In regards to allowing God to be God, and how we speak of God and His actions, and how that impacts our thinking, teaching, preaching, conversations, etc…I defer to two of the greatest theologians of all time.
Karl Barth says this in Doctrine of the Word of God: Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics I/I:
Volume 1/1: The Word of God
A. On the relation of dogmatics to proclamation (pp, 85-87)
(underlinings are my emphasis)
3. The theme of Church proclamation or subject-matter of Christianity demands dogmatics to the extent that its proclamation is a responsible act and to the extent that dogmatics is the effort to meet this responsibility towards the theme of proclamation. Yet it is by no means the case that in dogmatics the Church becomes as it were the lord and judge of the subject-matter, so that the current results of dogmatics are to be accepted as law imposed as it were on God, revelation and faith. Dogmatics has to investigate and say at each given point how we may best speak of God, revelation and faith to the extent that human talk about these things is to count as Church proclamation. It should not think that it can lay down what God, revelation and faith are in themselves. In both its investigations and its conclusions it must keep in view that God is in heaven and it on earth, and that God, His revelation and faith always live their own free life over against all human talk, including that of the best dogmatics. Even if we have again weighed everything and corrected everything and formulated everything better, as is our duty to the subject-matter of Christianity in respect of human talk about it, and even if our findings have been given the status of Church confession and dogma, we have still to say: We are unprofitable servants, and in no sense are we to imagine that we have become in the very least masters of the subject.
Like the subject-matter of Christianity, Church proclamation must also remain free in the last resort, free to receive the command which it must always receive afresh from that free life of the subject-matter of Christianity. Church proclamation and not dogmatics is immediate to God in the Church. Proclamation is essential, dogmatics is needed only for the sake of it. Dogmatics lives by it to the extent that it lives only in the Church. In proclamation, and in God, revelation and faith only to the degree that these are its objects, dogmatics is to seek its material.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer says this in Spiritual Care:
The greatest difficulty for the pastor stems from his theology. He knows all there is to be known about sin and forgiveness….The peak of theological craftiness is to conceal necessary and wholesome unrest under such self-justification….The conscience has been put to sleep. Theology becomes a science by which one learns to excuse everything and justify everything….The theologian knows that he cannot be shot out of the saddle by other theologians. Everything his theology admits is justified. This is the curse of theology. (Spiritual Care pp.67-68)
As for some book recommendations that I think are absolutely brilliant regarding the issues of suffering, and even the issue of cancer are the following:
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
This is Lewis’s honest account of what he experienced at the loss of his wife to breast cancer. A beautiful look and insight in the journal writings of man who is devastated by the loss, and who moves from doubt to a more affirmed faith in God through the journey of grief.
A Letter of Consolation by Henri Nouwen
A beautiful letter that Henri Nouwen wrote to his father six months after the death of his mother. Beautiful exploration of grief and suffering and the beauty of resurrection out of death.
Maybe one of the most signficant theological works written that explores the suffering on the cross as the beginning point of our theology.
