I don’t embrace an eternal hell for the same reason that many uphold it. Isn’t that the way many things in the Bible can be posited? Almost everyone I know believes in a hell, among other reasons, because God is JUST! God is inded JUST and for that reason ther can be no eternal hell, which is the epitome of UNJUSTICE.
But let me apply this JUSTICE principle to the atonement.
I have to agree with Tom Smail whem he writes, “God’s justice is concerned less with punishing wrong relationships than with restoring right ones.” Why is that so hard to get other than the whole concept of GRACE is so scandalous and unfair from our vantage point.
Colin Gunton said it this way, “The cross is transformational rather than punitive: a transformation in which the reconciliation of persons enables the acknowledged evil of the past to become the basis for present and future good.”
P. T. Forsyth asked the nagging question that I did for so much of my life until I saw that God didn’t, douldn’t demand the death of Jesus FOR our sin. He put it this way, “It is an enirely unthinkable thing that God could punish Jesus, in whom He (God) was well pleased”. Hey, to punish someone you’re well pleased with is some sort of wild perversion- like an eternal hell would be.
The key is not that Jesus died FOR our sins, but that He died TO sin! That’s probably why Romans 6:10 says TO and not FOR. Hint, hint. 
Finally, this from John McIntyre, “I cannot find ONE New testament statement which outrightly affirms that the death of Christ was a PUNISHMENT visited upon Jesus, rather than upon the mass of sinful mankind.” My God is a loving God. God is love! And therefore He is in to restoration, not retribution.
Restroration- not Retribution!
Jesus repeatedly stated He was here to do the Father’s will. (John 4:34) In John 18:11 declares it was the Father’s will for Him to suffer and die. Luke 22:42 reiterates this with the famous, “not My will but Yours.”
Referencing John 4:34 and Luke 22:42- it’s the Christian’s desire to do the WILL of God. Those verses are for ALL of us, not just Jesus. And John 18:11 must be a typo.
It is indeed the will of the Father (our Higher Awareness) that we suffer (if necessary) and die to our limited self conceptions, so that our True Identity can be revealed in all of its glory and splendor. It can then be said that I AM the resurrection and I AM the life.
As 2 Cor. 5:8 reminds us, “Be absent from the body (your limitations) and present with the Lord (who you really are).”
Yep. And if Linda meant drinking of the cup that it is the will of God that Jesus die and suffer, then that can be said of us ALL as the other verses can. Matthew 5:45 in just another approach. Stuff Happens……to ALL!
Every single thing that happens or has happened can be said to be God, our Source’s will. Penal substitution? I think not. Perhaps our interpretation of God’s will is the problem.