The Eastern Orthodox Church affirms the reality of hell as the eternal state of those who choose final separation from God. This is confessed in the Nicene Creed (the resurrection 'of the dead, and the life of the age to come') and in the Church's liturgical prayers for protection from eternal condemnation. The Last Judgment and the eternal consequences of moral choices are solemnly proclaimed.

Orthodox theology, however, has not dogmatically defined the internal nature of hell or declared that any specific person is in it. An important current of Orthodox theology—drawing on St. Isaac of Nineveh and others—has expressed genuine hope that God's infinite love may ultimately reach all souls, and some major Orthodox theologians (including Sergius Bulgakov and Olivier Clément) have written sympathetically about universalism while affirming that it cannot be taught as dogma. The dominant Orthodox position holds that hell is real and that human freedom makes it genuinely possible to choose it definitively—while praying earnestly for God's mercy for all.