Sept 14, 2026 Show with Teasi Cannon on “Counterfeit Forgiveness: How a Modern Myth Betrays Victims, Protects Abusers & Corrupts the Gospel”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 14th day of September 2026.

Before I introduce our guest of the day to you and our topic, I want to remind everyone to please mark down on your calendars a very special guest for this Wednesday, September 16th, my dear friend for decades, going back to 1996, actually, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries will be my guest once again.

We have not yet determined our topic, but I know that joining us on that broadcast will be Pastor Brandon Myers of Christ the King Reformed Baptist Church in Niles, Illinois. And that wonderful church happens to be one of the most recent annual sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

So, I hope to have as many of you listen this Wednesday as possible, and I hope that you all get ready to submit questions. Whenever we have Dr. White on, we typically allow the listeners to send in any theological question to him, even if it is not directly associated with the topic.

So, you can start developing your questions now if you wish, and hopefully I'll actually have a topic to announce tomorrow. Can't guarantee you that, but hopefully we will have a topic before the broadcast anyway.

The Guest’s Testimony and Journey from Abuse to Faith

And today I am thrilled to have a first-time guest who will be addressing a very controversial issue that sadly divides the body of Christ, and that is the issue of forgiveness. Many of you may recall that I have recently had on the program, on a number of occasions, my friend Chris Brawns.

Chris Brawns is a wonderful brother in Christ, a very theologically astute brother. And we have had Chris on multiple occasions, actually spanning a couple of decades, because I first had Chris Brawns on the program back in the early days of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio when I was broadcasting the show out of WNYG Radio in Babylon, Long Island.

But I more recently had Chris on the program March 17th and the 25th of this year to discuss not only his most recent book, The Way of Repentance, but also his more well-known classic work on forgiveness, Unpacking Forgiveness, Biblical Answers for Complex Questions and Deep Wounds.

Well, it caught my attention in social media that Chris was giving glowing, enthusiastic endorsements for the book we are addressing today, Counterfeit Forgiveness, How a Modern Myth Betrays Victims, Protects Abusers, and Corrupts the Gospel.

And I'm thrilled to have on the program for the first time the author of that book, T .C. Cannon. She's a teacher, author, speaker, apologist, and host of The True Comfort Podcast. And welcome for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, T .C. Cannon.

Thank you, Chris. I am thrilled to be here with you and looking forward to our conversation. Praise God.

And before we get into the heart of our main theme today, Counterfeit Forgiveness, since you are a first-time guest, as I always do on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, whenever we have a first-time guest on the program, we have that guest provide a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and the kinds of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you.

So we would love to hear your story.

Yeah, well, I actually was raised in a Christian cult. It was called The Way International, based out of, you know that? Some people have never heard of it, but it's based out of New Knoxville, Ohio, at least it was when I was growing up.

And my parents were very involved in various leadership roles. At the time, when I was a part of it, it was more like a free grace type of cult, not necessarily high control, but a lot of hippies. We met in homes.

You know, as a child, it seemed fun, but eventually the leadership and the doctrine became so unbiblical that my parents chose to leave, and that was very painful for them. I was still a young teenager at the time, and so I didn't necessarily understand all that was going on.

But what I did know is that after we left that cult, we had a long period of time in which our family did not have any intentional faith practice. We didn't go to church, and we didn't really talk about God much.

We were just sort of living a life separated from any Christian community. And during that time, we also moved from Indiana all the way to California. So I ended up finishing my high school years out there.

And during those high school years and early college years, I summarized those years as just being a time of running to every possible counterfeit to get the needs of my heart met. I was very broken from multiple instances of abuse in my childhood, not from my parents but others, and just desperate to find purpose and love and affirmation and was going to all the wrong places, which led me to a very deep pit.

I scraped the bottom of the barrel, and it was in that place of being heaped in shame and guilt and purposelessness and depression that I truly on my own, just in my room, had an encounter. I'm definitely not a hyper-charismatic person, but there's no way to describe what happened to me other than in a place of desperation.

I remembered the name Jesus from my childhood, even though it wasn't a biblical Jesus that I had been taught about. And I had an encounter with love and just felt this hope. Truly it was, you know, I can't, obviously, I don't think there's any way we can look back and think, well, step one was this, and this is what I did, and this is what God did.

But all in all, what I walked away with was I had an overwhelming awareness of my sin and the depravity of the state that I was in at that time. My desperate need for God and my utter inability to get to Him.

All of that was sort of swirling through my heart. And it was then that Jesus became real to me, that I understood He and He alone could actually get me to the Father and cleanse me from the sin. And all of it was just one big event.

And from that moment, after experiencing that, my eyes were set on Jesus. I can cry thinking about it because I've never looked away. That love that I felt set me on a deep dive to want to know Jesus and understand His story and my place in it.

Of course, my journey, like any other, has been fraught with lots to learn, lots of healing, lots of growth in my understanding of how to read Scripture and how to understand, you. But my love for Jesus has just been the guiding principle of my life ever since.

And my desire and my passion is to help people to find Him and to build a faith that lasts through the sorts of waves that we are being hit with in our culture today. Whether it's abuse or skepticism or just our own doubts that are normal to navigate in the Christian life, just to do my part to help say, Jesus is truly the answer.

This world truly has nothing for us because I've been there. So that's sort of a nutshell of testimony. And I always like to say that the strength of our testimony doesn't lie within the depth of our former depravity.

It lies within the authenticity and the actual realness of our relationship with Jesus and what He is doing in and through us. He is the star of the testimony. So that is, in general, where I've come from and where I am today.

Praise God.

The reason why I immediately recognized the cult, the way that you were involved in, is that unfortunately, I believe it was likely back in the 90s, possibly the early 2000s, the late wife of one of my nephews, who lived up in Schenectady, New York, she develops inoperable brain cancer, and she was seeking to find comfort during this trial in her life in the wrong place, which was the way.

I put her in touch with an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor and his wife up there, and they reached out to her and poured love upon her and took her shopping and did a lot of things for her. And there was a bit of a tug of war between the way and this biblically sound church over my nephew's late wife's soul.

But thankfully, God is the one in control. And I don't know where she wound up because she passed, and I never heard a final word from her on this issue. I did attend the funeral, which was held in an evangelical church up in the Schenectady area, and I was so disheartened that the pastor there allowed the woman pastor of the way group that she was in to get up and eulogize my nephew's late wife, and she proselytized heresy during that eulogy.

I couldn't believe that they allowed her to speak. That's just amazing. But anyway, that's not why we're here today to talk about the way. I think it would be helpful for you to define forgiveness, because this is really at the root of the confusion that abounds in the body of Christ.

In fact, I have not taken a poll of the views and beliefs of Bible-believing Christians on what they believe about forgiveness, but I get the sense that you and I and Chris Brawns and the late J. Adams are in a minority when it comes to our understanding of forgiveness.

I could be wrong, but I don't think so. A lot of it has to do, as you know, with a misapplication of such texts in the Scripture as those in Luke 6, 27 -28, and 35, Matthew 5, 43 -44, Romans 12, 14, and 20, and Proverbs 25.

There are texts instructing Christians to love their enemies, do good to their enemies, feed their enemies, and on and on. And although those are the byproducts of forgiving someone, truly, that's not forgiveness.

It's not the same thing. And I think that that's where the confusion is, because people equate those things with forgiveness itself. But if you could, define forgiveness for us.

Yes. Well, so I would start with a definition of God's forgiveness, which we see biblically, is His promise to graciously pardon the sins and the moral debt of the repentant, of those who repent and believe, although this doesn't remove all the consequences of their sins, but it's a gracious promise to pardon the repentant.

And then our forgiveness is the gracious promise that we give to also pardon the repentant person from the moral debt and to be reconciled. And that's a big part of, well, obviously, God's forgiveness.

The point of God's forgiving sin is to be reconciled, because sin separates. Forgiveness deals with that problem, that separation that is caused by our moral debt. Forgiveness addresses that problem. And that is the problem it's meant to address in our relationships with one another as well.

So it is a free gift that cannot be earned, but it is received through repentance, according to God's pattern.

Yes. And the irony is that if God forgave the way that many, if not the majority of Christians say we must forgive, which means in even many, if not most evangelical pulpits and churches, it means we're supposed to automatically declare that we have forgiven people that have sinned against us or sinned against those we love, even if they, number one, never even ask for it and never even acknowledge that they've sinned, but if they have even remained unrepentant and continue to sin in that way, Christians are told, oh, we're just supposed to say, I forgive you, which almost renders it into a meaningless concept.

But if God forgave that way, there would be no place called hell. It would not be occupied by eternal residence there. Am I right?

Yeah. And if God forgave unconditionally or just forgives everyone all the time, whether they repent or not, then why all of the repeated cries for repentance? I mean, when you read through—I've been reading through Jeremiah just for my morning reading, and I'm just blown away by how many times through the prophet Jeremiah, God is begging for people, his people, to repent.

So it renders that meaningless. And not only in the Old Testament, but in the New, we see Jesus commissioning the disciples to preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And we see Peter on the day of Pentecost saying, you know, repent for the forgiveness of sins.

We see repentance all the way through the New Testament as well. And if forgiveness is unconditional, if God's forgiveness is unconditional, then how do we make sense of all of that? We have to, I don't know, come up with some reason why he's calling for that.

Also, it makes all of Jesus' teachings about hell seem almost like pointless. Why is he warning people of hell if everyone is forgiven? I've actually heard people say, well, there are forgiven people in hell, which is very hard for me to wrap my brain around, because that would make Jesus and God really, in my opinion, the biggest gaslighters of all time.

If you're forgiven, that's supposed to mean your sin is not held against you any longer. But to be in hell means that you are being held accountable for your sin. And you've chosen to take that on, to stand upon your own merit before God.

So yeah, I'm with you. It doesn't make a lot of sense. In fact, if God forgives the way we do, it would model not the gospel, it would model something more like universalism, where everyone is saved in the end, no matter whether they ever turn to him in repentance and faith or not.

Christ’s Prayer from the Cross and the Meaning of Repentance

Yes, and one of the areas or one text, I should say, that has added to the confusion is not necessarily the text itself adding to the confusion, but the interpretation of the text that has added to the confusion, is Luke 23, 34.

One of the last words of Christ while hanging on Calvary's cross was, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And I know that there are biblical scholars who disagree over whether this is actually a part of the inspired canon to begin with, but even if you say this is a part of the God-breathed canon, Jesus did not hang on the cross and say, I forgive you.

He was saying to the Father, Father, forgive them, and he gave a reason, for they know not what they do. Isn't that—aren't those crucial aspects of this that are very frequently, if not even most often, overlooked in the defenders of the unconditional forgiveness concept?

Yes, I hear that one most regularly, and you just said it so beautifully. What we see modeled there is not Jesus looking down at the crowd and saying, I forgive you, whether you ever turn to the Father in faith and repentance or not.

What we see is him modeling a prayer for those who abuse you. He earlier in the Gospels had commanded that we pray for those who abuse us, and what he is doing is he is modeling that. For many of us who have been abused in horrible ways, it is hard for us to imagine how could Jesus ask us to do that?

How could we be commanded to pray for people who abuse us? And Jesus right there is saying, you can do it because I'm doing it. He is modeling that, and so it is a beautiful example of that. And one thing that I would say to people is that we know it can't be that Jesus is now turning the definition of forgiveness on its head because Jesus says multiple times that he is the exact imprint of the Father, that when you've seen me, you've seen the Father, that I don't do anything.

I'm paraphrasing. I do what the Father shows me to do. I do what I see the Father doing. I don't do what I don't see the Father doing. And so I think almost everyone agrees that God's pattern of forgiveness involves repentance, that God offers forgiveness freely.

He has made the provision of forgiveness possible, but the way he has deemed that we receive that free gift is through repentance and faith. And for Jesus to turn that on its head and to say, well, now we're going to forgive everyone whether they repent or not would not make any sense when he doesn't do what the Father doesn't do.

When we look at Jesus, we see the Father, so we can't walk away from that scene and imagine that Jesus is changing all of that. The reason why we do, in my book, this is what I am asserting and just suggesting, is that the reason why we read texts like that and assume an unconditional model of forgiveness is because we are importing ideas that we have learned from our culture over time, not that we have gleaned from a faithful, systematic study of biblical forgiveness, especially our interpersonal forgiveness.

So we are interpreting that moment through a lens that is not interpreted through the explicit teachings of Jesus and the very clear model that God has left us throughout Scripture.

Now, let's hear something about your own personal journey, about your understanding of the concept of forgiveness. I'm assuming, and I could be wrong, but I'm assuming that like most of us who profess to be Christians and are Christians, that you at one time held the more commonly held view of an automatic forgiveness unconditionally, regardless of whether the person repents or even asks you for forgiveness.

Did you hold to that yourself at one time?

I did, and I'll tell you, what started my course correction was one morning I was out walking and listening to one of my favorite podcasts, and the guest on the show was talking about something called therapeutic forgiveness, and I had never heard that term before.

But the way she was defining therapeutic forgiveness was exactly what I had always believed was biblical forgiveness. It was, in fact, what I had believed, practiced, mentored others according to, and even written a chapter in my first book from that understanding.

Then she kept juxtaposing that with biblical forgiveness or conditional forgiveness, and she just kept bringing out scripture after scripture in which repentance is always linked. Repentance and reconciliation are linked to forgiveness, and so I left that particular podcast so shaken, and my assumptions were shaken enough to where I knew that she had something substantive that she was suggesting, and I knew that forgiveness was so important in my life because, as I mentioned, I've had multiple different abusive situations and had believed in my heart that I had forgiven them or that I should always forgive them.

So long story short, personal reasons plus my desire to study the word and my willingness to ask, have I been wrong, sent me into months and months of deep dive into the topic of forgiveness. I read as many books as I could get my hands on.

I went back to scripture and started at square one, and, of course, my first book that I bought was from that guest. Her name is V Chandler, and she wrote a book, I forget how long ago, but it took her ten years to write it, and it is very, very exhaustive, and it's a scholarly treatment.

Then I looked at her sources and began to buy some of those sources, and Chris Bronze was one of the books I read as well, and Chris has been, you mentioned him at the start of the show, he has been incredibly encouraging to me and very kind in answering questions and helping me to understand.

But after I began to search and search, I walked away with absolutely seeing that this therapeutic view of forgiveness is, in fact, not scriptural, and basically what that is, it's a view that it's more like a self-help strategy in which we, as the offended person, work internally to deal with all of the effects of somebody else's sin in our own heart and in our own mind for the purpose of being emotionally free, for the purpose of us being set free from our painful past.

So the goal is our own freedom, and it doesn't necessarily ever need to involve the one who's sinned against us. In fact, we're given, in multiple popular-level books, permission to never have to deal with the offender, and our freedom isn't connected to their response whatsoever.

So going back to Scripture reminded me that that is not the way God ever forgives, and I am so thankful for that, that God doesn't forgive in order to heal his own pain. He doesn't ever forgive as a solo act.

He never leaves the offender out, and his forgiveness is a gracious gift meant for the offender to be able to experience the guilt and shame being removed, to have the moral debt truly dealt with so that we can be reconciled to him.

And for us to completely change all of that, I began to ask, how did we get so far off track? And that led me into history and all of that. But I know, as you said, many Christians hold different views on forgiveness, and I understand how long it took me to untangle my faulty assumptions.

So I try to just come from a place of saying, I am not throwing stones. I understand forgiveness is tied to our most painful and tender memories, our most painful and tender experiences, and it is hard to let go of our previous understandings sometimes.

But what God has on offer for us, for everyone, is so much better. And what I've discovered is we don't lose anything. Whatever we thought we truly gained when we were doing some sort of solo act between us and God, we don't lose what is real, and we just gain something more beautiful.

And that is my hope for everyone is that they will at least be willing to go back and question their assumptions, go back and look again. And especially if they read my book, I'm not demanding everyone agree.

I'm just asking, consider, consider this. Could we have been wrong, and what are we missing out on, and what damage is being done? Because we are devoting ourselves to a model of forgiveness that is not reflecting the gospel or God's heart, which is such a shame when you know that we are called as ambassadors of reconciliation.

This is one of the most important parts of our purpose as the body of Christ, is to be ministers of reconciliation. And yet we are adopting a view of forgiveness that leaves offenders and sinners out.

How can we reconcile? How can we help people be reconciled if we're modeling unconditional forgiveness? Like, you're already forgiven. You're fine where you are. That is not what God says.

Amen. And we have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody would like to email us a question for TC, feel free to do so at chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

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Therapeutic Forgiveness and the Burden Placed on Victims

Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, my guest today is T .C. Cannon, and we are discussing T .C.'s book, Counterfeit Forgiveness, How a Modern Myth Betrays Victims, Protects Abusers, and Corrupts the Gospel.

If you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Please only remain anonymous. If your question involves a personal and private matter, and it's interesting, a listener just changed his request to remain anonymous, even though his question is just a general question, so I'm puzzled by that.

It's not a personal or private question. So please, folks, if you're asking general questions, don't remain anonymous. But before I go to any listener questions, explain in more detail one of the ways that you and I believe is a false way of understanding forgiveness that has been labeled therapeutic forgiveness.

Yeah, so I think there's a popular slogan that pretty much says, kind of sums it up, and that is, forgiveness sets a prisoner free, and the prisoner is you. And so this is the idea that forgiveness is all for us.

It is something that we can complete as a solo act within, you know, between our own ears. There are a variety of different supports for this, but in my studies, in every scripture that I went back to, and just all the sources that I studied, I never found anywhere in scripture where we are explicitly taught that there is such a thing.

As unilateral forgiveness, what we do see in scripture is that we are to be, what can we do, what are we commanded to do as someone who is offended against, sinned against the victim? I use the word victim broadly, not to attach an identity that we keep for the rest of our lives, but just to make the language simple.

But as a Christ follower, I'm always commanded to give, to release vengeance to God, to not carry revenge in my heart, to not be bitter. I am commanded to love my enemies. I am commanded to pray for my abusers, to repay evil with good, also to live a life of surrender to God, where I am put to repent for my own sin before Him.

Even though we are justified and the reach of God's forgiveness covers all our sin, we still, as His adopted children, are called to a lifestyle of repentance for the quality of the relationship that we have with Him as we live.

We see multiple places where believers are still called to repent. So it's not just a one and done, and then we don't ever have to ask for forgiveness again, but we live that lifestyle. But I never could find in scripture where we are explicitly told that there is a type of completed forgiveness that we can practice that is a solo act, where it's just me and I am actually forgiving someone.

What we do see is that we have inner dispositions that we are called to as believers that are separate and different from the actual practice of forgiving. We must be willing to forgive always. We are to have forgiving hearts.

We must be—even desire, I would say—desire to forgive, to be so—the thought of forgiving someone who has wounded us brings such joy to our heart that we are not harboring anything—bitterness. That's one of the pushbacks I get, too, is people automatically assume I'm trying to give permission for us to stay bitter or to cling to resentment, and that is so far from the case because we're never given that permission as believers.

The bar is high for us to love our enemies. When Jesus taught that, it was countercultural. Everyone knew you would love your family and your friends, but to love your enemies was a totally new level of grace for His followers to walk in.

So a lot of what I do in my book is to try to help us to separate out these inner dispositions that we're always called to from the actual practice—the relational transaction, so to speak, of actual forgiving someone—granting forgiveness to someone—is different than all of those other things.

And that is what I am finding is so hard for people to separate because—and I'm one of them forever—if you had asked me, how do you define forgiveness, I would have said, oh, well, you release bitterness, you trust God with ultimate justice, you do all of these things.

That's how I would have defined forgiveness, and that is not how the Bible defines forgiveness. Yes, those things are commands, but they are not forgiveness. So I suggest and fully believe that biblical forgiveness is the solution to that one problem, and that is the moral debt of sin that damages relationship.

And the forgiveness is the solution to that so that the sin can truly be dealt with and a repair of that broken relationship can happen, which I call the moment of a type of reconciliation. And I see very clearly explicit teaching from God's clear pattern to what Jesus explicitly teaches.

I see the conditional model everywhere. I see that we are commanded to forgive the repentant. I see God modeling that. I see Jesus teaching that. But I cannot find anywhere in Scripture where Jesus says, and then there's this second kind of forgiveness that you can do in your own mind, completely separate from the offender.

So I think what has happened is when we find these Scriptures where repentance isn't explicitly mentioned, again, we bring in our own idea of what forgiveness means in those passages and then interpret them to be thinking that Jesus is now saying,.