In this article at Modern Reformation Brent McGuire talks about the man-centered new evangelical portrayal that "in Gethsemane Jesus demonstrates his humanity, by shrinking (as any of us would) from the painful death ahead of him." Which over-emphasizes how "Jesus is deeply distressed by the prospect not only of dying but of being killed in a cruel and violent manner." But McGuire rightly focuses our attention onto the most important vicarious penal substitutionary atonement that Christ was about to make:

 Jesus’ agony is over something other than the prospect of physical suffering and death. We learn what that is from the words he prays. His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, in fact, gives us the full meaning of what he is about to do. And the Father’s answer, in turn, reveals that the world could be saved in no other way.

This is what leaders in the Emergent Church like Brian McLaren and his friend the Very Reverend Alan Jones are attacking. Interestingly enough McGuire also reminds us of:

The Dutch jurist and Arminian theologian Hugo Grotius (d. 1645) [who]promoted the view that Christ suffered on the Cross not to bear God’s wrath in sinners’ stead but to prove to men how much God hates sin and to fill men with a hatred thereof… By the Grotian theory, Christ’s death is not a substitute. It is an example. Grotius, however, did not take this belief into death. As Grotius lay dying, he bid a Lutheran minister visit him. When the minister commended Grotius to Christ, "besides whom there is no salvation," Grotius responded, "All my hope is placed in Christ alone."

The Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong, in his Systematic Theology (1907), shares similar accounts of Horace Bushnell, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Albrecht Ritschl. Each of them in his own way denied Christ’s vicarious satisfaction of sins and taught in its place a kind of moral influence theory-that Christ’s suffering is the most convincing proof of God’s love and serves to awaken in man a love for God, which, in turn, reconciles us to God. But each of these theologians reverted in his last hours to the view he had rejected throughout his career.