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The first and biggest distortion associated with penal substitutionary atonement, I told the class of seniors, is that it makes God your problem.
This issue is well-documented and well-known. When your view of salvation reduces to penal substitutionary atonement your sole spiritual predicament is avoiding the judgment of God. God is going to send you to hell. Talk about salvation is always about avoiding some bad thing that God is going to do to you. When this fear is framed in its crudest terms, we come to feel that God is wanting to kill us. Because isn't that what happens on the cross, that the death sentence aimed at us is directed toward Jesus who dies in my place?
Again, you're probably very aware of this problem, how when penal substitutionary atonement is the only note you play in the song of salvation we instill a fear of God in our children. We also send them missed messages. God loves you unconditionally and God is going to send you to hell. So which is it? Seems like unconditional love has a lot of strings attached.
It's at this point where defenders of penal substitutionary atonement will step in and say, "Well, sure, but it is true, is it not, that Jesus is saving us from judgment? I have book, chapter, and verse to prove that."
That response is precisely why I began my talk and this series with the "true, but partial, and therefore distorting" observation. The point isn't to deny that the death of Jesus saves us from some bad outcome heading our way. Like I said in the last post, penal substitutionary atonement is true. The death of Jesus saves us from eschatological hazard. But when that truth becomes the whole truth, we reduce salvation to avoiding hell. Salvation becomes "fire insurance." Salvation becomes all about avoiding the judgment of God. Salvation is just about fixing your God problem.
Again, this isn't to suggest that salvation doesn't involve creating peace between God and a rebellious humanity. As 2 Corinthians 5.18 describes, in Christ we are reconciled to God. So something is mended between us and God in salvation. We don't want to deny that. But when that fracture is reductively highlighted, and we morbidly fixate upon the "sinners in the hands of an angry God" framing, we come to think and feel that God isn't really on our side, but is, rather, a fickle, wrathful, and punitive God. Salvation is reduced to being rescued from the Scary Person in the Sky. And that message just doesn't sound like good news.
