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 timeMany of us have big questions about God 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 honoring 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? In his new book Paradoxology Krish Kandiah 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 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.

Chapter 1

The Abraham Paradox

The God who needs nothing but asks for everything

The teenager stood trembling on the stage, wearing her smart black school uniform, dwarfed by the huge platform and a very tall lectern. Four thousand pairs of eyes were trained on her. Gyeoung1 was born in Pyeong Yang, the capital of North Korea. Her father had the lofty position of being an assistant to President Kim Jong Il himself. But then one day, out of the blue, the president’s attitude towards her father changed – they became undesirables and were immediately subjected to political persecution. Aged six, she and her parents fled as refugees to China. There her parents became Christians. What a good news story – exiled by a dictator from North Korea, only to be converted in communist China – just the kind of poetic justice I like. It proves not only that God is in control of the universe but also that he has a sense of humour.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t end there. Her hands still shaking, the girl carried on reading. After only a few short months, Gyeoung’s mother, pregnant with her second child, contracted leukaemia and died. Not long after that, her father was arrested by the Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea. He spent three years in prison, tirelessly sharing his faith, before finally being released and allowed to leave the country. Again, I was ready to cheer; maybe not quite so loudly this time, but God still wins, turning the tragedy of widowerhood and imprisonment into opportunities for others to hear the good news of the gospel. Grief wouldn’t mute this minister of the gospel, prison bars couldn’t contain him.

But the story was still not finished. Shortly after being reunited with his daughter, Gyeoung’s father felt called by God to return to North Korea to help others come to know Jesus. He was discovered by the authorities in 2006, and he disappeared. In her soft voice, Gyeoung explained: ‘I have heard no word from my father nor about him ever since. In all probability, he has been shot dead on charges of treason and espionage, as is so often the case for persecuted Christians in North Korea.’2 A hush fell over the room as this petite teenager paused to glimpse up from the script she was holding. Now I didn’t feel like cheering. I wanted someone to go and embrace this young girl and let her know that she was not alone in the world after all. Silence descended on the auditorium.

Questions were crowding into my head faster than I could acknowledge or record them. How far should believers be willing to go to serve God? What price should we put on the cost of discipleship? What would it take to put this situation right? These were closely followed by deeper, darker questions. A big part of why Gyeoung’s story so disturbed me is because as a father and foster carer, I have seen the damage done to children when they are left without parents. I have seen children emotionally crippled and unable to form attachments with others because they felt so abandoned by their parents. Should a father be willing to sacrifice his daughter’s well-being for God? Would God really ask a father to do that? How could this girl stand up there as a follower of a God who would ask that of her, that she give up her own father?

As a young Christian, hearing stories like this would have inspired me – I could afford to be a lot more reckless then about my personal safety. But now, as a husband and father I feel the responsibility of providing and caring for those who depend on me. I find it nerve-wracking enough to cross the road and invite my neighbours to church – I have grave doubts that my courage would stand up to the life-and-death decisions that my brothers and sisters in the persecuted church face every day. On my best days, I’d like to think that with great help from God I might have enough courage to choose to be faithful to Christ even in the face of death. But deliberately taking risks that might orphan my own children seems a wholly different question.

Gyeoung’s story struck a chord at the Lausanne conference, a global gathering of Christian leaders;3 her story has inspired thousands around the world. So why am I left more perplexed than encouraged? How, after losing his home, his unborn child and his wife and after surviving three years in a North Korean prison, could a father abandon his one and only daughter, whom he loved? Why would one teenage girl have to pay such a high price for her father to follow God?

Why would God demand such an outrageous, impossible thing? What kind of God could possibly need his followers to make these kinds of sacrifices?

Why does worshipping God cost so much to those who love him, and those whom he supposedly loves? The more we reflect on the nature of God, the less these kinds of sacrifices make sense, as God is supposed to be all powerful and all sufficient.

This is not an isolated problem. Every day Christians face, not the life of peace and contentment we might hope for, but impossible situations – situations in which God seems to want them to take the hardest path. Not just those who are facing persecution in places like North Korea, Pakistan or Sudan. Recently I met a young woman who had been abused by her foster parents while she was a child in their care, and yet she told me she had felt called by God to phone them and forgive them. How could God ask her to do that? But he did, and she did, and she is now training as a social worker so as to devote her life to helping children in care. I have met countless Christians who have heard God’s call to move into difficult neighbourhoods. I have met single women who have felt God lead them to leave jobs they love and friends they care for to nurse elderly parents. I have met Christians who are trying to break long-term addictions out of honour for God. I have met converts who have been rejected and disinherited by their family because of their new-found love for Jesus. I have met parents who have received physical abuse from adopted children whom they felt led to welcome into their homes.

To be perfectly honest, when I hear these stories I sometimes wonder if God is insecure, cruel or greedy.

First, sometimes God seems to behave like a jealous or hopeless lover who demands huge sacrifices and outrageous demonstrations of devotion because he needs reassurance that he is still loved. Perhaps when God asks the impossible of us, he is not actually testing our ability to survive, but testing our affections? Is he just insecure? When we look at the Job Paradox, this possibility will come up again.

Second, God can appear to be behaving like a nasty child slowly pulling the wings off a butterfly, simply to watch how it struggles, to see how much pain it can endure before it dies. As God asks people to make sacrifices for him, gradually stripping away so much of what they hold dear, it may feel as though he is just testing their resolve, seeing how much loss can be coped with – and all just for the fun of it. There are moments when we experience the terrible cost of worshipping God, or watch while others have to face these impossible decisions, and the idea of a cruel God seems like it might fit the reality better than a loving one.

Third, and perhaps most complex of all to try and work through, when God asks the impossible, it makes him look greedy. With all the riches at his disposal, why would he ask for more? I would feel a lot happier sacrificing my coat to a homeless person shivering in the tube station, than offering it to a fellow commuter huddled over his laptop because he left his designer jacket in the office. When a poor person asks you to give them something, you may not feel comfortable about it but you can see the point; the request has greater plausibility than when a wealthy person asks.

The Bible makes it very clear that God needs nothing from us:

I have no need of a bull from your stall

or of goats from your pens,

for every animal of the forest is mine,

and the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird in the mountains,

and the insects in the fields are mine.

If I were hungry I would not tell you,

for the world is mine, and all that is in it.4

In the New Testament Paul explains that God ‘is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.’5 The term that captures this idea is ‘aseity’ which, according to theologian J. I. Packer, means that God ‘has life in himself and draws his unending energy from himself ’ (a se in Latin means ‘from himself ’).6 God needs nothing – yet he demands everything.

Here lies the heart of the paradox: an all-powerful, self-sufficient God who asks for costly worship. This paradox challenges us not just at an intellectual level, but at an emotional one. It strikes at the core of our faith, because it is about the very character of God. Is God loving, kind and compassionate? Or is he cruel, insecure and greedy? If we don’t resolve this issue we will either become miserly towards God – refusing to give him what he demands – or miserable with God – resenting giving him what he deserves.

The Bible, however, acknowledges and indeed encourages us to explore this paradox of a God who asks the impossible. In fact, it is highlighted early on in Scripture when we are given a heart-rending account of a dark episode in biblical history – when a father is asked to participate in child-sacrifice in the name of devotion to God.

Abraham is a key figure in the Old Testament. His story is the first in-depth biography we come to in the Bible, and is thus significant as the bridge point between the primeval story of creation and the history of the patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith. Abraham’s story is the link between cosmology and genealogy.7 We are given a long and detailed account of Abraham’s family tree. It gets more space than was given to describe the creation from nothing of billions of constellations and galaxies.8 But then, after we have heard over and over about who ‘begat’ whom and went on to ‘beget’ someone else, there is an abrupt stop. This family line will not continue, because Sarai, Abraham’s wife, ‘was childless because she was not able to conceive’.9

In an ancient culture where your identity was defined by your ancestors and your future would be defined by your descendants, being childless was a particularly heavy burden to carry.10 In today’s culture, of course, some make a conscious decision to live a childless life. But sadly, there are many other families who do want children and live with the continual pain of childlessness. Our televisions, social networks, supermarkets and workplace policies constantly take for granted the expectation that we will get married, have babies, raise a family, have children to make small talk about. It is an unspoken heartache, because the corollary of the Me Culture is that you can’t talk about things that haven’t worked out. Too many people silently identify with the prayer of Rachel, wife of the patriarch Jacob: ‘Give me children, or death.’11 The sense of shame and public exposure as one who cannot have children was then, and still is now, unbearable for the many women who suffer it.

For Sarai and Abram, without children there was quite literally no future – they had no one to pass on their inheritance to, no one to care for them in old age.12 They would become a genealogical dead end. Despite being materially wealthy, they carried a huge burden of shame. They may well have felt their lives had been worthless – we are told Abram’s body was ‘as good as dead’,13 and Sarai’s womb ‘was also dead’. Into this story of an elderly couple entering their twilight years and about to fade into the night of genealogical obscurity, God steps in.

The God who created the stars in Genesis chapter 1 asks Abraham to count the stars in Genesis chapter 15. The Creator’s promise to this humble and ageing creature is that his offspring – none of which are yet born – will one day outnumber the stars. The cosmic, universe-creating God becomes intimately involved in the life of an elderly couple living in an out-of-the-way corner of a major landmass in the northern hemisphere of the third rock from a pretty ordinary star in a forgotten backwater of one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Abraham’s story links the big story of the creation of the universe and the one-on-one story of God’s involvement in the creation of a new family.

The God who spoke the stars into being gives Abraham a new name, a new vocation and a new location. The God of creation becomes the God of the covenant, establishing relationship with one man from amongst the wealth of his creation.

The LORD had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’14

Our nightmare story begins like the ultimate fairy tale. An elderly couple are plucked from obscurity and told their dreams are coming true: they will be given significance, inheritance and innumerable descendants in God’s plans for the world. This feel-good plotline could be the story of Cinderella, or Pretty Woman, or Harry Potter. A nobody will become a somebody. When we are first introduced to Abraham, the details are sparse. Even his name is shorter than it becomes later: at the moment, he is just plain Abra...