“The word hell has had a checkered career in the history of the church. And it wasnt hugely important in the early days. It was important, but not nearly as important as it became in the middle ages. And the in the middle ages, you get this polarization of heaven over here and hell over there, and you have to go to one place or the other eventually. So you have the Sistine Chapel, with that great thing behind the altar. This enormous great judgment seat, with the souls going off into these different directions. Very interestingly, I was sitting in the Sistine chapel just a few weeks ago. I was sitting for a service, and I was sitting next to a Greek Orthodox…who said to me, looking at the pictures of Jesus on one wall. He said, ‘These I can understand. The pictures of Moses on the other wall, he said, those I can understand. Then he pointed at the end wall of judgment, and said, that I cannot understand.’ ”
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N.T. Wright and the Orthodox/Byzantine Catholic view of Hell | Byzantium on Brew