As the resident neo-orthodox person here, I see the question of hell as part of a larger picture.

We are lovingly created with free will as small-scale co-creators of the universe with (or under) God, and we each have some effect on the outcome of things.

But with our free will we can also engage in destruction of what God loves. We can do evil, in other words.

Whatever we do that destroys what God loves is unworthy to go forward into eternal salvation. We are not just soiling our co-creator status by doing evil, we are in effect undoing that status.

Christ can redeem us through grace if we accept him; still, our sincerity in accepting him is in serious doubt if we are still egregiously destructive and unrepentant.

If at the end of our lives we have mainly only destroyed and we have abrogated any salvation we might have been granted, having done so through our own ongoing contempt of God's love, then there is nothing there that is fit to progress into eternal life.

Thus we are extinguished through our own actions, like something that has been burned in a garbage dump. Our co-creator's place in eternity is nonexistent. This is, jumping back into ordinary time concepts, eternal "punishment" or, if entry into nonexistence is compared to burning, eternally effective fire.

The only torture involved is that our own actions have slowly but surely whittled away our spiritual substance until there is nothing there. Our "treasure in heaven" has all been tossed out, and this treasure was not some sort of spiritual money -- it was ourselves in our loving eternal form.

That's the version of it that can be written on the fly in 10 minutes, anyway.