The big problem with penal substitution is that it doesn't make any sense from a logical and moral point of view. Substitution for compensation makes sense, but not substitution for punishment. If one child behaves badly, how could I possibly be satisfied in my righteousness by punishing another child for that? Another child can offer to clean-up the mess (that is the compensation bit), but the punishment of someone else does not solve anything at all - it doesn't restore a relationship and does not clean up the mess.
Neither does the legal payment argument make sense: God would be paying the price Himself (as he is sacrificing His own Son). Paying yourself is a zero-sum game.
Real forgiveness does not require any repayment or retaliation at all - at least that is the core message of Yeshua. We are called to forgive 7 times 70 times without any blood or repayment involved. Penal substitution theory is basically saying God cannot do that Himself: He is so righteous that any offense/sin MUST be punished always so someone else guilt-less and blameless MUST die - the logic of that is lost to me.
I do see the logic of us dying with Yeshua so that with Him our sin and shame and death ends up on the cross so also with Him we rise and live a new life in Him. He literally takes us with Him in His death so all our bad stuff also vanishes at the cross. The wages of sin is death - so because of our sin death is inevitable, but we can go through Yeshua's death in Him and so with Him also receive new life.
That logic I get and is beautiful.
Real forgiveness is about restoring a spoiled relationship as if nothing has happened - not about someone else paying for a broken window.
I deeply appreciate your concern for the moral coherence of atonement. Many popular presentations of penal substitution unfortunately sound like the crude scenario you describe—an innocent person arbitrarily punished instead of the guilty. But when rightly understood in its biblical and theological context, penal substitution is not about a capricious transfer of punishment but about the holy God Himself bearing the cost of justice to restore the relationship.
Your analogy assumes two distinct, unrelated parties: a guilty child and an innocent child. But in the gospel, the substitute is not an unrelated third party. The substitute is God Himself in the person of the Son, who is one with the Father and also one with us through the incarnation.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).
So it is not that the Father grabs an unwilling Son and punishes Him. Rather, in divine love, the Son willingly enters into our plight, takes our place in solidarity with us, and bears the judgment due to sin so that justice and mercy meet. The judge steps down from the bench and bears the sentence Himself. That is profoundly different from punishing a random innocent bystander.
Biblically, sin is not just a “broken window” or an interpersonal slight that can be waved away; it is a moral and cosmic rupture that distorts creation, enslaves humanity, and violates God’s holy love. True forgiveness cannot simply ignore evil—it must confront and deal with it.
Think of it this way: If someone commits a grievous injustice, a loving and just person cannot pretend it never happened. Real forgiveness absorbs the cost of wrongdoing rather than denying it. On the cross, Jesus is absorbing the full reality of sin’s weight, its alienation, its curse, its death. In that sense, penal substitution is not about mere retribution but about taking sin seriously enough to deal with it fully.
When you say God is “paying Himself,” it might seem circular—but here’s the key difference: in Christ, God does what we could not do. He upholds His own justice without leaving us condemned. Imagine a judge who faces a dilemma: he must uphold the law, but he also loves the guilty defendant. In human courts, this is impossible. But God, in the gospel, steps in to bear the consequence Himself. It is not mere bookkeeping—it is self-giving love that satisfies both justice and mercy.
"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness" (1 Peter 2:24).
It’s true that Jesus taught us to forgive without demanding repayment. But even in human forgiveness, someone always bears the cost. If you forgive someone who broke your car, you don’t demand repayment—but you absorb the loss yourself. Forgiveness always involves a cost. The cross is the place where God Himself bears that ultimate cost.
So PSA is not saying God “cannot forgive unless He vents His anger.” It’s saying that God forgives at infinite cost to Himself.
And here I agree with you wholeheartedly: atonement is not only substitution for us but also union with Him. Romans 6 emphasizes that we are united with Christ in His death and resurrection. The penal dimension (Christ bearing our guilt) and the participatory dimension (our dying and rising with Him) are not mutually exclusive—they’re two sides of the same coin. He takes our sin as ours because He becomes one with us, and in Him, we truly die to sin and rise to new life.
So while a shallow version of PSA seems illogical, the deeper, biblical view is not arbitrary punishment, but self-substitution of divine love. It’s God entering into the consequences of sin Himself to redeem and restore us.
