By Father Thomas Hopko
At the Parousia of Christ, the flame of the living God who is a consuming fire is joy and peace and refreshment and glory for those who believe Him and love Him, but it is torment and agony and Gehenna for those who do not. So you have the flaming fire, and He does inflict vengeance upon those who do not know God…” To not know God means to not know God by experience, not really love God. It does not mean to not know about God…“and upon those who do not obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In the Revised Standard Version it actually says, in English translation, “They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might.” That betrays a theology that thinks of hell as an exclusion from the presence of God. It is as if the evil people are being excluded from God and that is their punishment, and they say, “O Lord, please forgive us,” and the Lord says, “No, it is too late, go away.”
Well, that is not the teaching. The teaching is that when Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, identifies with sinners and takes upon Himself the sin of the world, He has mercy and forgives everybody. Absolutely everybody is forgiven. And those who do not enter because they have no wedding garment, it means they do not accept the forgiveness of Christ. They are forgiven, He offers them the wedding garment, but they do not want it. They prefer the outer darkness. They wish they could be inside at the wedding feast, but they still want to be outside and have their own way and not have the wedding garment.
But in any case, getting back to this text of the second letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, the first chapter, the ninth verse, what it really says in Greek is, “They shall suffer the punishment, or the torment, of eternal destruction.” The destruction is from the presence of God. The Greek term does not mean exclusion. And in fact, that same expression, “from the presence of God” is used in the Book of Acts, I believe it is the fourth chapter, where it says that those who are refreshed in the resurrection and experience the renewal, they also experience the renewal “from the face of the Lord.” So the just are experiencing glory and peace and beauty and bliss from the face of the Lord, the presence of the Lord, and the evil are experiencing torment and agony and punishment from the face of the same Lord, in the same reality. That is the teaching of Holy Scripture.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades.
