Eternity and dust? Cancer and the creative God

Abstract

According to the preacher, God has ‘put a sense of past and future into [our] minds, yet [we] cannot find out what God has done from the beginning and the end’ (Eccl 3:11 NRSV). As human beings we occupy the ground between our time-bound limitations and our God-imaging sense of eternity. And according to the Isaiah scroll, God ‘make[s] weal and create[s] woe’ (Isa 45:7 NRSV). There is a shadow side to the creative process of which modern science is making us increasingly aware. This article suggests that the phenomenon of cancer may be understood in the context of this risky creative process, and that as creatures of dust human beings are caught up in the riskiness of creation. This piece of speculative theology then considers the question, ‘What is God doing when cancer strikes?’ in the light of a God who, while creating, resists the suffering released by God’s own creative process.