In my previous post, I commended this story by Donald Haynes about a recent visit to a hospital:
Yesterday I visited a 27-year-old woman whose mother called my lay leader to ask if I would visit. I drove 60 miles to a regional hospital to see this young woman. Her ovarian cancer has now metastasized. She can tolerate no more chemotherapy.
Only she and her fiancé were in the room. After a few minutes of conversation, I said: “Lisa and Tim, I know you must ask why this is happening. I am not here to tell you that I know, but I do want to reinforce that God is love and this cancer is not from your Heavenly Father.
“Jesus said, ‘If you love your children, how much more does your Father in heaven love them. If they ask you for bread you will not give them a stone.’
“Lisa, God is weeping that you are not getting well.”
She brightened and said, “I believe that. We were going where the preacher said that everything that ever happens to us is from God, and we quit.”
I have no desire to retract my admiration for his pastoral grace, but as I have been driving around and attending to my morning work today, the context in which he sets the story has been jangling around in my head. Haynes sets the story in an article about the contrast between Arminian and Calvinist theology.
It reminds me of a blog post written by John Piper about not wasting your cancer. In it, Piper certainly argues against the pastoral approach in Haynes’ story. Piper writes that God does not just use our cancer to help us grow, but permits it as part of his divine plan. Since God does not prevent cancer, he is the cause of it.
So, does that mean a Calvinist would walk into this dying woman’s room and tell her that God gave her cancer and she needs to use the cancer as an opportunity to get her head straight about the sovereignty of God?
Does that sound like Jesus?
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
I don’t know if Jesus would say that cancer is an opportunity to get our understanding of sovereignty right, but he did say this about a blind guy (shameless copy-paste from BibleGateWay, NIV), assuming we trust the author of John as accurate with a historical core (which I do):
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”
Which I could easily see as saying that God in God’s sovereignty might foreordain some suffering so that God might be glorified in the later redemption of that suffering, or at least that suffering in general is always an occasion for God to be glorified. However, that is not an equivalent event to getting into our heads a right understanding of God’s sovereignty. So while Jesus didn’t say that exactly, it does seem like he said something that could be easily confused with it, especially for a Calvinistic theologian.
Great text, Dan. That one had escaped me when I was thinking about this in the morning.
In the end, what all this is doing is raising my discomfort with the basic pastoral move the Rev. Haynes made. The disclaiming of the possibility that God caused illness just does not fit my reading of Scripture.
I don’t think you go in and say, “God gave you cancer,” but it does not seem proper to disavow that possibility either.
My discomfort isn’t so much with his theology as going into a pastoral situation like that and (apparently) telling someone what to think. (But maybe the story was abbreviated for the sake of making a theological point.)
If healing is central the Christian tradition – which I think it is – I really don’t personally know what to make of a God who both heals people and makes them ill.