It's the third book in his New Kind of Christian trilogy, although the subject seems to have led to a much less pure narrative book. To me (an admitted non-expert), it provided a nice, readable outline of different views typically mentioned on the subject (inclusivism, exclusivism, conditionalism, and universalism). The characters find "problems with all those views" and sort of, but not at all very clearly, I think, suggests another take. I'll leave it to your own reading to explore these options.
I found the historical/cultural background interesting- Zoroastrian, Egyption, Babylonian, and Greek takes on the afterlife, "Hades" and similar concepts- and how that cultural environment seems to have affected the Pharisees in particular. Reviewing Jesus' statement in this context really does raise a lot of questions about the traditional Biblical support of the traditional, exclusivistic view. "So whether or not Jesus endorses the idea of hell, when the Pharisees use hell to threaten sinners to fly right, Jesus takes it and kind of turns it back on them, doesn't he?" (by saying that not showing mercy and justice to the weak/least of these is what would send you to hell).
Another useful part of the book, I thought, was the "homework assignment" that tables out all the instances in the gospels that deal with the subject of judgement (not just those that refer to hell/hades). The table has four columns: the "passage" , the "behavior", the "consequence" and "The Point". I think most people would be shocked by what the list of "behaviors" were that were being judged- for example, sexual sin isn't in the list, but "not bearing fruit" is included many times and in a variety of ways.
It is also perhaps illuminating how many different (and mutually exclusive, if taken literally) ways the consequences are expressed. Jesus is the king of metaphors and parables, after all. The "gehenna" (the perpetually burning garbage pile outside of Jerusalem translated as hell or hades I talked about in my other post) sure seems to fall right in with the rest of the metaphors, it would appear to me.
Of course, at least equally interesting and perhaps more important is "the point" of each of these cases. After all it was "the point" of the parable/statement that was, well his point- regardless of whatever other theological inferences might be made.
At the very least it has been interesting to read the thoughts of so many other well respected, thoughtful Christian scholars/authors (certainly C.S Lewis comes to mind in particular) who are highly critical/skeptical of the traditional exclusivist view.
