Henry Neufeld discusses a shocking-sounding quote from someone named Richard Cunningham who said “God never forgives — he punishes.”
Mr. Neufeld comments:
This looks to me like an example of the problem we get into when we regard a metaphor as the actual core of the truth. Substitution, even penal substitution is a good metaphor, but it remains one metaphor. When you put it at the center of your doctrine of the atonement and then build everything else around that, oddities like this result.
My evangelical Christian education taught me that penal substitution and atonement were one and the same. God didn’t actually forgive us our sins so much as He allowed His unforgiveness and punishment of our sins to be directed at someone else — Jesus. I began having problems with this idea of forgiveness when I became a parent, however, and was regularly called upon to forgive the trespasses of my own children. I would use punishments as a form of correction, hoping to steer them away from evil and into the right. Once they turned, however, it was now my turn to demonstrate true forgiveness. I would forgo further retribution and make the effort to heal our relationship. I might feel that their sin had inflicted harm on me (physically or else to my sense of honor) but forgiveness meant to let that go so that we could be of one mind again.