As part of some on-going thinking theologically with a friend, hell has come up in passing a couple of times. So I want to reflect a bit more intently on it. What follows is less a fully-developed theology of hell as some scribbles. Take them as such.
1. What is "hell"? It can't be known as Dinge-an-sich. As a negative to a positive, hell can only be known and named in relation to heaven. Heaven is life-with-God, therefore hell is existence-without-God.
2. Or, more accurately, because "God is love", hell is lovelessness. At its essence, hell can't be hot. It is, as Dante said, cold -- ice cold. Or if, with most of Christian tradition, hell be aflame, "Yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible" (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.62-63). In this way, hell may be something experienced here, in life, even as it may experienced after death.
3. The opposite of love is not hate. It's fear. Thus, 1 John 4.7-21 is the proper text from which to begin thinking of hell. The wilted fruits of a life lived in fear don't have their roots in hatred. But in fear. Hell is therefore the war of terror.
4. Which is why hell is despair, utter despair. Dante again: "Abandon all hope, ye that enter here". In that sense, then, Christian theology accounts for hell only as a datum of sin, not doctrine.
5. Hell is absolute power -- protestas absoluta. We typically think of God using this phrase, but his power is grounded not in the ability to do everything, but to love completely, wholly, without fault. "The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour; and he said to him, 'All these things I will give you ...'" (Matthew 4.8-9).
6. If heaven is loving communion, hell is isolation. Sartre was wrong. Hell isn't other people. Hell is the tyranny of Me. Milton's Satan: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell" (Paradise Lost, 4.75).
7. But more: "I can speak of hell only in relation to myself, precisely because I can never imagine the possible damnation of another as more likely that my own" (Hans Urs von Balthasar). Of one thing we can be sure about anyone who knows the population of hell: He himself will be in the census. This includes all the preachers who consistently damn others.
8. Hell, therefore, isn't something God does. Hell is something we do. Hell is our creation in our sin and death. Hell is our "hiding" from God (Genesis 3.9-10). Hell is the horrendous human inhumanities we commit (Robert Burns). We trivialize the world's victims if we deny hell. We deny those evils if we deny hell. Therefore hell is a dogma -- it must be admitted.
9. Yet hell is not a datum in the creeds. "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come" (Apostles' Creed). "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come" (Nicene Creed). We do not believe in hell.
10. Therefore, while hell is real (just ask a family tortured by divorce or a drug addict), we dare hope and pray that hell will be empty. "This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ" (Karl Barth). Thus the church will not preach hell -- Barth's "gospel at gunpoint" -- "it will preach the overwhelming power of grace and the weakness of human wickedness in face of it". "For the Lord will not reject for ever" (Lamentations 3.31).