Penal substitution

I have not posted in a while; very involved in some personal matters, having January fatigue, and working on academic papers and presentations. It seems my Kallman's post is popular and I get a lot of hits from porn sites.

To the extent I read more advanced theology, it seems that penal substitution has become a hot topic of debate. Since this is all that I was taught in my Christian development, it is strange to me that it is a "hot topic." How could the cross be interpreted any other way? Of course, it is, and has been, specifically as an example of suffering (not entirely wrong) or in other ways. 

From this article in CT, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/january-february/eleonore-stump-atonement.html on a new book about atonement, the reviewer quotes the author: (what follows in red is quoted)

According to interpretations of the Anselmian kind, what God does to act compatibly with his goodness or justice is in fact to fail to punish the guilty or to exact the payment of the debt or the penance from those who owe it since sinful human beings do not get the punishment they deserve or pay the debt or penance they owe. . . . How is justice or goodness served by punishing a completely innocent person or exacting from him what he does not owe?

This, I would venture, gets to the heart of Stump’s unease with penal substitution. To her, it doesn’t make philosophical sense. To be frank, it doesn’t make any “sense” to me either. But large swaths of Scripture assume that sin rightly incurs punishment—and that the innocent and clean can make things right for the defiled and guilty.

This is the kind of reality for which, in Pascal’s words, “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Examples abound. Seeing a painting of the crucified Christ, Mahatma Gandhi remarked, “I saw there at once that nations like individuals could only be made through the agony of the cross and in no other way.” In a mysterious (and yes, very limited) way, the deaths of men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were substitutionary. While their tormenters escaped punishment, they ended up dying unjustly—as sacrifices that worked toward healing both victims and oppressors. That’s one reason King’s death has often been called his “crucifixion.”

I don’t know why substitution works, but it plainly does, as all the Christ figures woven into our literature and movies can attest. No, it doesn’t make philosophical sense, but it makes a profound sort of human sense.

This is a provocative passage. I never thought of the penal substitution theory as being illogical; within the Bible (and most ancient world views) it does make sense. This is another example of how our  modern sensibilities are at odds with the history of mankind.  So who is right?