The main criticism of penal substitutionary atonement, as I and others have described, is the view of God that sits behind it. God's baseline stance is wrath, a default position that has to be changed. Consequently, the leading edge of the gospel proclamation is The Big Angry Guy in the Sky. Salvation is being rescued from That Guy.
This criticism is well known. And yet, there is a substitutionary logic in the New Testament regarding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And many of us feel queasy about those passages and tend to ignore them. So, how are we to read texts that have a substitutionary logic?
To start, we all can see the point that love often involves suffering for each other and for the sake of each other. Love often accepts suffering and pain intended for others. Love involves protecting and shielding others, even when those others might be "getting what they deserve." If something bad were going to happen to my children I'd rush to "substitute" myself. That's what love does. So it's not surprising that God does the same thing.
The sticking point has to do with where the suffering is coming from. That's where substitutionary logic gets weird. The "bad thing" coming down on us is God's wrath. God ends up saving us from God. That's the paradox introduced by the crime-and-punishment metaphor.
But as scholars like N.T. Wright and others have noted, the better frame here isn't penal but covenantal. YHWH and Israel form a covenant, with God's plan being to bless the world through Israel. But Israel cannot keep its end of deal, bringing upon itself all the punishments that befall those who break covenants in the ancient Semitic mind. Israel breaks its promise with the result, per the covenantal agreement, being exile. And at that point, God's plan to bless the world through Israel gets stuck.
So, God enters history in Jesus to be Israel's representative, Israel's Messiah. And as the faithful Israelite Jesus takes up the covenantal burden--both in fulfilling the Torah and in bearing Israel's punishment in breaking the covenant. In Jesus God does what Israel could not do, stepping in to help Israel fulfill its side of the covenant, which, per ancient Semitic covenantal logic, does include punishments for breaking promises. In all this Jesus substitutes himself for Israel. Jesus protects Israel from itself, carries a burden it cannot carry, and takes on its exile so that Israel can be set free.
The point in all this is that we can read the substitutionary logic of the New Testament through a covenantal rather than penal frame. In short, I've suggested that we speak of a "covenantal substitutionary atonement" rather than a "penal substitutionary atonement."
Of course, this raises other sorts questions, but these are different questions from those thrown up by penal substitutionary atonement. The substitution in this covenantal context has less to do with you and your particular relationship with God than with the narrative of God's relationship with Israel and God's overcoming the curse of the Law to push Israel's vocation forward, through the Messiah, to its universal objective where all can be saved.
