Thoughts about Hell

At one time, in very late antiquity, Western Christians could speak with firm if dour certitude of a place of real physical and mental agony to which the vast majority of the race would be consigned at the end of days and to which even babies would be sent forever and ever if they were so thoughtless as to die unbaptized. Today only a relatively tiny if obstinate remnant of believers finds that notion tolerable. Already by the high Middle Ages, the roasting babies had been mercifully plucked from the flames and transferred to a “limbo of infants” where, though forever denied the beatific vision, they would nonetheless enjoy perfect natural contentment. And since then, even in regard to unrepentant adult souls, Christians have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the thought that God actively wills eternal suffering, and many have come to adopt the idea that, although hell is eternal, it’s doors are locked only from the inside (to use C.S. Lewis’s imagery): the damned, that is, freely choose their perdition out of a hatred of divine love so intense that they prefer endless torment; and so God, out of his fastidious regard for the dignity of human freedom, reluctantly grants them the dereliction they so jealously crave. Needless to say, in this view the fire and brimstone have been quietly replaced by various states of existential unrest and resentfully guarded self-love. This all sounds quite reasonable…. But it also demonstrates that many Christians know that something is incorrigibly amiss in the very concept of eternal torment, as otherwise they would not feel the need to absolve God of any direct responsibility for its imposition.
Preface to the paperback edition of That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart