In light of the flurry of postings on the topic of hell and damnation at a popular Orthodox website, I thought it appropriate to repost this article that I wrote almost two years ago. And you might want to also read the subsequent articles in this series.
Last night I was reading a tract titled Juridical Justification Theology by Dr Kharalambos Anstall and Fr Michael Azkoul. The authors express what has now become recognized as the Orthodox understanding of perdition:
It can be truly said that the God of love is eternally present to answer our knock on His door for help. We know that He forgives all–and that His mercy is boundless. He utterly respects our personhood and does not force Himself upon us. Thus He plays no part in the infliction of punishment, most especially not eternal punishment. In the final analysis of Orthodox theology, damnation consists entirely in the voluntary rejection of God by us. We have the Gospel, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Fathers, and the Mystical Body of Christ (the Church) with which we can choose to associate or from which we can elect to walk away. The choice of…
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Eclectic Orthodoxy 
I just read your “Hell and the Solidarity of Love,” but I saw nowhere to leave a comment. So though this is off-topic, I’ll leave it here:
As far as I know, all the stories of salvation in the Bible that speak of salvation being offered to a person, always include that person’s family. The one time I can think of where this doesn’t occur is in the story of Lot being saved from the city of Sodom. He, his wife and his daughters are taken out of the city by the angels, but the wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. I take the lesson to be that she loved evil so much that there was nothing left of her that could be redeemed from evil.
Anyway, apart from Lot’s wife, I think the promise to the saved is that their loved ones will be saved, also.
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Sorry it took so long for your comment to appear. For some reason it got caught by the spam filter, which I only check once a week or so.
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